From Pine View Farm

Charlie Rangel Is Right 3

Let Chauncey Devega explain. A nugget:

Rangel’s suggestion that the Tea Party is comprised of white crackers is actually a claim that can be empirically evaluated. If a cracker is a white person who holds anti-black animus and feelings—what can range from “old fashioned” open and public bigotry, to “backstage racism” and more subtle types of implicit bias—then what does the actual evidence tell us about the Tea Party GOP and its members’ racial attitudes?

In the most obvious and public examples, Tea Party rallies have featured signs depicting Barack Obama as an African “witchdoctor” or “savage”. Tea Party supporters have also carried signs emblazoned with the Confederate flag, or used monkey and ape imagery to describe the country’s first black president at their rallies.

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3 comments

  1. George Smith

    August 5, 2013 at 1:59 pm

    Proven empirically, almost every day. This is from yesterday:
    http://dickdestiny.com/nugentsharing.JPG
    I didn’t post it yesterday because he devoted the entire week to escalation. On Thursday he went full birther on Obama, using his column to call him the phony president with a phony birth certificate. On Wednesday, he called himself “a black Jew at Nuremberg in 1939,” which besides being purposely offensive makes utterly no sense. We haven’t lived in a time until now when you could make such a good living being public racist. But that’s the Tea Party, it makes money every single day being like this. This rot of the intellect and spirit, proclaimed as legitimate opinion and entertainment, is dumbfounding. I believe people in other civilized nations, whatever their condition may be, must look at the United States and be equally astounded, now convinced this isn’t the place they thought it was and it’s not the future of anything.

     
  2. George Smith

    August 5, 2013 at 2:20 pm

    I guess what I’m try to say straight out is that, nationally, it’s impossible to recover from the normalization and monetization of this behavior. It’s profitable business to be a public bigot and to cultivate it in others in 2013 America. You can go on tv and do it in prime-time, you can have an entire party devoted to it, television networks dedicated for it and no one knows what to do. Even a decisive victory in an election makes no difference, it just becomes more lubricant. It’s pure pathology, mental sickness that can’t be fixed because it’s part of the fiber of people. So I’m not really joking when I use WhiteManistan as a pejorative. You could replace it with the word “scumbags” and it would mean the same thing although it doesn’t have the same national definition.  

     
  3. Frank

    August 5, 2013 at 10:31 pm

    Hate sells.

     

    It’s particularly popular with persons who have nothing else going for them.  It gives them the opportunity to look down on someone, anyone, because they have to look down on someone or they are left with nothing but their own worthlessness and emptiness.

     

    I know.  I’m a Southern boy.  I grew up with it.  I know a bigot when I see one.

     

    Thank God my parents, although they accepted Jim Crow because it’s what they grew up with, somehow missed the hate part of it, so they ultimately outgrew the Jim Crow part too–not they lost all the stereotypes, but they never had the hate so they couldn’t pass it on.