ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured oped in the Washington Examiner, Niger Innis takes on the NAACP’s claim that the tea party movement is racist:
NAACP betrays its mission of uplifing Black Americans by attacking tea partiers
By Niger Innis
This morning I had the opportunity to listen to a NAACP conference call that was organized to release its report highlighting alleged (yet unproven) Tea Party ties to racist groups. This conference call, report and website reminded me very much of the quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “A Tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”
What was reiterated on the call by the NAACP and it’s minion of “progressive” allies was the same old, unproven, nonsensical charges against the strongest modern grass-roots movement in decades:
“The Tea Party used the N word against a Black congressmen during the Healthcare Debate.”
Indeed Ben Jealous, CEO of the NAACP had the audacity to reload this charge in spite of Andrew Breitbart’s $100,000.00 challenge to anybody that could document the occurrence and in spite of the Tea Party Federation’s unanswered challenge to the Congressional Black Caucus to have a joint investigation of the phony incident.
The most illuminating part of the call came when “progressive” ally, Larry Cohen of the Communication Workers of America revealed the real agenda of the attacks on the Tea Party by the Left: “We disagree with the agenda of the Tea party Movement…. They advocate slavery” and this classic gem, “We don’t need 19th century capitalism.”
What this potpourri of “progressive” groups are really trying to do is inspire an uninspired liberal base of voters, days before the predicted November election bloodletting.
Over the past month, President Obama has also been putting a full-court press on African Americans to turn out to vote in this mid-term election. Not surprisingly, mainstream media writers are puzzled by the muffled response from what is viewed as the president’s core constituency.
The answer can be found in one number, 49%. That is the unemployment rate for black teens.
It is one thing to talk about empowerment, and quite another to deliver it. And the legacy of the Reid/Pelosi leadership in Congress which has been embraced by Obama is that young black people have virtually no hope of finding work.
Parents know that when their kids can’t find an honest job, all too often the temptation is to make money with one that is not as honest. That is nothing but the furthering of the cycle of poverty, which continues to plague the African American community in our nation.
Reid, Pelosi and Obama cannot shift the blame for the painful fact that half of all young African Americans who want a job cannot find one. It is their policy decision to increase the minimum wage which is directly responsible for it.
Even former Clinton pollster Doug Schoen identifies the Pelosi/Reid minimum wage law as causing dangerously high unemployment among African American teens in a recent column in the Huffington Post.
Is it any wonder why African Americans are questioning why we should enthusiastically support the failed and disastrous economic policies of Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi?
Unfortunately, the self-appointed spokesmen for blacks, the NAACP, doesn’t view 49% unemployment among black teens as a civil rights issue. Instead, in their partisan zeal, they have become little more than a Get-Out-The-Vote arm of the Democratic Party.
In their dying gasps of attempted influence, the NAACP is trying to create a climate of fear in the black community this election season by pushing false visions of white-sheeted tea partiers taking over America.
Desperate to regain relevance, they use 1960’s imagery to an audience that for the most part hasn’t seen it or lived it, and doesn’t buy into it. Most African Americans have very familiar wants: safe neighborhoods to live in, a job, educational opportunities, and most importantly, a strong economic future for their children. Instead, the NAACP is attempting to hand us outdated platitudes that play on the basest of fears.
If the NAACP were anything more than a partisan shill, they would be leading rallies across America demanding that the minimum wage be lowered. Professor David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine has found that for every 10% the minimum wage is raised, minority teen unemployment increases by 6.6%.
Then-senator Obama, Reid and Pelosi raised the minimum wage by more than 40% in January 2007, and black teen unemployment skyrocketed from 29.1% to 49% this past month.
The ultimate irony is that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer crowed at the time of passage that, “Dr. King once said: ‘Equality means dignity. And dignity demands a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week.’ Today, we heed those words.”
Four years later, I repeat back these words to Hoyer, “Dignity demands a job.” The ill-advised minimum wage increase has stripped that very dignity from young African Americans, and now these very same Democrats have the arrogance to ask blacks to come to their rescue at the ballot box.
Is it any surprise that African Americans are resisting the same old scare tactics, and instead are questioning whether the promises of the left are really anymore than chains of dependency?
By virtually ignoring unemployment horrors among black teens occurring on the ruling party’s watch and not holding them accountable, the NAACP is betraying its mission and constituents.
If I were Obama, Reid, Pelosi and Hoyer, I wouldn’t look to the minority communities to throw me a life preserver this November. After all, we are already paddling as hard as we can to keep ourselves afloat under the weight of their misguided policies.
Niger Innis is the National Spokesperson for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which inaugurated the Freedom Rides of the modern Civil Rights movement in 1947.
