When the NAACP challenged the Tea Party movement to confront the overt racism within its ranks I was impressed.    A normally timid organization took a strong stand on a controversial issue.  The vote was unanimous.  Good for the NAACP. 

Then a conservative blogger named Andrew Breitbart posted a heavily-doctored video of a Shirley Sherrod, a high-level employee with the Department of Agriculture, telling an NAACP audience that she once gave less-than-stellar service to a white farmer because he copped a superior attitude.

Breitbart misrepresented Sherrod’s remarks so he could make the classic “you’re-racist-for-calling-me-a-racist” argument. 

As we all now know, Ms. Sherrod was actually telling her audience how she came to see that the real divide in America is more economic than racial. 

Fox News and the Tea Party gang jumped all over Mr.  Breit.rt’s video scam.  What could be more predictable?  The same shoddy tactics, aided and abetted by Fox News and the usual suspects on the right, were used to bring down ACORN and Van Jones.  The scenario is wearily familiar

But why did the NAACP and the Obama administration feel compelled to fire off hair-trigger denunciations of Ms. Sherrod’s alleged indiscretion?

Mr. Obama and the NAACP have both admitted that they rushed to judgment without taking a careful look at the facts.  True, Agriculture Secretary Tom Villsack took the blame.  But Sherrod insists that the USDA official who badgered her into a hasty resignation insisted that he was acting on White House authority.

Sure, these folks showed lamentably bad judgment; but why?

Check out this chart released a few days ago by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality.  Note that 45% of white Americans express a measure of support for the Tea Party movement while only 25% of whites are opposed.

  The time will come when white Americans will be forced to build alliances with non-whites to get what they want, but we aren’t there yet.  White voters still control the political game.

The scandalously craven behavior of the Obama administration becomes even more understandable when the researchers asked a series of questions designed to tease out feelings of racial resentment.

In case the print is too small to read, here’s the statement, “Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up.  Blacks should do the same without special favors.” 

As one would expect, 88% of strong Tea Party supporters endorsed this statement.  Only 67% of those who expressed mild support or mild opposition to the Tea Party movement followed suit–a 21% difference. 

This shows that Tea Party enthusiasts are higher on the racial resentment scale than average Americans.

But notice, a solid majority of those who adamantly oppose the Tea Party also agree with the statement, as do 70% of all white respondents.

Now, consider the second statement: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.”  Almost three-quarters of Tea Party enthusiasts reject this claim.  The other quarter are likely the small government, low-tax folk who aren’t motivated in any significant way by racial resentment.  The numbers suggest that these people are the true fringe element within the Tea Party movement.

But notice, 55% of those showing weak support or opposition for the Tea Party phenomenon also disagree with this statement, as do 58% of all white respondents.

If these numbers are an accurate reflection of American opinion (as I suspect they are), there is a rough-and-ready consensus within the white electorate that systematic racism is a myth, that the civil rights movement removed the last vestiges of racial unfairness from American life, and that most claims of discrimination are bogus.

When the NAACP suggests that the Tea Party movement is riddled with racial resentment it is bucking hurricane-force winds.  The majority of white Americans (somewhere between 58 and 70 per cent) display Tea Party levels of racial resentment. 

Conclusion 1: The Tea Party is riddled with racial resentment, but this doesn’t distinguish them much from the balance of the white population.

Conclusion 2: The Democratic Party enjoys the enthusiastic backing of about one-third of white Americans and can’t win elections without overwhelming support from Black and Latino voters.  To win more than 30% of the white vote, Democrats must appeal to the 70% of white voters who believe that America is a level playing field.  This explains all the post-racial rhetoric we have been hearing of late.  No one with even a cursory grasp of American history or the elementary principles of sociology believes this prattle; but political reality demands it.

In fact, savvy politicians like Barack Obama learn the importance of denouncing “reverse racism” (such as that allegedly displayed by Sally Sherrod).  It’s a wink and a nod to socially moderate white folks who can occassionally be induced to pull the blue lever.  Message: forget about all that civil rights stuff; we just want a fair deal for middle class folks like yourself.

President Obama was right to issue a quick apology to Ms. Sherrod.  The decision to sack her in response to a silly smear-video was an act of political desperation. 

Chris Kromm at Facing South points out the deep irony in the USDA’s knee-jerk decision to fire Sherrod for alleged racism. 

It’s an astonishing development given the history of race relations at the USDA, an agency whose own Commission on Small Farms admitted in 1998 that “the history of discrimination at the U.S. Department of Agriculture … is well-documented” — not against white farmers, but African-American, Native American and other minorities who were pushed off their land by decades of racially-biased laws and practices.

It’s also a black eye for President Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who signaled a desire to atone for the USDA’s checkered past, including pushing for funding of a historic $1.15 billion settlement that would help thousands of African American farmers but now faces bitter resistance from Senate Republicans.

Notice, the USDA has not been discriminating againt Irish, Italian or Jewish farmers–just African Americans. 

Kromm shares this excerpt from a USDA funded study:

Black farmers tell stories of USDA officials — especially local loan authorities in all-white county committees in the South — spitting on them, throwing their loan applications in the trash and illegally denying them loans. This happened for decades, through at least the 1990s. When the USDA’s local offices did approve loans to Black farmers, they were often supervised (farmers couldn’t spend the borrowed money without receiving item-by-item authorization from the USDA) or late (and in farming, timing is everything). Meanwhile, white farmers were receiving unsupervised, on-time loans. Many say egregious discrimination by local loan officials persists today.

One could make the same argument in connection with the GI Bill that gave a generation of American vets their first taste of home ownership.  That program too discriminated against African Americans on a massive scale.

And then there is the issue of white flight and red-lining that restricted Black Americans to inner city neighborhoods.  When the white folks headed for the suburbs, so did the manufacturing jobs.  This fundamental unfairness didn’t impact Jews, Italians and the Irish in a major way.

I could talk about the shabby schooling available to inner city populations, or the issue of racial profiling, but I think you get the drift.

The real issue in America may be economic rather than racial, as Sally Sherrod suggests, but the latter half of the 20th century was studded with examples of institutional discrimination targeting people of color.  The net result of these practices is that even the surprisingly large portion of the African American community that has moved up-and-out possesses far less net family worth than their white social peers. 

Barack Obama and Ben Jealous understand the impact of decades of systemic injustice; but they also know that speaking too freely would be politically disastrous. 

How else do we explain the cringing cowardice on display in recent days?