Tea Party ranks were permeated with racial and national-identity anxieties

Evidence

InJuly 2010, the NAACP publicly condemned “rampant racism” in the Tea Party movement, and subsequently issued a report, Tea Party Nationalism, that dismissed the “non-racial” claims of the movement and surveyed the links between Tea Party organizations and explicitly white supremacist groups: The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government. Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues. In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama’s birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is nota “real American.” — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 223

Categorization

• XREF: The birth-certificate-as-racial-stand-in reading corroborates vault claims about coded racism and racial dog-whistles in post-civil-rights conservatism.