“We’re losing our country”: Barack Obama, Race & the Tea Party Clarence E. Walker Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/140/1/125/1829889/daed_a_00064.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 The United States is not as racist as it was when I was born in 1941. Asians have become citizens, blacks can vote in Southern elections, and inter- racial marriage is now legal nationwide. However, these advances in racial justice do not mean that racism is dead in the United States; indeed, it con- tinues to exercise a powerful hold on the Ameri- can imagination. How could it be otherwise? American democracy was created on a racial foun- dation, and although the election of a black presi- dent represents a historic step in the nation’s ra- cial modernization, it does not signal “the end of white America.” Even if it did, this development would not mean that Asians, blacks, Mexicans, and other Spanish speakers would get along with each other.1 Race will continue to plague Ameri- can politics even as the demographic composition of the nation changes. The idea that the death of whiteness might usher in racial nirvana rests on a demographic determinism that the history of the CLARENCE E. WALKER is Profes- American Republic renders problematic. sor of History at the University If we take a long view of race and politics, the of California, Davis. His publica- demise of white hegemony is an interesting but tions include The Preacher and the premature notion suggesting that contemporary Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack American racial liberalism, like the Garrisonian Obama, and Race in America (with abolitionists in the nineteenth century, has been Gregory D. Smithers, 2009), Mon- swept up in a moment of self-congratulatory wish- grel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings ful thinking. Both the end of slavery and the elec- (2009), and We Can’t Go Home tion of Barack Obama constitute important turn- Again: An Argument about Afro- ing points in the history of race in America. And centrism (2001). both events shed light on the Republican Party. I © 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Dædalus Winter 2011 125 Barack refer to the Republicans not because I Race is never absent from American Obama, think the Democrats have wonderful politics, and this is no less true of the Race & the Tea Party racial politics but because the gop has Tea Party movement, though it claims become the voice of white victimology not to be racist and has some black mem- in a supposedly post-racial and multi- bers. Yet according to a recent cbs/New cultural world. York Times poll, white Tea Party mem- Contemporary Republican victimology bers think “too much has been made of expresses itself in the Tea Party move- race in America and that the policies ment. The Tea Party is the latest phase pursued by the Obama administration of a transformation that has been tak- promote the interests of poor blacks over ing place in the Republican Party since those of the white middle class.”3 Given 1968, when the Nixon administration these attitudes, why would blacks be began pursuing its “Southern Strategy” members of the Tea Party? Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/140/1/125/1829889/daed_a_00064.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 to woo the South. The issues that galva- The answer to this question is not to nized the Republicans to court white be found solely in the history of black Southerners in the 1960s were the civil people but of minorities in general. The rights movement and the expansion of desire to be accepted cuts across lines federal power; today, according to intel- of ethnicity, race, and sexual preference, lectual historian Mark Lilla, three issues and thus is not limited to black people. energize the contemporary Tea Party: The quest for acceptance can be seen in “A ½nancial crisis that robbed millions the history of court and assimilated of their homes, jobs, and savings; the Jews in Central and Western Europe, Obama administration’s decision to in Booker T. Washington’s program of pursue health care reform despite the cultural rehabilitation during the last crisis; and personal animosity toward quarter of the nineteenth century in the the president himself (racially tinged American South, and in the careers of in some regions) stoked by the right- gay men like Roy Cohn and David Brock. wing media.”2 The Tea Party, then, is Cohn denied he was gay and actively per- an extreme right-wing or conservative secuted gays during the Army-McCarthy outgrowth of the Republican Party. Not hearings. Brock, like Cohn, was a clos- all conservatives are Tea Partiers, but eted gay conservative activist who made Tea Partiers are radical conservatives. a reputation smearing liberal politicians Some of the party’s spokespeople have and black women. Brock came out of the called for the elimination of government closet after he found the conservative agencies such as the Departments of movement’s homophobia intolerable. Education, Energy, and Environmental It would be easy to call these people op- Protection and the Federal Reserve and portunists, but to do so would be an over- for either abolition or privatization of statement and would simplify the com- Social Security and Medicare. Several plicated history of minorities generally of these programs have bene½ted blacks and black people in the United States in the United States because the post– speci½cally. World War II bureaucratic state has What we have here are groups and in- been central to leveling the so-called dividuals who want to normalize their playing ½eld between blacks and whites. history and escape the stigma of being So what role does race play in the Tea thought of as outsiders. In the case of Party members’ claim that they have black Tea Partiers, this effort means dis- lost their country? associating oneself from the history of 126 Dædalus Winter 2011 black welfare dependence, crime, and Membership in the Tea Party situates Clarence E. racial militance. Charles Butler, a black black conservatives, as it does white ones, Walker Tea Partier, told a Chicago radio station in a libertarian enthusiasm centered on that “the Democratic social welfare poli- the idea of an autonomous self. Tea Par- cies of Roosevelt and Kennedy negative- tiers view government as the enemy of ly affected Black people then and con- freedom, and Obama, who they call a tinue to affect Blacks today.”4 Butler is proponent of big government and social- not alone in thinking the government ism, is likewise an enemy of freedom. is the enemy of black people. Lloyd Tea Party opposition to Obama is reli- Marcus, another black member of the gious in its intensity. I say this because Tea Party, has been quoted as saying when I see Tea Party rallies on television, that “the Democrats are focused on they remind me of the revivals I attended keeping Blacks thinking they are vic- as a child in Texas. At these camp meet- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/140/1/125/1829889/daed_a_00064.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 tims and dependent on social welfare.”5 ings, the faithful, shouting and in the grip To escape the stigma of welfare, if you of religious ecstasy, would be rendered are black, you have to be baptized in unconscious at the altar by the power of the cult of individualism and self-help the holy ghost. A similar enthusiasm char- to overcome the notion that your col- acterizes Tea Party gatherings, where a or marks you as a victim; you must be version of Greta Garbo’s mantra, “I want reborn as a tax-producing rather than to be left alone,” activates the crowd and tax-consuming citizen. works it up into a frenzied state reminis- Instead of viewing these black con- cent of religious possession. Inspired by servatives as race traitors or individ- right-wing saint Margaret Thatcher, the uals with false consciousness, they former prime minister of Great Britain, should be placed in the context of a the Tea Party grounds its faith in the be- black conservatism that predates the lief that “there is no such thing as socie- accommodationist policies of Booker ty. There are individual men and women, T. Washington. Frederick Douglass, and there are families. And no govern- the Civil War champion of black equal- ment can do anything except through ity, delivered a speech in 1862 that an- people, and people must look to them- swered the question, “What shall we selves ½rst.”8 Thatcher’s comment is do with the Negro?” Douglass replied, highly seductive if you have, as black “Do nothing with them, but leave them Americans do, a history of being thought like you have left other men, to do with of as losers in a nation whose “national themselves.”6 He went on to say that imaginary” is based on ideas of individ- “the bitterness of the black man’s for- ual achievement and success.9 tune is the fact that he is everywhere I use the term “national imaginary” regarded and treated as an exception here to mean “a system of cultural repre- to the principles and maxims which sentations that makes the contours of the apply to other men.”7 Later on, Doug- nation-state emotionally plausible.”10 In lass changed his mind about govern- the United States, people, regardless of ment aid for the freed men. My point their color and whether their ancestors here is that black hostility to govern- came from Asia, Africa, Europe, or Latin ment programs designed to aid black America, are bound together by the myth people is not new and, in fact, has a of individual success that sits at the cen- distinguished genealogy.