Nobody could have predicted this would be a complete disaster of hilarious proportions.
TPM attended so you don't have to:
For three hours, a small crowd drifted in and out of Independence Park as speakers and musicians regaled them with paranoia about Democratic politicians and policies and reassurances that no matter what anyone says, there's no racism in the tea party.Amazing.
Even as just a regular old tea party rally, the event fell flat. Though organizers said the event's website had been visited more than 2 million times in the days leading up to today's rally outside Independence Hall, for most of the afternoon there were fewer than 500 in attendance. It was clear from the large numbers of volunteers and the 1,500 bottles the organizers put on ice that they expected a big crowd to turn out. They did not get it by a long shot. They blamed a traffic jam on I-95 for keeping people away (for the record one organizer said that she counted 1,500 on the high end of attendance, but that appeared a bit generous to us).
. . .Among those who did make it, for most of the time the numbers of non-white faces could be counted on two hands, and maybe a foot.
The same can't be said for the group who went up on the event's small stage. Organizers promised the most diverse cadre of speakers ever to grace a tea party rally, and they delivered. For the most part their message was the same: tea partiers are not racists and never were -- but liberals are.
"The more liberals talk about race, the more they show who the real racists are," right-wing blogger Andre Harper told the crowd. "It's 2010. The tea party has officially moved on passed the race issue. The liberals can have it."
. . ."I hope it has taken away any idea that the tea party is racist," Terry Adams of the Independence Hall Tea Party, a co-sponsor of the event, said. "The crowd today was more diverse than I've seen at a tea party rally."
J.N. and I were debating over the weekend what stunning decision making allowed this event to happen.
Step 1: We want people to stop calling us racists
Step 2: Let's host a rally to show how diverse we are!
[Something happens]
Step 3: Teabaggers host a rally where the crowd is not 100% white people.
It's pretty amazing that the teabagger organizers are so deluded that they couldn't see this spectacular failure coming. Even if you believe the evil liberal media was making up the racist signs at these rallies, you'd think they would have at least known not to promise something as insane as a diverse crowd.
With that said, since only TPM wrote about this, I'm not holding my breath for these facts to be revisited the next time the post decides to give a glowing front page profile to these assholes.
So it was about 15 people out of 500? Using a very bad system of eyeballing for minorities?(I'm not white but I can pass to the casual eye...same for other family members of mine)
ReplyDeleteIf there's a handful more accidental stealth-Aryans like myself, that's not that bad percentage odds considering the racial makeup of the U.S., its just their turn-out was too small.
@anon:
ReplyDelete15 of 500 = 3%
US Population:
White: 75%
Latino: 15%
Black: 12%
It would take 45 more "stealth-aryans" to get to 12%, and that's before you get into the fact that this was held in downtown Philadelphia where you would see a more diverse crowd walking down a random street.
All this for a rally to celebrate the diversity of their movement. They couldn't have failed more spectacularly.
Of course, if the tea party really WERE black all hell would break loose:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtH7vH4yRcY
As Tim Wise so awesomely put it:
"And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the mess we do, on a daily basis."