When Barack Obama won the US election in 2008, for many a new day had come. It had, but after every day is a night-and that night was called the Tea Party (TP). The TP saddled up to save America from socialism, taxation, government regulation, state healthcare, social security. In one year, they changed the American trajectory from hope to despair, recovery to relapse, and "yes we can" to "up y---s." The TP's ability to hijack the public sphere was thanks to the extraordinarily effective right wing noise machine-talk radio, Fox News, mainstream media's pretence at "fairness," and the TP's lack of scruple or common decency. But them wasn't fooling nobody: the Tea Party's real motivation was clear: We ain't taking no black president. By way of proof, in the NY Times on August 16, Roger Putnam and David Campbell published ongoing research on the Tea Party: it is comprised of mainly white, fundamentalist Christian conservatives, who dislike blacks and immigrants. Obama's election catalysed the complex into action. They were/are funded by powerful people (like Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers) who tacitly support their cause, and they fomented enough discontent to win a small bloc of seats in the 2010 US Congress. Which they used as leverage to hamstring the US economy, like the debt-ceiling debacle, which woke up the US public.
Everyone now knows the TP's agenda: we ent care bout nutten bur taking down Obama. Even if it means bringing the country down. Which is a real possibility-the US economy is in real trouble now. A NY Times columnist pointed out that if a foreign country had done to the US what the TP has, the US would declare war on it. It's likely that in 2012, the Tea Party will be pushed back to the fringes. But the lessons here are that long-standing bigotry doesn't die quietly, and small, fanatical groups with no scruples and access to media can do incredible damage to a nation, despite their lies being continuously refuted. Once they keep speaking the lies, the effect persists. Which brings us to Trinidad where our very own Tea-Pee Party has formed to protest the SoE. Their grouses? The trampling of "rights." Government conspiracies to arrest black people. A general assault on democracy and Africans. The Chief Justice's rubbishing loss-of-rights paranoia as "uniformed;" TV news surveys showing 80-90 per cent support for the SoE; UNDP data showing 83 per cent of gang members are African, which might explain the seeming preponderance of Afri-can detainees; the 2003 Ken Gordon committee which reported that a generation of poor, young, black men were being schooled in a syndrome called "learned helplessness" and crime by PNM social policy-none of these facts has slowed the narrative.
The effects on the ground of this rhetoric were revealed by Newsday's Carol Matroo, who reported one Nelson Street detainee's take on the SoE: "It's a racist thing they're doing. They're trying to get rid of PNM people so when the election comes round they will be phased out" (Newsday, Sept 18, pp 8-9). This is a good précis of the talk radio dribble. So let's not p--s around here, folks: a constituency has found a way to say they ain't want no Indian government, without actually using the words. I have iden- tified these people as Afrocentrists, obsessed with racial paramountcy at any cost. And from PNM MP Joanne Thomas's comment about "doubles men in Debe" during the SoE debate (and many others), we know the PNM is on board. It's not hard to see why: The Tea Party's screaming distracted attention from the fact that the Republicans crashed the US econo- my, and started two endless, unwinnable wars. The Trini "rights and race" parrots have distracted attention from the fact that the PNM created and funded criminals, tief billions, and leff we to dead. Now, all problems are the fault of the present Government. Having outed the Afrocentrists/ PNM party group, I'm seeing predictable responses. The main strategy is pretending that all black people are insulted.
The PNM-o-centrists twist every proposition into this one, because this is the one to which they know the script by heart. If this narrative metastasises it will easily counter whatever benefits the SoE generates. A bonus is that any response sounds like a defence of the PP, ergo, it sounds like an ethnic response. The question is, is it the fringe or a majority? We don't know because our public sphere apparatus is not functioning as it should. Data are not being generated, and press freedom is (again) being perverted to inject a stream of poison from the radio into the minds of the desperate. Last week I named a few people as being responsible for the Afrocentric narrative. One was Leroy Clarke. Here is a part of his response to that column: "The frontier is hot with glee... Say murder... say drugs... say tief... say gang in this crazy unfair place, the Afro-Trinidadian is to blame. He is to be blamed for every thing sordid, every thing that is wrong with Trinidad and Tobago! [...] and now, again let loosed from a puss-swollen hate for the slightest detection of African blood in a well profiled season of marauding, intent on striking down... no... annihilating any vestige of African- stay-ability that wont to utter its 'AYE!'" [Sic]. This is the only conversation Afrocentrists want to or can have: victim-oppressor, hater-hated, everybody against we. And it's exactly what desperate, paranoid people need to hear now. It's not crazy at all.