The Shameful Bigotry of the NAACP

The once-relevant, once-commendable NAACP today sadly is neither. The organization founded in New York City in January 2009 by three people who happened to be caucasians, Mary White Ovington, journalist William English Walling and Henry Moscowitz now stands foursquare and sinking in the swamp of identity politics, a destructive cultural and political force. Its recent attack on the Tea Party groups is just the latest example of its moral and ideological decline.

When NAACP president Ben Jealous called members of the Tea Parties racists, he got what must to him have been a surprisingly muscular push-back from the tea partiers themselves and people like Andrew Breitbart. The charge of racism, as ugly and stinging as it is, doesn't carry the weight it once did. By using it so indiscriminately and so often, Democrats and civil-rights activists have squeezed all meaning from the word. Americans are tired of being insulted by groups like the NAACP. It should expect muscular push-back to be more the rule than the exception in the future.

Mr. Jealous says the tea parties are racist, but admits he's never been to a meeting. One wonders if he has any interest in going to one. We doubt it. If he did he might have to publicly confront his ignorance and prejudice. He might come to recognize his own organization's caricatures for the falsehoods that they are. Our guess is he just doesn't want to risk the embarrassment.

So we are left with the spectacle of Mr. Jealous refusing to believe – or even talk to – the sizable number of conservative blacks who've actually been to thousands of Tea Party meetings without even one racially-motivated confrontation. Had there been one, is there any doubt that our media would not have saturated the airwaves with it by now?

Yet the NAACP and its cohorts like the Congressional Black Caucus can't resist tarring the tea parties with the Klan brush. Ironically enough, blacks were underrepresented at the Democrat-sponsored Klan events of yesteryear – except as lynch victims. Has anyone ever asked Mr. Jealous or his fellow race-baiters how they overlook that fact about the Democrat Party?

And what of the blatant bigotry of the NAACP? Can there be any doubt that they hate conservatives, without regard to color?

Ken Gladney, a conservative black man selling pamphlets outside a Russ Carnahan townhall meeting last year, was assaulted by SEIU goons. The NAACP, at a press conference in St. Louis, added insult to injury, calling Gladney an "Uncle Tom" (which is ironic in itself – the character of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel is a heroic figure, who resists giving information about an escaped slave while under torture). The spokesman also called Gladney "not black enough," thus revealing the excruciatingly narrow color gamut of the NAACP. Any color you like as long as it's liberal.

Benjamin Hooks, one-time president of the NAACP, has used the "Uncle Tom" smear on two brilliant conservative black intellectuals, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell.

Inspired by those famous race-baiters Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the NAACP exploits blacks to promote its agenda of dependency and statism. Emulating the sordid tactics of Jackson's Operation PUSH, the NAACP has lately grown adept at the low art of the corporate shakedown – and has profited handsomely from it.

Last year, the NAACP sued the country's biggest banks, accusing them in effect of luring unsuspecting blacks into bad loans. The suit was settled out of court, no doubt for a very large sum of money. We can't help but wonder what good the payout will do for blacks in America. Will it get them jobs? Will it heal their self-destructive culture? Will it end the blight of single-parenthood? Or will it just make penthouse life for the NAACP leadership a little bit more luxurious than it already is.

Now Ben Jealous truculently demands that the Tea Party purge itself of some spectral racist presence in its midst. But it’s the Democrat party which is haunted by racism – not the Tea Party. It's the Democrat party that was the party of slavery in the 1860s, the party of segregation in the 1960s, and, today, the party of state-coerced "diversity".

Was the NAACP necessary once upon a time? Without a doubt it was. But that time is long passed, and the NAACP, its original purpose achieved, has mutated into something else, a monster obsessed with its own self-cultivated victimhood, morally adrift, and poisonous to anyone who touches it.