If we could go back in time to the night of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, and tell the political pundits of that day that in two years, we would be as polarized over race as we’ve ever been, I’m sure they would think we were insane. “We’ve just elected a black man as president of the United States,” they would tell us. “We’ve matured too much on race to ever go back.”

If only that were true.

(more…)

Click here to listen to John McCaslin and Amy Holmes interviewing me on September 2, 2010 about my new book, SELLOUT: Musings from Uncle Tom’s Porch.

What is the NAACP doing now?

I read yesterday that the NAACP is launching a new website, teapartytracker.org, in partnership with Media Matters, Think Progress and New Left Media. Its purpose? To monitor and broadcast “racism and other forms of extremism within the Tea Party movement.”

How irresponsible it is for this organization to waste its members’ dues and shred whatever moral authority they had left over this hunt for bogeymen. It’s not 1955, and the Tea Party activists have made it crystal clear that they reject racism within their ranks and, to the maximum extent a movement without a centralized command structure can, they are policing themselves.

The scores of black conservatives, myself included, who identify with the Tea Party’s goals of individual liberty, free enterprise and constitutionally limited government are proof positive that racism is not at the heart of the Tea Party movement. They are alive and unscathed, for starters. As Alonzo Rachel, a black entertainer, satirist and popular Tea Party speaker so accurately states, “if they were out to get us, Ida’ been got by now.”

(more…)