Sometimes it’s hard to improve on the original, and Eric Effron’s editorial in a recent issue of The Week is such a case. What if, Effron asked, tea baggers were black?
It’s a provocative thought experiment: “Imagine,” writes author and self-described anti-racism activist Tim Wise, “if the Tea Party were black.” In reality, of course, the Tea Party is virtually all white, but for the sake of this exercise, imagine that members of Congress in March had been surrounded by thousands of angry African-Americans, yelling insults at white, Southern politicians and talking about “revolution” and “taking the country back.” Or, imagine that the hundreds of gun-rights activists who recently descended on the nation’s capital, many armed with AK-47s and handguns, were black. Would admirers of the Tea Party view such protesters as patriotic Americans entitled to voice their heartfelt opinions, or as a dangerous mob that the police and the FBI should closely watch? And what if there were a black Glenn Beck, with millions of devoted followers, calling for a public uprising against a tyrannical U.S. government? Would he be seen as an entertainer—or as a threat to public safety? “To ask any of these questions,” Wise concludes, “is to answer them.”
Not to mention if a black woman who describes herself as a pit bull were to make speeches in which she applies rifle scope cross-hairs to places on the map where she urges followers “not to retreat but to reload” on incumbent representatives.
Effron, in the interest of even-handedness, suggests that our team would be more sympathetic to these black tea partiers.
The experiment, however, cuts both ways. If the throngs holding Tea Party protests were mostly black, might liberals be less apt to dismiss them as cranks, and mock their laments about taxpayer money being used to bail out Wall Street? And might liberals be less inclined to seize on the vile ranting of some hotheads as representative of the movement as a whole?
While these questions might produce affirmative responses, the fact is, the hotheads are representative of the movement as a whole. Anyone whose town has had a tea party demonstration needs no convincing that tea baguettes can all be painted with pretty much one brush. There is little diversity — of thought, or of ethnicity — in the tea party movement.
Oh good lord! They would have had the riot squads out firing tear gas, rubber bullets and wailing away on anyone and everyone!
I can’t go into an upscale store in Atlanta without being followed around, so I know that if I and thousands of other African Americans took to the streets to protest something we thought the government had done, we’d be perceived as a threat to democracy almost immediately. Cue the outrage.