Ishmael Reed - Going Too Far: Essays about Americas Nervous Breakdown

PART 1

Chief Executive and Chief Exorcist, Too?

As the first African-American president hes been up against a racist white bloc in the Republican Party that has come dressed as the Tea Party. Frank Schaeffer, author of Sex, Mom & God, interviewed by Jonathan Capehart, substituting for Martin Bashir on MSNBC, August 12, 2011

The Tea Party Congressmen and Congresswomen didnt go to Washington to insist upon fiscal responsibility, but to destroy the first black president. This is a racist movement in which holocaust deniers, Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates play a prominent role and whose members are drawn largely from the secessionist states, states that cited their desire to continue using human beings as property as the reason for their secession. Writing in Salon.com (20 August 2011) Michael Lind found that the majority of Tea Partiers are white men from the South. It figures, because the Tea Party is a secessionist movement and the filibustering against President Obamas programs, the most frequent use of the filibuster in history, amounts to a new nullification. Early on, Senator Mitch McConnell announced that his goal was to deny President Obama a second term. Hes from Kentucky and though Kentucky was not part of the Confederacy, a Confederate shadow government was a powerful influence on the state government during the rebellion launched by traitors.

The Tea Party is founded on a racist Big Lie. Broker, Rick Santelli, who calls himself the Tea Partys lightning rod, said that whites are angry because minorities are receiving all of the entitlements, when it would take a few hundred years for blacks and Hispanics to achieve the kind of government largess that has been accorded whites, which includes forced land grabs at the expense of blacks, Native Americans and Mexicans; the resistance to minorities gaining financial opportunities, from the driving out of the Chinese from gold mines to the racist policies of the Federal Housing Administration, which denied millions of blacks mortgages for decades. Whites also benefited from FDR programs (the G.I. Bill was called the white G.I. Bill), the Great Society programs, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and federal highway programs that built their routes to the suburbs suburbs that excluded blacks often by mob violence just to mention a few. Whites even benefit from programs that were set up for the benefit of blacks like Affirmative Action. This is why theres a sixty percent enrollment of white women in colleges and universities. In ten years, it will be seventy percent. This is not the only program thats supposed to benefit blacks but ends up benefiting whites. Take the Small Business Administration. Associated Press reported on April 17, 1994 that Minority Programs Mostly Aid Whites. The governments flagship program for minority entrepreneurs awarded $19 billion in contracts over the last six years, with the lions share going to firms whose headquarters were located in primarily white, well-to-do neighborhoods. An Associated Press computer analysis of minority set-aside contracts handled by the Small Business Administration found that 22 percent of the project dollars went to companies located in minority areas. The highest form of hypocrisy is exposed when one finds that Santellis Tea Party, those who are offended by minorities benefiting from entitlements, are hogging all of the welfare. In an article entitled Moochers Against Welfare, Paul Krugman ridicules Moochers Against Welfare, published in The New York Times, February 16, 2012

Now, theres no mystery about red-state reliance on government programs. These states are relatively poor, which means both that people have fewer sources of income other than safety-net programs and that more of them qualify for means-tested programs such as Medicaid.

By the way, the same logic explains why there has been a jump in dependency since 2008. Contrary to what Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney suggest, Mr. Obama has not radically expanded the safety net. Rather, the dire state of the economy has reduced incomes and made more people eligible for benefits, especially unemployment benefits. Basically, the safety net is the same, but more people are falling into it.

But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? Ive seen three main explanations.

First, there is Thomas Franks thesis in his book Whats the Matter With Kansas?: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.s exploitation of social issues. And its true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who dont.

One could say that in comparison to blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics and South Asians, the white middle class is living in a socialist utopia, however the upper class whites, with whom they formed an alliance under the banner of a Reaganite white nationalism, might be ready to jettison them. Jewish Americans who thought theyd been accepted into this coalition are now being threatened by the far right, which the Tea Party represents. This movement is anti-Semitic as well as racist. Maybe those Jewish Neo-Cons at The New Republic and Commentary (whose black representative is John McWhorter), who felt so secure in the embrace of white nationalism that they supported quack theories about black intellectual inferiority, will notice this new threat to the security of Jewish Americans. David Frum and David Brooks, who are urging the Republicans to cultivate white students and the white working class, should spend a year in Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Test their whiteness.

Despite Manhattan Institute spokesperson John McWhorters claim that racial profiling is the last issue facing blacks, millions of blacks have been denied the kind of advantages accorded whites when buying homes. (McWhorters changed his mind since he was used by Commentary to dismiss racial profiling as an issue; after the Trayvon Martin murder, McWhorter and other post-racers have retreated from this position, since Martin was the poster boy for the post generation; he enjoyed horseback riding and skiing. After denouncing my book Another Day At The Front, McWhorter just about admitted that he was wrong.) As late as Sunday, July 31, 2011, Tom Brokaw was blaming the economic crisis on minorities who bought homes that they couldnt afford. MSNBCs black correspondent Jonathan Capehart agreed. The reason that millions of whites regard blacks as failures, as drug addicts, as Affirmative Action babies, is because they get most of their information about blacks from news correspondents, Hollywood and politicians who embrace the same stereotypes about black Americans as they. Though some of the black commentators have some verve, the opinions of others are managed by white producers who demand that they be even handed so that they wont alienate their white consumers. This is why Melissa Harris-Perry had to say that there are a lot of things that she likes about the Tea Party. What things? People showing up at the presidents rallies armed? Ugly signs like those of the president as a witchdoctor or lying in a coffin? Prominent Tea Party members calling for his assassination or insisting that he was born in Kenya?

The propaganda promoted by Santini and others that blacks receive entitlements more than others is a false claim. So is the one about blacks getting into trouble for taking out mortgages that they couldnt afford. It fails to recognize that the banks discriminated against blacks by leading them to loans that bore higher interest rates, yet it fits the Tea Partys argument. Even