NYU Black Renaissance Noire Summer/Fall 2011 | Page 9

Paul Krugman, columnist for The New
York Times, is among the economists
who’ve challenged this suburban myth.
(This is the Krugman who is treated
as the leading economist of the white
power shadow government; he’s had
it in for Obama since the campaign
when he called Obama supporters “a
cult.” Another critic is Frank Rich the
Imus supporter who now works at
New York magazine. Constantly quoted
by Obama detractors, Rich has called
Obama “slippery”).

004-Essay-Ishmael-Reed.indd 7

And so the Tea Party, financed by
some of the 2 percent—mostly oil
companies whom Barack Obama
would make pay taxes and end their
subsidies, is based upon lies, hypocrisy
and most of all racism. But left and
liberal commentators are reluctant to
classify them as such for fear of being
accused of playing the race card. Such
is the intimidation that the Tea Party
uses against its adversaries that The
New York Times columnist Joe Nocera
had to apologize to the Tea Partiers for
calling them “terrorists.” Standard &
Poors, the credit rating agency cited
Republican (Tea Party) intransigence
five times on page 4 of its report, as its
reason for lowering the United States’
credit rating from triple A to double
A+, yet the line promoted by cnn on
Sunday August 7 and msnbc, August 8
was that all were at fault.

The white males, who still monopolize
the airwaves and opinion pages,
progressive, liberal, left and right, exclude
the discussion of race when discussing
the Tea Party. One of the reasons is
because the producers, who are fond of
making racist comments in private, are
reluctant to tune out their angry white
male customers with the discussions
of race. This applies to the progressive
as well as the mainstream media.
The progressives, to the consternation
of the blacks among them, still rank
class above race, historically. They
still long for the day when the white
working class will join ranks with
blacks, hispanics and other minorities
and rise up against the Bosses, their
version of the apocalypse. A mirage.
This is why some progressives advocate
an alliance with the Tea Party which
they view as a working class uprising
against Wall Street when the Tea
Party in Congress was sent there to
prevent liberals and progressives from
taxing Wall Street and ending oil
subsidies, which is why millions of
dollars in Texas oil money are behind
these pitiful saps.

7

This is a false claim and one that fits
the Tea Party’s argument. Even
The Wall Street Journal notes that sixty
percent of blacks and hispanics
were eligible for conventional loans,
but were denied because of the racist
practices of the mortgage industry,
details of which were developed in
an article by Tanya Dennis,” Banking
While Black,” Oakland Post, August
3-9, 2011. Moreover, the state with
the highest number of foreclosures
was Nevada, a state with a small
black population.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

On August 9th, while casting blame
for the downgrading of United States’
credit, cnn showed a huge picture
of President Obama. (I was watching
this cnn report while standing in line
at the Kaiser pharmacy in Oakland.)
Next to the picture of Obama,
representing the executive department
was a picture of the capitol building,
but no photos of Grover Norquist,
House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor,
from Virginia, or Republican Speaker
of House from Ohio, John Boehner,
as though the only human responsible
for the crisis was the president. (An
elderly white woman who was in line
behind me said, “Why don’t they
leave him (Obama) alone?” A middle
aged white man standing in front
of me agreed with her that cnn was
ambushing Obama.) John Chambers,
head of s&p’s Sovereign Rating
Committee, blamed the downgrading
on Congress’s inability to raise the debt
ceiling in a timely manner, yet the
head mooner of the Tea Party, Michelle
Bachmann, also blamed the financial
crisis on Obama.

9/18/11 10:42 PM