Editor's Letter: If the Tea Party were black

last updated 8 January 2015

It’s a provocative thought experiment: “Imagine,” writes author and self-described anti-racism activist Tim Wise, “if the Tea Party were black.” In reality, of course, the Tea Party is virtually all white, but for the sake of this exercise, imagine that members of Congress in March had been surrounded by thousands of angry African-Americans, yelling insults at white, Southern politicians and talking about “revolution’’ and “taking the country back.’’ Or, imagine that the hundreds of gun-rights activists who recently descended on the nation’s capital, many armed with AK-47s and handguns, were black. Would admirers of the Tea Party view such protesters as patriotic Americans entitled to voice their heartfelt opinions, or as a dangerous mob that the police and the FBI should closely watch? And what if there were a black Glenn Beck, with millions of devoted followers, calling for a public uprising against a tyrannical U.S. government? Would he be seen as an entertainer—or as a threat to public safety? “To ask any of these questions,” Wise concludes, “is to answer them.”

The experiment, however, cuts both ways. If the throngs holding Tea Party protests were mostly black, might liberals be less apt to dismiss them as cranks, and mock their laments about taxpayer money being used to bail out Wall Street? And might liberals be less inclined to seize on the vile ranting of some hotheads as representative of the movement as a whole? Discomfiting questions, all. We’d all like to pretend we live in a nation where race doesn’t color our views of people and politics. But a colorblind society is not a reality; it, too, remains a thought experiment.