In “Trouble Brewing,” published recently in the Financial Times, Edward Luce points out that some Americans fear that the United States is in mortal danger and place the blame squarely on President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president.
Luce invokes the Rev. Jeremiah Wright – a scholar of black liberation theology – highlighting the media’s repetition of his infamous sermon illustrating America’s moral and political contradictions. Luce notes, “Already there are rumors that he, Barack Obama, had not been born in America and was a closet Muslim.” These are tea party talking points.
The tea party uses the rhetoric “take back America.” Take back America from whom? Is it a black man in the White House you want to take America back from?
Many of us old warriors of the struggle for justice in America know every aspect of racism. Some of us can sense it in a smile; others of us go so far as saying we can smell racism. The tea party has few men of color among them. I have not seen any of our sisters championing the tea party cause. The few black men working with them are as flies to buttermilk.
To hear the tea party accusing Obama of bankrupting America and see them drawing a Hitler mustache on the President of the United States exceeds the limits of normal political differences. Remember, Hitler was against a whole community of people and sought to annihilate them.
When the tea party proclaims to be a continuation of the late Jerry Farewell’s Christian moral majority, the veterans of our struggle for justice know exactly what they mean.
The tea party also claims that under Obama, the Constitution is in danger. In danger because there is a black man in the White House? The tea party asserts the Constitution is divine. It is hard for a black American to say the same. Those who are descendents from the horrors of slavery clearly recognize that the framers of this document were slaveholders. How do you reconcile denying us freedom, brutally mistreating black slaves and then advance this document as divinely inspired by God?
Luce wrote in his article that the Constitution reflects the political realities of the late 18th century, striking a hard compromise between the slave states of the South and the non-slave states of the North. That is a factual reality. Among some of the tea party supporters, there is a call for a Christian Constitutional Commonwealth. One group, the 9/12’ers – a post-9/11 group initiated by Fox news commentator and a Barack hater, Glenn Beck – has stated that all Americans after 9/12 were Americans. I ask the question before God, “What were we before that?”
As a right-wing conservative, Beck referred to the Obama administration’s health care bill as “reparations.” What is he talking about? Again, the black veterans of our struggle understand what the cry for reparations signals to white America. We know the tea party does not agree with reparations because the so-called inspired Founding Fathers would never agree to reparations as slaveholders themselves.
On one of his Fox News shows, Beck said people aren’t recognizing Obama’s version of Christianity and then tied Obama to liberation theology, implying the president is not the right “kind” of Christian. Leading up to his rally on the Mall in Washington, Beck characterized the president as an adherent to a liberation theology, which Beck says represents a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
What we have is indeed trouble brewing. Erroneous views are being used by the tea party to make it difficult for President Obama to win a second term in 2012. They hope to reduce the first black American president to a failure of the American people.
For questions and comments, contact Akbar Muhammad at aakbar314@yahoo.com.
