Tea Partiers Almost All White – So What?
Dennis Prager wrote a piece for National Review Online entitled Race and the Tea Parties (April 27, 2010) and it is about as wrong as I’ve read in a long time.
He starts out with this
Opponents of the popular expression of conservative opposition to big government — the tea-party movement — regularly note that tea partiers are overwhelmingly white. This is intended to disqualify the tea parties from serious moral consideration.
Typical straw man argument. He tells us why people have pointed this out and then shows how wrong that motivation is. He doesn’t waste one sentence, however, proving this motivation. He simply assumes it.
And it gets better …
The fact that the Left believes that the preponderance of whites among tea partiers invalidates the tea-party movement tells us much more about the Left than it does about the tea partiers.
Where is the evidence that “the Left” believes any such thing. I’ll grant him that the race of the group should be considered when evaluating some of its opinions – but certainly not all – as should gender and class. His disagreement with that indicates how much he has lost touch with reality. I’ll return to this later.
He goes on to say …
One would hope that all people would assess ideas by their moral rightness or wrongness, not by the race, gender, or class of those who hold them.
I could not agree more.
But in the world of the Left, people are taught not to assess ideas but to identify the race, class, and gender of those who espouse those ideas.
The “world of the Left?” Is this really what people are being taught? I could easily make similar assertions of the Right with nothing to back up my claims.
This helps explain the widespread use of ad hominem attacks by the Left: Rather than argue against their opponents’ ideas, the Left usually dismisses those making an argument with which it disagrees as “racist,†“intolerant,†“bigoted,†“sexist,†â€homophobic,†“xenophobic,†and/or “homophobic.â€
Two things are going on here.
First, he is making the assumption that pointing out that tea partiers are mostly white is always an attempt to invalidate all of its arguments. This is simply not the case.
Second, he is ignoring any valid reason for pointing out these biases. When a particular group espouses an idea that is inherently racist or sexist, I have every right to point that out. Much of the rhetoric out of the tea party camp is clearly racist. I don’t call the tea partiers racist to invalidate their ideas. Their ideas are racist and that makes those ideas wrong. Why is this not clear?
To prove my point I am going to say something I might regret. I may agree with some of the ideas held by the tea party. I don’t, however, agree with all their ideas because they are racist – some of the ideas, not the people. Just because some of the members, or all of them, are racist does not make their valid ideas automatically invalid. The racist, and sexist, ideas are invalid – because they are racist and/or sexist. Is there something wrong with pointing that out.
He gives another example …
This is why, to cite another example, men are dismissed when they oppose abortion. The idea is far less significant than the sex of the advocate. As for women who oppose abortion on demand, they are either not authentically female or simply traitors to their sex. Just as the Left depicts blacks who oppose race-based affirmative action as not authentic blacks or as traitors to their race.
Is it just me or is that paragraph simply a list of assertions with no foundation.
And, of course, he brings up the issue of abortion. In this case, I’m glad because this is a great example of what I said I’d return to. There are two issues to consider here – abortion, and a woman’s right to choose. I know opponents of choice don’t like to look at it this way but the issues are different. A man has the same right as a woman to hold a valid opinion on both issues, BUT his opinion on the matter of choice, because he will never have to make that choice, does not carry as much weight as the opinion of a woman.
Prager finishes his first point with …
In this morally inverted world, the virtual absence of blacks and minorities from tea-party rallies cannot possibly reflect anything negative on the blacks and minorities’ absence, only on the white tea partiers’ presence.
Okay, this is a very good point. The virtual absence of minorities does not necessarily indicate that the party is inherently racist, but it might. Members of the tea party should take a serious look at their ideas. Perhaps the absence of minorities does indicate a problem with the party itself.
He finishes with a second point that sounds suspiciously like the first so I won’t get into that.
One final thing bothers me about his article. Two days before his article, another article entitled Imagine: Protest, Insurgency and the Workings of White Privilege was wildly popular online. I don’t see any reference to this article by Prager but I have to assume he had seen it. Anyone writing on the subject would have seen it. If he had not seen it, he can contact me and I’ll make a note here.
Assuming he had seen it, he makes no attempt to address it. What if the tea party were predominantly black, or muslim? Would they be allowed to storm Washington in protest? This is a matter for serious consideration. The fact that he ignores it in his piece is telling.
If you ask me.