By Mark Rhoads
Ever since President Obama was elected, there has been a cynnical effort by some on the Left to demonize any critics of his socialist schemes as motivated by "racism." This is perhaps the worst slander in American culture. All the more so because for so many years most of America struggled so hard to overcome and eradicate if possible a tragic subculture of actual racism among certain white people in some regions and cities.
The word "racism" in the 1950s was about the most ugly word one person could hurl at another in polite society. "Racism" meant so much more than simple racial bias, prejudice, or bigotry. The word was all of those things, which can stem from an ignorant upbringing in a lower-class white household, but went beyond mere bias to an extreme hostility to an entire race of people based only on their skin pigmentation or manners of speech and expression.
The most often cited example of actual racism after World War II was the Nazi-driven holocaust to wipe out the Jewish populations of Europe. That type of monstrous racism never again existed on such a massive scale anywhere else in the world even in other anti-Jewish progroms or Stalinist purges or the killing fields of Cambodia or the rampages of Red Guards in China in the 1960s.
The often noble Civil Rights leadership of the 1950s in America gradually lost control of their movement to extreme demagogues in the 1960s and 1970s and the word "racism" started to be hurled with greater and greater and more irresponsible frequency when a more tame word such as "bigotry" might have sufficed instead. Bigotry is a bad enough word but it does not carry the same ugly power that the word "racism" conveys.
So over a long period of time, the word "racism" was over-used so often that by the 1990s it almost meant the same thing that mere "prejudice" did in the 1950s. The power of the word itself have been devalued by excessive use. So to compensate for the loss of power of the word and its diminished credibility as an instult, a small number of professional self-appointed African-American advocates started to use the word even more frequently which led to even further erosion of the word.
It would be ridiculous and contrary to common sense to argue that racial bigotry has been entirely stamped out in America. It is also absurd to argue that any new nontraditional political movement of any kind such as the collection of Tea Party groups could be pristine and completely free of any individual, deed, or sign that might express an idea based on a racial bias.
But it is even more ridiculous for the NAACP to slander ALL Tea Party marchers as allies of one person with a single sign out of a half million signs in Washington, DC or in rallies across the nation.
Just because dishonest news assignment editors on certain cable outlets order their staffers to show the same snippet of video tape over and over and over again so they will have visual "proof" of a charge of racism is no reason for Tea Party patriots who love the country and want the excessive taxing and borrowing to end to roll over and go home. Like the very young man in a fable who cried wolf too many times to be believed anymore, the NAACP has diminished its own credibility by slandering others with too broad a brush too often. I just have to wonder at the lack of curiosity of "journalists" who seem so eager to focus entirely on one sign for a day but yet are not interested enough to find out who is carrying the sign or if that person is actually a member of a Tea Party group or not.
A once nonpartisan leadership group when it was founded with high ideals in 1909, the NAACP in 2010 has degenerated into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Radical Left Wing of the Democratic Party. CLICK HERE TO READ AN ESSAY BY NOLAN FINLEY of the Detroit News on the too frequent charges of racism in America.
