Com­ment: It really shouldn’t come as a great sur­prise, but white suprema­cist ele­ments are tar­get­ing the Tea Party move­ment for infil­tra­tion and co– option. With the GOP’s his­tory of involve­ment with Nazi and fas­cist ele­ments, they shouldn’t be too far out of the Repub­li­can mainstream.

“Tea Party Rejects Racist Label, but Con­cerns Remain” by Judy L. Thomas; Kansas City Star; 7/15/2010.

Excerpt: Billy Roper is a write-in can­di­date for gov­er­nor of Arkansas and an unapolo­getic white nationalist.

“I don’t want non-whites in my coun­try in any form or fash­ion or any sta­tus,” he says.

Roper also is a tea party mem­ber who says he has been gath­er­ing sup­port for his cause by attend­ing tea party rallies.

“We go to these tea par­ties all over the coun­try,” Roper said. “We’re look­ing for the younger, poten­tially more rad­i­cal people.”

Accu­sa­tions about racism within the tea party have rum­bled for a year, but they sud­denly exploded this week with a res­o­lu­tion at the NAACP con­ven­tion in Kansas City say­ing the party is attract­ing peo­ple and groups hos­tile to minorities.

The alle­ga­tions prompted irate denials from tea party sup­port­ers, and even crit­ics make it clear that they’re not accus­ing all tea par­ties or party mem­bers of racism.

Indeed, it’s dif­fi­cult to answer the racism ques­tion because the tea party is split into hun­dreds of shards, and the issue of racism depends some­what on perceptions.

Still, it’s clear that some with racist agen­das are try­ing to make inroads into the party.

In sev­eral instances, tea party mem­bers with racist back­grounds such as Roper have played a role in party events. At the same time, The Kansas City Star has found, white nation­al­ist groups are encour­ag­ing mem­bers to attend tea par­ties. One orga­ni­za­tion based in St. Louis is spon­sor­ing tea par­ties of its own.

“There def­i­nitely is racism within the tea party move­ment,” said Daryle Lam­ont Jenk­ins, an African-American and a spokesman for One People’s Project, a Philadelphia-based group that mon­i­tors racism. “I’ve seen it, and it’s some­thing they need to deal with now.”

The tea party absolutely rejects the racist label, for a num­ber of reasons.

Many deny out­right that any inci­dents of racism have occurred. They point out that there are minori­ties in the tea party and that tea par­ties are endors­ing minor­ity can­di­dates in some races.

Oth­ers say racism may be occur­ring, but only on the fringes of a move­ment that is so decen­tral­ized that 69 tea par­ties exist in Mis­souri and 24 more in Kansas. Nonethe­less, some in the party have tried to police inci­dents of racism and turn away white supremacists.

Bren­dan Stein­hauser, direc­tor of cam­paigns for Free­dom­Works, which orga­nizes tea par­ties, acknowl­edges that some racist groups may be try­ing to “glom” onto the move­ment. But “where we see that behav­ior, we’re going to call them out,” he said.

He noted that one tea party in Hous­ton helped expose a tea party leader who allegedly made a racist poster.
“Racism is some­thing we find morally repug­nant,” Stein­hauser said. “It dam­ages the move­ment, and it’s just not good for our image or our message.”

At the same time, Stein­hauser down­plays actual racist inci­dents, say­ing he hasn’t seen any him­self.
“Are there infil­tra­tors com­ing in to try to make it look racist or extrem­ist? Yes,” he said. “Are there peo­ple that may have those kinds of views that are show­ing up at our events try­ing to be a part of the move­ment? Sure. But if you talk to 99.9 per­cent of these peo­ple, that’s not what they believe.”

But for Leonard Zeskind, who has writ­ten a his­tory of the white nation­al­ist move­ment, the prob­lem is obvi­ous.
“There are hard-core racists brew­ing inside the tea party move­ment,” said Zeskind, author of “Blood and Pol­i­tics” and a Kansas City res­i­dent. “They see tea par­ties not only as recruit­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, but as vehi­cles to cross over into main­stream Amer­i­can politics.”

Is it racism?

For many tea partiers, racism is in the eye of the beholder.

