Tea Party: a Nation of Islam for White People?

Jenean McBrearty offers a response to JoAnn Wypijewski’s “Outside a Tea Party“:

While in graduate school in the 1980s, I was often alone in empty halls after undergrads had left. One day I saw suited young black men along a stairwell, and heard doings upstairs. It was a meeting of The Nation of Islam. Being a sociology major, I was intrigued.

Outside the lecture hall was a table attended by white tuniced and scarved young women serving slices of what looked like gingerbread, guarded by more tie & coated men.

Though I was white, I was allowed into the hall and heard a representative of Elijah Mohammed deliver a speech against white devils, and the need for black people to separate themselves from them and the jews who, I was informed, were responsible for every ill on earth. (They did not have George Bush to blame for everything at the time.)

Unike New Black Panthers, these black folks did not bar my path holding weapons, or try to  intimidate me. They gave me a copy of their newspaper and were very polite. But not friendly, of course.

I had never thought of myself as a white devil. And I was familiar with the Nation of Islam because my duaghters Godparents are black and I lived in a black neighborhood when she was born. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Islamic prosletyzers regularly made the rounds there. these folks didn’t know that, however, and seemed scared to make their racism evident when they came face to face with a white devil.

It seems the Tea Party folks are as equally well behaved which speaks well of their upbringing even if one does not agree with their politics. To my knowledge, no one has ever been harmed by these people—but then, one would imagine people who have tea in their monicker rather than panthers or nation are probably not violent even if they espouse racial purity.

I’ve never understood just why one has to show ones brotherhood by bearing children with others of another race, but I guess, sex being as important to folks, having sex with people of another race does display a certain dedication to one’s belief system. I understand why people want their children and grandchildren to look and act just like themselves. It is some physical evidence of immortality not provided by invisible deity belief systems.

I also understand why groups who do look and act like each other (the Amish, for example) and keep themselves separate from other groups claim our interest and fuel our admiration whether we admit it or not.

Which is why, I guess, Obama has meetings with Farahkan.

Um, well, that explains it. (The Obama/Farrakhan meetings are apparently a “long-debunked canard,” according even to LGF.)

It also should probably be pointed out that nobody is proposing that people be required to mate with people of other ostensible “races”—we hope. What the opponents of white supremacy long for is simply a world in which people are not stigmatized and hated for doing so.

Your turn: Tea Party vs. Nation of Islam. Go!