Last week, the NAACP passed a resolution at its annual convention asking Tea Party leaders to condemn the racists in their ranks. The NAACP was right on the money. Regardless of whether you think the average Tea Party supporter is racist, overt racists regularly show up and make headlines at their events. Tea Party leaders would have you believe that they're a fringe element that is absolutely not representative of the core values of the Tea Party. So, the leaders should be only too eager to publicly distance themselves from the ugly fringe, right? 

Wrong. Instead, one major Tea Party group doubled down, accusing the NAACP of racism.

The large and influential Tea Party Express withdrew from the National Tea Party Federation rather than rebuke TPE executive director Mark Williams for a satirical blog post in the voice of "Precious Benjamin Jealous", "Tom’s Nephew National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Head Colored Person"[sic]. (The current president of the NAACP is named Benjamin Todd Jealous.)

The post purports to be a letter from the president of the NAACP to President Abraham Lincoln accusing Lincoln of being "a racist" for freeing the slaves because the slaves "never had it so good." The narrator denounces the Tea Party for being the "old time abolitionist movement." 

Let's parse the "logic" of Williams' "satire": The NAACP accuses the Tea Party of having some racist supporters, therefore the NAACP loves slavery and hates Lincoln for emancipating the slaves. You see, taxes are slavery that redistribute the wealth of white workers to black layabouts--just like under actual slavery where white slave owners paid for "three squares a day" for slaves out of their own pockets. Today, according to the fictional Jealous, taxpayers somehow fund "wide-screen TVs" for "coloreds" who long for the good old days of slavery when "massa" made all their decisions for them. (Read the whole thing at Ta-Nehesi's place.)

Williams later tried to defend himself by saying that the piece was satirical, that he was using the absurd to illustrate the absurd. Satire to underscore an offensive point is still offensive. The point Williams was trying to drive home with all the juicy stereotypes about "coloreds" and their "wide screen TVs" is that anyone who thinks the Tea Party is racist is the real racist for wanting to perpetuate slavery.

This is the kind of bizarro hall-of-mirrors logic that typifies the Tea Party rhetoric around race. Their favorite language game is "Who's the Real Racist"? Whenever anyone accuses the Tea Party of racism, they accuse the accuser of racism.

The simple move is to cite the charge as proof of the accuser's implacable hatred of white men. A more sophisticated strategy is to allude to racist stereotypes in your rhetoric, confident that everyone who lives in this culture will get the reference, and then accuse anyone who complains of being racist for picking up on the reference.