Take Ron Wight, who stood with dozens of tea party activists at the J.C. Nichols Memo­r­ial Foun­tain in April, com­plain­ing about the Obama admin­is­tra­tion, its social­ist agenda and being called a racist.

Those like him who com­plain about Pres­i­dent Barack Obama are accused of racism, lamented the semi-retired music teacher from Lee’s Summit.

Then he added: “If I was a black man, I’d get down on my knees and thank God for slav­ery. Oth­er­wise, I could be dying of AIDS now in Africa.”

Wight doesn’t con­sider that com­ment to be racist.

“I wish slav­ery had never hap­pened,” he said. “But there are some black peo­ple alive today who have never suf­fered one day what the peo­ple who were black went through in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Has some­body said some­thing stu­pid or done some­thing stu­pid? Yes, there have been incidents.

“But with every­thing that has been done in this coun­try legally and socially for the black man, it’s almost like they’ve been given a great leg up.”

Signs at tea party events that have drawn crit­i­cism also have defenders.

One poster says: “What’s the dif­fer­ence between the Cleve­land Zoo and the White House? The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African!”

Another depicts Obama as a tribal witch doc­tor, wear­ing a head­dress and a bone through his nose, with the words “Oba­macare: Com­ing soon to a clinic near you.”

While some tea party events turn away signs that might be offen­sive, it’s not always clear that they depict racism, party mem­bers say.

Another con­cern — even within the tea party — is the actions of some who are in lead­er­ship positions.

A photo cir­cu­lat­ing on the web shows Dale Robert­son, founder and pres­i­dent of Houston-based TeaParty.org — also called the 1776 Tea Party — at a 2009 rally car­ry­ing a sign that said: “Con­gress = Slave Owner, Tax­payer = Niggar.”

In an inter­view, Robert­son denied his sign was racist, say­ing some­one altered the pic­ture on the web.
“The orig­i­nal sign said ‘slave,’ and some­body changed it to the N-word,” he said. But then he defended the use of the word.

“I looked the word up in Web­ster, and it says it means polit­i­cally unrep­re­sented,” he said.

Robert­son also sent a fundrais­ing e-mail that con­tained a pic­ture depict­ing Obama as what some describe as a stereo­typ­i­cal black pimp with a thin mus­tache and wear­ing a zebra-striped fedora trimmed in white fur with a black feather on top.

Robert­son said alle­ga­tions of racism in the tea party are com­ing from “peo­ple who have an agenda, and all they want to do is slan­der this movement.”

But some tea party groups have denounced Robertson.

“We do not choose to asso­ciate with peo­ple that use his type of dis­gust­ing lan­guage,” the Hous­ton Tea Party Soci­ety said in a state­ment issued on its website.

The Tea Party Patri­ots also shunned Robertson.

“We stand firmly against any expres­sion of racism and the kind of lan­guage and opin­ion expressed in his (N-word) sign,” the group said.

The Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens, a St. Louis-based group that pro­motes the preser­va­tion of the white race, has spon­sored its own tea par­ties in some South­ern states.

The council’s web­site has referred to blacks as “a ret­ro­grade species of human­ity” and said non-white immi­gra­tion would turn the coun­try into a “slimy brown mass of glop.”

Gor­don Baum, the group’s founder, told The Star that the coun­cil encour­ages mem­bers to par­tic­i­pate in tea parties.

He described the tea party ral­lies as “mainly a white thing, because there’s not a whole lot of blacks that par­tic­i­pate, and the ones that do get to be speakers.”

That leads some groups into a bizarre hyper­sen­si­tiv­ity, he said.

“They have black speak­ers, and some­times when they can’t get one lined up, they just get some poor devil that’s on their side, black guy, in the audi­ence and drag him up on stage,” he said.

Some other white supremacy groups also see tea par­ties as recruit­ing grounds.

Roper, a for­mer orga­nizer for the neo-Nazi National Alliance and now chair­man of White Rev­o­lu­tion, said he has been attend­ing tea party ral­lies to recruit mem­bers and gar­ner sup­port for his 2010 write-in cam­paign for Arkansas governor.

Roper, a mem­ber of the ResistNet.com tea party, said in an inter­view that he sees tea par­ties as a base of support.

Have tea par­ties been receptive?

