Satellite High, the guy behind the awesome diss track of the teaparty rappers Wolverines' track "O.T.P. (One-Term President)," hipped me to a really satisfying video today, entitled "What If the Tea Party Was Black?" For politically oriented hip-hop, it's extremely well done, avoiding ponderous and syllable-choked words, elaborate sentences or the unskilled MC's tendency to run back to a chorus every two lines because he's afraid you won't "get" it. The whole thing is perfectly pitched: fun, catchy and devastatingly on-point when it needs to be:
You may remember the title as the subject of a Tim Wise column linked here in a piece called "The Right Kind of Terrorism," in which I looked at the far right's new self-aggrandizing offenses against history and expanded on Wise's speculation about how whites would respond if people of color behaved exactly like the teaparty. Wise continues to catalog the teaparty's abuse of fact and their entirely fabricated martyrdom in a new and brutally — but enjoyably — thorough essay entitled, "Black Power's Gonna Get You Sucka: Right-Wing Paranoia and the Rhetoric of Modern Racism."
His essay teems with links to studies and news articles on modern white racism against blacks and other minorities, followed by a list of frankly disgusting white claims of "reverse racism." If you know anyone who sincerely uses the term, this is the excellent counterpoint to the racist fantasist trash that they eagerly forward to your email box hours after Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh spontaneously invents it on air.
