The Tea Party--No, Not Racist At All!!!

The Tennessee Tea Party has a few minor demands for new history standards in the state:

The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds

Ah yes--the made up history about Native Americans. I mean, what possible evidence is there that whites committed depredations toward Native Americans? And slaves, I mean, don't we know that they were all so contented, eating watermelons and playing banjos and such. Clearly, they were asking to be raped by their masters!

And the piece about making sure that things that actually happened to minorities, or whatever they believe actually happened (which could be quite different from reality), not get in the way of talking about how awesome George Washington is, well, that's just fantastic. It's not like the two are mutually exclusive.  But in the zero-sum game minds of the Tea Party members any discussion of brown people means that we are destroying liberty or something.

So, no, the Tea Party is not racist at all.....