Should blacks give the tea parties a second look?

In her recent post, Sophia nelson asks this question. Her point is that a movement shouldn't be rejected solely because it's mostly angry white people. This makes sense. Unfortunately that's pretty much the sum total of her article. That, plus some complaining about taxes, suspicion of the government, and the claim that our founders were rebelling solely because of high taxes*.

Personally I don't think most blacks should support the Tea party for a simple reason: they disagree with everything it stands for. For example a key tenet of the Tea Parties is that the Federal Government is a danger to individual freedom, and that state and local groups are an important bulwark against Federal tyranny.

But as any black person can tell you, in the history of American governments actually oppressing their people, there are virtually no examples of DC oppressing people without active help from state governments. No state protected the property rights of Indian tribes from a grasping Federal Government, the Feds never forced a state to accept slavery, Jim Crow appeared AFTER Federal Troops stopped meddling in the affairs of southern states, Segregation was protected to the bitter end by the states, the states did nothing to protect the japanese from internment, etc. The only example of the Feds actually oppressing people against the will of their state I can think of is the Fugitive Slave Act.

Another key tenet is that the government, especially the Federal government, is no good at helping people. It screws everything up, and can't be trusted. This is not something blacks typically agree with. They're overwhelmingly fiscal progressives. They want more money for health care, more federal support for struggling schools, the whole nine yards. Always remember: if the federal Government could not do hard things there would be no black community. The slaves wanted to be free, and many of them wanted to go back to Africa. They're here because the government can be quite effective when it really wants to.

Then there's the Tea Parties fondness for firepower. You may have noticed that mot of the gun bans the Supremes just shot down are in black areas. There's a substantial minority in the afro-american community which believes that if the slaves had had such firepower there would have been no Jim Crow. The majority seems to be pretty clear that if only the KKK had been disarmed, and armed Federal troops, paid for by high Federal taxes, had remained there would have been no Jim Crow.

Then there's immigration. Blacks aren't necessarily pro-immigration, but they get mighty uncomfortable when white people start talking about "them" taking "our" jobs. They know perfectly well that until very recently the "them" were black people. They also remember what happened when white people started complaining about them in the 20s: wage stagnation for everyone, as whenever the whites employees got too greedy Henry Ford would ship up a couple trainloads of black guys. Auto workers didn't start getting decent pay until they integrated.

You get the idea. Tea party ideology makes perfect sense to one subculture with one history. But the US is a huge country, with many subcultures. And the black historical experience has basically been a refutation of everything the tea parties stand for. Blacks were oppressed by states 100% of the time until the Feds got involved in the 50s and 60s. The Right to Bear Arms has historically been used to shoot at black people, not defend them. Anti-immigrant sentiment makes them cringe, because their grandmothers experienced exactly what modern Latinoes are going through, and they did not enjoy it.

*She's mistaken on this point. They rebelled because they were not allowed to vote on those taxes ("Taxation Without Representation"), and because the British responded to their protests with oppressive force. It should be noted that a) Obama has cut taxes, b) the tea parties have been allowed to organize whatever they want, and c) Tea Party members had every opportunity to be represented in Congress. It's not Obama's fault they lost.

Christopher Hitchens is a bit of a prick

In his latest Slate column he asks why the US "subsidizes" Jewish settlement activity in the West Bank. He comes to this conclusion because many right-wing organizations that fund such activity are non-profits, and thus donations to them are tax deductible.

The answer to this is simple, Mr. Hitchens: we grant almost everyone non-profit status. The only restrictions are that you can't be run solely for someone's material benefit, and you keep a minimal distance between your group and politics.

Neither condition is strictly enforced. The Church of Scientology is widely thought of as a for-profit entity, but donations are still tax-deductible. Detroit's last Mayor, Kwame Kilkpatrick, was associated with several non-profits that spent most of their money hiring his relatives.

The political neutrality thing isn't enforced very strict, either. You can't endorse candidates directly, but you can rate them. And even if you don't use the words "endorsement" when a guy with a 100% rating runs against a guy with a 2% rating de facto you've endorsed the guy with the 100% rating. You can also "educate" people to your heart's content. If you're nan ideological organization with expertise in some area, your education efforts are bound to help one side or the other politically. Most think tanks, the NRA, NAACP, ACLU, etc. manage to be known political partisans, with obvious preferences on election day, but stay officially non-profit.

Unfortunately for those of us who oppose settlements in the West Bank, groups that fund such settlements are (by definition) not in it for the money, and generally don't mess with politics. Therefore their opposition to US policy is irrelevant. They are official non-profits, and there is no legal basis for revoking their non-profit status.

That's just the way the system is set up. It's not ideal, but the alternatives could be a lot worse. For example if the US Government wanted to bulldoze a camp for disabled kids and build a dam the camp could lose it's status as a non-profit, unless the camp decided to close without a fight.

An incredibly crappy story:

A major problem with this story is that it just isn't news. No fucking shit, Moslems have trouble opening mosques. Everybody has trouble getting zoning for new houses of worship. Thanks for the news flash Lauren Green.

But on to it's more juicy problems. The biggest is that the reporter did very little reporting. She interviewed three people, read a poll, and combined it into a few paragraphs. So we know that activists claim the Moslem Brotherhood is trying to take over America with a stealth organization the Muslim America Society, that it's doing so by acquiring mosques (so it can appoint Imams), that Hamas was founded by Brotherhood members, that the stated goal of all these organizations is a world under shariah law, and that MAS has defended convicted terrorists. The Shariah law thing, BTW, includes Kansas. MAS denies everything and calls the activists racist. What we do not know is whether any of these people are lying.

For example it would have been very easy for Ms. Green to find out exactly which terrorists MAS has defended, and how. Saying Zarqawi was insane, and needed to be in a mental hospital instead of a courtroom is one thing. Saying the 20th hijacker was a great guy who should get a medal for standing up to the US is another. I suspect MAS has not defended any convicted terrorists. It probably defended charges against Ali Houssaiky and his friend, Osma Sabhi Abulhassan, but those guys were cleared when the police realized they were simply buying low at Walmart, and selling high at Detroit Gas Stations.

It would also have been easy to ask parishioners at the newly "acquired" mosques what they thought about the organization.

Or simplest of all she could have found out whether the Islamic population in these areas is actually growing.

But all that would have been work.