“It varies,” he said. “If I go to some of the larger tea par­ties, I’ll find a few dozen peo­ple at least who are see­ing the world through the same lenses I have.”

Roper said he was kicked out of one tea party rally by a man who said racists weren’t wel­come.
“I told him I’m not a white suprema­cist,” Roper said. “I’m a separatist.”

For­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has posted a video on his web­site address­ing tea party sup­port­ers. Duke says in the video that the major­ity of tea party activists “oppose affir­ma­tive action and diver­sity, which are noth­ing more than pro­grams of racist dis­crim­i­na­tion against white people.”

Tea party on racism

Last fall, the Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens put fliers pro­mot­ing the group on cars at a tea party event in Vir­ginia. In response, lead­ers of the Roanoke Tea Party pub­licly dis­avowed the council.

In April, an Alabama attor­ney who was sched­uled to speak at a tea party rally in Wausau, Wis., was asked to with­draw after it was revealed that he had a his­tory of speak­ing at white suprema­cist events.

Those are among sev­eral exam­ples of tea par­ties mak­ing it clear they don’t sup­port racist views.

At the same time, though, sup­port­ers want to make sure racist inci­dents aren’t blown out of pro­por­tion.
“We’ve got to rec­og­nize that there are freaks at both ends and they will attempt to attach them­selves to legit­i­mate move­ments,” said Woody Cozad, a for­mer chair­man of the Mis­souri Repub­li­can Party who has spo­ken at tea party events.

“But that does not say any­thing about the move­ment unless the move­ment endorses or embraces them, which the tea party has not done that I know of.”

Indeed, some tea partiers say they haven’t seen racism at all.

Lloyd Mar­cus, a black con­ser­v­a­tive and musi­cian who has both spo­ken and enter­tained at tea party ral­lies, said he has been to 200 events and never wit­nessed any racist incidents.

“It’s women, it’s fam­i­lies, it’s grand­par­ents, it’s kids,” Mar­cus said. “The decent folks that I meet at the tea par­ties, to be called a racist is dev­as­tat­ing to them.”

Ward Con­nerly, a con­ser­v­a­tive African-American who has spo­ken at numer­ous tea party events, said he has no qualms about the tea party movement.

“I’ve prob­a­bly spo­ken at over 20 tea party events in the last three months, and I’m con­vinced that these folks are ordi­nary peo­ple who are frus­trated with gov­ern­ment,” he said.

Con­nerly acknowl­edged that minori­ties are scarce at tea party events he’s attended, but he attrib­uted it to “the atti­tude that minori­ties often have about the polit­i­cal process.”

Some­times lan­guage dif­fer­ences hold back blacks and Lati­nos, he said, while those of Asian descent don’t par­tic­i­pate in polit­i­cal events unless it relates to what they see as their own identity.

Many also are com­plain­ing about racism on the other side. They accuse the NAACP of fail­ing to denounce racist inci­dents by African-Americans, such as voter intim­i­da­tion by the New Black Pan­ther Party dur­ing the 2008 elections.

“There’s no room for that kind of vit­ri­olic lan­guage in a civ­i­lized demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety,” NAACP spokesman Chris Flem­ing said Thurs­day about the voter incidents.

Watch­dog fears

Those who mon­i­tor hate groups are wor­ried about racism in the tea party.

“There are prob­a­bly close to a cou­ple thou­sand of these local tea party chap­ters now,” said Devin Burghart, vice pres­i­dent of the Insti­tute for Research and Edu­ca­tion on Human Rights, which is final­iz­ing a spe­cial report on tea parties.

“A num­ber of these groups have been either thor­oughly infil­trated by more hard-core folks, or at least those more hard-core folks are allowed to swim in that same ocean.”

As exam­ples, Burghart cited Robert­son, as well as some speak­ers pro­moted by tea par­ties, such as Red Beck­man, an anti-Semite who was once evicted from his land by the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice for refus­ing to pay taxes.

The racism isn’t com­ing only from the fringe, Burghart said.

“This is not just a nut show­ing up in the audi­ence with a crazy sign,” Burghart said. “It’s some­one who they vet­ted and decided to give a plat­form to.”

Zeskind said racist ten­den­cies may be broader within the party than even crit­ics realize. . . .