Click here to listen to John McCaslin and Amy Holmes interviewing me on September 2, 2010 about my new book, SELLOUT: Musings from Uncle Tom’s Porch.

What is the NAACP doing now?

I read yesterday that the NAACP is launching a new website, teapartytracker.org, in partnership with Media Matters, Think Progress and New Left Media. Its purpose? To monitor and broadcast “racism and other forms of extremism within the Tea Party movement.”

How irresponsible it is for this organization to waste its members’ dues and shred whatever moral authority they had left over this hunt for bogeymen. It’s not 1955, and the Tea Party activists have made it crystal clear that they reject racism within their ranks and, to the maximum extent a movement without a centralized command structure can, they are policing themselves.

The scores of black conservatives, myself included, who identify with the Tea Party’s goals of individual liberty, free enterprise and constitutionally limited government are proof positive that racism is not at the heart of the Tea Party movement. They are alive and unscathed, for starters. As Alonzo Rachel, a black entertainer, satirist and popular Tea Party speaker so accurately states, “if they were out to get us, Ida’ been got by now.”

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“Don’t tell me words don’t matter! ‘I have a dream’, just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self evident that all me are created equal’ – just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself?’ – just words. Just speeches?… Don’t tell me words don’t matter!“ ~ Senator Barack Obama, February 16, 2008

For a man who rose to the presidency primarily on the strength of his words, presented in eloquent phrases and a soaring baritone, when he is divorced from his teleprompter, he can be surprisingly inartful. During his appearance yesterday on The View, a show that continues to amaze me with its lasting power, and I don’t mean that in a complimentary fashion, the President had this to say about black people when questioned about his biracial background:

“[T]he interesting thing about the African-American experience in this country is that we are sort of a mongrel people. I mean, we’re all kinds of mixed up. Now, that’s actually true of white America as well, but we just know more about it.”

I wasn’t watching it live – I can’t stand it and I won’t contribute to their ratings, although I know it wouldn’t make a difference. I watched the clip, however, and replayed it over and over to make sure I got it right. After the Shirley Sherrod brouhaha, I wouldn’t want to be sued for harping on what the video shows he actually said! More on the lovely Sherrod family later, by the way.

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The events of the past week or so have come so fast that they’ve made my head spin and my heart despair. We are at a place in this country on the topic of race that I never envisioned for the second decade of the 21st century, and we need to pull back from the brink before what happened to Ms. Sherrod of the U.S. Department of Agriculture happens to others on both sides of the racial divide.

In brief, here’s what occurred. Famous conservative muckraker Andrew Brietbart posted a couple of videos on his website, Big Government, that showed Ms. Sherrod speaking at an NAACP awards dinner. She was describing to the audience how she struggled to help a white farmer who had come to her seeking assistance because he was about to lose his farm. She spoke of how she helped him just enough to where he would report back to whoever referred him that she had done her job. She also spoke of sending him to a white attorney, “one of his own kind”, for further help.

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As executive director of Regular Folks United, I’ve devoted significant attention recently to the irrelevance of the NAACP to the real plight of black Americans. My articles here and here take the NAACP to task for fighting past battles and tilting at windmills, while the tangible problems go unaddressed – entitlement programs that stifle individual initiative, create permanent dependency and destroy the black family; low standardized test scores and astronomical high school dropout rates due to a failed public education system; black-on-black crime and a murder rate where 94% of blacks are slain by other blacks; an abortion industry that thrives disproportionately on the blood of black babies; and an anemic percentage of black wealth in America that hasn’t changed since the Civil War.

Now we have the NAACP doing the bidding of their liberal enablers and flailing at the supposedly pervasive racism of the Tea Party movement, an outpouring of grass roots citizenship in which I have proudly participated since hosting the first Tea Party in Maryland in March of 2009. I’ve attended or spoken at several Tea Party rallies since then, and the people I meet are good and decent folks who’ve never protested in their lives before now, but are afraid for our country’s future.

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“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” ~ Isaiah 5:20

Two events in the past two weeks have stirred a righteous anger in me that I can’t keep contained. Someone has to be unafraid to call evil by its name, because when we remain silent, that evil becomes us. I have seen the evil of racism rear its ugly head, and the silence from certain quarters is deafening.

What picture comes to your mind when you hear the word “racism”? Klansmen in white robes and hoods burning a cross in the darkness of night? A crowd of white onlookers posing by a tree, while the lifeless body of a black man dangles by a rope around the neck from one of its branches? The contorted faces of grown white men and women screaming in anger as black children are escorted to school by the National Guard?

How about two black thugs wielding batons, dressed in uniforms and wearing military berets, standing at the entrance to a polling place? How about a deranged black man standing on a corner, screaming racial slurs and threats of murdering children while the crowd around him barely pays him any attention? How about the leader of these men smoothly but wickedly dispensing hate on Russian television, an irony considering what Russians typically think of black people, while the so-called reporter goads him on? How about members of what used to be an esteemed civil rights organization defending the beating of a black man by union hooligans because, by selling his wares at a Tea Party event, he deserved the beating and was unworthy of the group’s protection?

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Note: This is an excerpt from my upcoming book “Sellout: Musings from Uncle Tom’s Porch”, which will be released in July or August of this year. Happy Independence Day!

Recalling the archetype of the “authentic black,” I suppose the expectation is that I’m supposed to temper my passion for America with my knowledge of her tainted history and keep her under constant scrutiny because she is still an inherently racist, xenophobic and sexist nation.

In this day and age, I’m certainly not supposed to be a political conservative or a devotee of the Founding Fathers, that group of privileged white men whose lofty principles weren’t manifest in their daily lives. After all, they owned slaves, stole land belonging to Native Americans and treated women as second-class citizens. According to the collectivist agenda, the authentic American black man must never forgive and never forget. Instead, he must characterize America’s moves toward righteousness as grudgingly done only under duress.

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As we commemorate the 46th anniversary of the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it seems appropriate to assess the current state of one of the key organizations which was in the arena, engaged in the fight leading up to its passage.

Every great warrior that lives to fight numerous battles knows they can’t fight forever. Some accept the verdict of time and move on to the next phase of their lives with their dignity intact, receiving the honor of their peers and countrymen for their valor.

There are those, however, who struggle to keep fighting long after their skills have deteriorated, and their colleagues are embarrassed for them as they stumble on the field of battle, a mere shadow of their former greatness. In that spirit, I think it’s time for someone to tell the NAACP to lay down their sword and shield before they further humiliate themselves and the people they claim to represent.

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The national discussion on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s racially charged comments about then-Senator Barack Obama is still going, but I chose to wait and think about it before publishing my thoughts.

I’m currently writing a book on race in America from the perspective of a conservative who happens to be black, and Reid’s comments dovetailed nicely with a topic that’s at the forefront of my mind.

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I had a moment of sheer despair recently as a result of a response to one of my statements criticizing President Obama. As a committed conservative and Christ-follower who happens to be black, I am a minority within a minority, although the magic of online networking has revealed to me countless others like me, some even more outspoken and courageous.

While it has never been en vogue to be openly conservative and black, it’s been even harder in the past couple of years since Barack Hussein Obama announced his candidacy for the office of President of the United States. The prospect and eventual reality of our first black President pushed a people already emotionally attached to the Democratic Party over the edge, and criticism of this polished, eloquent yet inexperienced man about whom America knew so little was and is met with a ferocity not unlike a lioness defending her young.

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