3 Ways Racism Still Drives the Tea Party's Efforts to Destroy President Obama

To fail to understand this most basic of realities is to fail to understand American politics in the Age of Obama.

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Ultimately, the Tea Party GOP is applying the shock doctrine and gangster style disaster capitalism on the American people—policies that were perfected and rehearsed on black and brown communities decades ago. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is prophetic in this regard: he warned that the sin of white racism is not just the harm that it does to African Americans; rather, it is also the damage that racism does to White America as well. Tragically, the willingness of the Tea Party GOP to sacrifice the American economy on the mantle of their narrow ideology, while they make every possible effort to destroy the country’s first Black President, is more proof of Dr. King’s wisdom.

In all, the Tea Party GOP is a faction, whose abandonment of normal politics is deeply motivated by a profound discomfort with the fact that America is led by a Black American. The global economic chaos that the Tea Party leaders cultivated, and the irresponsible brinkmanship they demonstrated in the debt ceiling fracas, is just one more data point in a long strategy that seeks to delegitimate and run over President Barack Obama at any cost…even if the American people and their economic well-being are collateral damage.

Editor and founder of the blog We Are Respectable Negroes which has been featured by the NY Times, the Utne Reader, Crooks and Liars, and The Atlantic Monthly. Writing under a pseudonym, Chauncey DeVega's essays on race, popular culture, and politics have appeared in various books, as well as on such sites as the Washington Post's The Root and Popmatters. He has also appeared on the Pacifica radio network, The Burt Cohen Show, Ring of Fire, and the Ed Schultz Radio Show.