Atypical Tea Partier A Typical Tea Partier

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Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 2010-06-05 14:03

tea bagger I was recently talking to a neighbor of mine about the role of race in politics, and about, more generally, the status of race relations in the United States. He told me a short anecdote about his job at a city school. He said he met the schoolâ€™s newest principal who asked him (he cooks there) whether he â€œOnly cooked Black, or [if he could] cook American, too.â€ Stories like these arenâ€™t difficult to find. In the minds of many white Americans, such questions seem legitimate and inquisitive, rather than horribly offensive, and implicitly derogatory towards Black Americans. Debates in the public sphere have given rise to the worse sort of reactionary politics. The most recently awakened activists have tended to expend their energies quibbling over what constitutes viable citizenship, rather than focusing on issues that are actually affecting our communities. The Tea Party is not least among the notable movements to spring up in the wake of the election of Barrack Obama to a post held only by wealthy, white males for the previous 220 years of this countryâ€™s existence. Tea Party members are mostly white, mostly wealthy, and overwhelmingly conservative. .