NYT’s columnist Charles Blow headed down to the Dallas Tea Party rally on Tax Day to see all of the diversity he’d been hearing about.  In his opinion, most of the diversity was on the stage and virtually none in the crowd.

The juxtaposition was striking: an abundance of diversity on the stage and a dearth of it in the crowd, with the exception of a few minorities like the young black man who carried a sign that read “Quit calling me a racist.”

Lately, this seems to be the complaint about the Tea Party rallies.  They’ve gone from having virtually no diversity to dragging anyone that isn’t a middle-aged white male up onto the podium, as long as they’re rabidly anti enough. Anti-government, anti-Democrat, and especially anti-Obama. And they have found some doozies.

I found the imagery surreal and a bit sad: the minorities trying
desperately to prove that they were “one of the good ones”; the
organizers trying desperately to resolve any racial guilt among the crowd. The message was clear: How could we be intolerant if these multicolored faces feel the same way we do?

Blow summed it up as a “political minstrel show”.

Ouch.

One of those speakers, Alfonzo Rachel, a young black (don’t you dare say African-hypenated-American!) responded on to Blow on YouTube. Blow had criticized Rachel’s s downing the president for acting unconstitutionally after “Zo” admitted on his website that drug use had cost him his “graduation”. Zo riffed on this criticism to in turn criticize Democrats in general for their drug use, though it seems clear to me that Blow was more focused on Rachel’s admitted lack of education.

What do you think?