by va
Teabaggers! They are vocal people. There is nothing worth saying that isn't worth yelling, the ethos seems to dictate. Just, oh yeah, the one minor thing that must never be spoken, and always disavowed: the whiteness. It is a bond that must remain secret, furtive, always transformed into different terms. Their whiteness accuses them, somehow. I see white people, one might be tempted (lamely) to snicker. But they don't know they're white. They think they're ...diverse? It's like recognizing the whiteness of teabaggery would unleash untold havoc, barely imaginable disruptions to the known order of things, which must be why the teabag community fights so mightily to keep such things from being said--until now. Dennis Prager:
Opponents of the popular expression of conservative opposition to big government, the tea parties, regularly note that tea partiers are overwhelmingly white.
Are. Overwhelmingly. White. This is incredible. O
Magickal Words! The sun is breaking through clouds, violins swell, the
grass, the trees, the verdant creatures are singing, starbursts dance
in troupes, and all through the land there is an Edenic re-discovery:
teabaggers regard each other in a state of innocent (if rather elderly)
nudity, all proclaiming, one to the other, White! White, over here, in
the teabag section! It seems, remarkably, that whiteness abounds in us!
On teabag signs, asterisks appear next to all the catchy slogans
(Taxation is Slavery! Take Back Our Country! Go Back to Kenya!) and in happy reconciliation with the fact of the
matter, they proclaim *I say this as a white person. It is a generally
nice, liberating time for everyone, to come to such self-awareness.
Unfortunately,
self-awareness just doesn't have the staying power you'd hope it would. By a generous count, it lasts nine paragraphs. That's how long
it takes Dennis Prager to get from the frank admission that "tea partiers are overwhelmingly
white" to this:
But in a more rational and morally clear world, where people judge ideas by their legitimacy rather than by the race of those who held them, people would be as likely to ask why blacks and ethnic minorities are virtually absent at tea parties just as they now ask why whites predominate. They would want to know if this racial imbalance said anything about black and minority views or necessarily reflected negatively on the whites attending those rallies.
Needless to say, Prager thinks, as an avowed white person, that the whiteness of tea party shindigs reflects poorly on minorities. So. As you were. (via)