Passage of universal healthcare was the final step in legitimating African Americans in the economic mainstream because it is one thing for President Barack Obama to get elected and quite another for him to govern. America’s racist trinity (Russ Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glen Beck) using Fox television and radio are attempting to recreate the anti-black vehemence of the 1915 D. W. Griffith Hollywood blockbuster and Ku Klux Klan propaganda movie, “Birth of a Nation.”

The racist trinity failed to defrock President Obama, so the Tea Party movement has stepped forward following yesterday’s Klan emotional outcries. When we hear, “I want my country back” this is comparable to Confederacy calling for the return of their aristocratic lifestyle undergirded by black slavery that Griffith brought out well in a birth of a nation. The Klan understood that there are four key elements in enfranchising blacks: 1) miscegenation, 2) vote, 3) education and 4) public accommodations.

The conservative movement offered the Klan cover because the evolution of the black conservative was a godsend to thwarting black socioeconomic upward mobility. The Klan knew blacks may accept an inferior education that makes them noncompetitive in the economic mainstream. Booker T. Washington is the conservative Negro doing the KKK’s bidding. Cheryl Renee Gooch in her article, “The Literary Mind of a Cornfield Journalist: Joel Chandler Harris’s 1904 Negro Question Articles,” gives rationale for the white racists embracing Washington.  

“The notion of social equality is impractical, Harris posits, and the responsibility for a successful solution must be shared by both whites and the Negroes in the south through patient and constructive cooperation without Northern political interference, the latter having encouraged blacks to inappropriately thrust “themselves into places where they were not wanted.”

 “At times, Harris is critical, even vitriolic, regarding black politicians and preachers whom he feels could better serve their race by embracing Booker T. Washington’s moderate philosophy. Washington expressed his perspectives during his famous 1895 Cotton States speech in Atlanta, he urged blacks to temporarily forgo political power and insistence on civil rights and intellectual education. Instead, they should concentrate their energies on industrial education and traditional trades. Washington’s conservatism resonated with many whites, including Harris, who lauded him as “wise counselor and a safe leader.”  

Yet White America did not remain subservient to the British and wait for their mainstream British citizenship to evolve over a long period of time. White America fought for the things Booker T. Washington was asking Black America to forgo; thereby, remain in the servant caste.

We might argue that Washington was successful in retarding black socioeconomic progress for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 legitimated racial segregation echoing in Jim Crow and menacing mainstream intellectual education.  Until the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling knocking down the “separate but equal philosophy,” racial segregation flourished by exploiting the black educational caste to offer assurances to ignorant white good ole boys that substandard black education kept these blacks noncompetitive in the economic mainstream.  

Within the next fifteen years, the civil rights epoch guided blacks’ evolution from the black caste to mainstream citizens. The national psyche changes accompanying the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act and 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that knocked down the anti-miscegenation laws started blacks on a comparable socioeconomic evolutionary path of yesteryear’s European immigrant groups. The election of biracial American Barack Obama to the US Presidency showed that the white racist loss control over African American socioeconomic progress because yesteryear’s propaganda is becoming impotent with today’s diverse population.

The Republican Party allowed itself to get overrun by the ultra rightwing who wants to see President Obama fail in the midst of a quasi-economic depression. The tragedy is the Republican Party got tainted as wanting a lilywhite party suggesting that they are surrogates for the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK went through an evolution where they had the introduction of roles of females - WKKK. Today with the Klan failure to topple President Obama, so far they appear to have adopted a new strategy to provoke media attention with a high profile female without KKK portfolio.  

The KKK 2010 political strategy becomes to harness the media interest in the antics of the Tea Party Movement while creating a female superstar of the ultra rightwing. Former Governor Sarah Palin’s Tea Party entourage should bring her on par with the America’s racist trinity in media standing. Hence, Palin antics will continue to give Fox ratings even if the long term impact of their efforts to debilitate President Barack Obama may place the nation in peril. When you think about it the indigenous people (Native Americans and Eskimos) are the only ones who have the right to declare, “I want my country back!” Will the national media pay lip service to Palin’s Tea Party entourage?