July 18, 2010
By Herman Cain
The NAACP is doing the dirty work for the failed policies of the Obama Administration and the Congressional Democrats. Accusing the Tea Party movement as being racist shifts (S) the attention from the mishandling of the Gulf oil tragedy, the failed $862 billion stimulus spending bill, the lack of private sector job growth and an economy stuck on stalled.
The NAACP’s accusation also shifts attention away from the problems in the black community which they ignore (I) in their name calling (N) rhetoric, such as increased high school drop-out rates, increased incarceration rates, increased out-of-wedlock birth rates and unemployment rates among blacks that are 50 percent higher than the national average.
Although my invitation to the NAACP annual convention in Kansas City got lost in the mail, I suspect there were plenty of speeches blaming George W. Bush and greedy capitalists for those problems.
When NAACP spokeswoman Leila McDowell says “hardcore white supremacist organizations have participated in and occasionally lead Tea Party rallies”, the mainstream lapdog media jumps all over such a blatantly baseless claim. When asked what the claim was based on, she said academic research on the Tea Party movement.
Of the nearly two dozen Tea Party rallies at which I have been a keynote speaker, I have yet to see or hear of anyone doing a survey, poll or research asking attendees if they were white supremacists. Nor has any of the Tea Party organizers indicated that such research was ever requested or being done.
Although it was not a scientific test, at a Georgia Tea Party event I attended last Friday July 16, which included a live broadcast of my radio show, I asked all of the white supremacists and KKK members to raise their hands. There were none. When I asked a show of hands of all the people who want the big government spending to stop, the legislative abuse to stop and the coming tax increases to be stopped, the over 3,000 attendees almost cheered the roof off the place!
Since there have been thousands of Tea Party and citizen rallies across the country beginning in early 2009, those researchers obviously attended the ones I did not attend. I would love to see the research, or hear or see one audio or video clip of a Tea Party speaker uttering one racist word. It does not exist!
It is unfortunate that a once-relevant and impactful organization is looking for relevance in the wrong place, namely, race. It should be about solving problems and uniting people instead of dividing people with baseless claims of racism.
I have also been called a racist among other names for disagreeing with the president’s policies and those of the Democrat-controlled Congress. But that does not discourage me or other black conservatives from fighting for what we believe, or challenging so-called black establishment organizations such as the NAACP.
Tea Party people are not racist. They are patriotic Americans who want the greatest country in the world to remain the greatest country in the world. We are exercising our right to speak out against bad public policy, even if the president is black.
This isn’t about race. This is about results, and the results by this administration and this Congress are missing in action.
The NAACP has lost its relevance and its way forward. That’s a sin.
