I’ve been to Tea Parties in DC and my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I’ve shared the freaks, and I’ve been upfront about some of the crazies that attend events (including this guy in Chattanooga), but I’ve honestly never encountered racism.

While racist people probably have attended a Tea Rally somewhere in the country, I’ve encountered thousands and thousands of people at these rallies. The most racist ones are the LaRouche supporters that cling like barnacles to any organized events. They happen to provide convenient cover for video cameras and clever editing. The overwhelming majority are too concerned about fiscal issues to give a damn about something like race.

Why then would the NAACP formalize a charge of racism towards Tea Parties?

Could they possibly want attention? Had the NAACP not made an issue of this, would anyone have noticed that they had their annual conference this week?

What news is going on right now? The BP leak, Old Spice guy, high unemployment, Bristol & Levi, FEC filings for the 2nd quarter, iPhone 4 issues, Lindsay Lohan…

In this environment, social issues struggle. While the abortion debate was renewed because of Obamacare, and the media’s obsession with Sarah Palin has reinvigorated feminism debates for the first time since the Reagan Administration, most social issues struggle during times of financial turbulence.

Unemployment is high, the housing market has crashed, the stock market fluctuating, and taxes are about to hit historically high increases. Frankly, debating social issues feel like a luxury. If we look at issues in the public debate, they match Maslow’s Pyramid. When you’re hungry and jobless, do you care about PETA? Folks who work in philanthropy for social causes only understand this too well.

How do social issue groups make money? Get in the news. How do you get in the news? Somehow peg your group to a current news story. What always makes the news? Charges of racism.

This was a win-win for the NAACP. They got everyone talking about them. Since being a liberal is more important than actually advancing the causes of your race or gender, they don’t care if they tick off Tea Party folks. The media, who are already biased against this grassroots movement since it interrupted Obama love, always enjoys controversy. The NAACP had more to lose by not taking this strategy and playing fair than striking out at Tea Parties.

Adrienne Ross wrote an excellent post about alleged racism and Tea Parties.

The notion that the Tea Party movement is racist is one that has no proof to support it. I have attended tea parties in both Wasilla, AK and Kingston, NY. (See pictures.) And from the Last Frontier to New York’s first capital, I can say that the participants treated one another like family. I was neither mistreated nor ignored. I was not made to feel I did not belong. There was not one racist sign. No one spit on me. No one called me the ‘N’ word. Rather, we had one purpose in mind: to boldly declare that we want to restore sanity to our nation. People protested President Obama’s policies, not because of his race, but because of the dangerous path on which he is steering America. I certainly didn’t attend these tea parties because I have a problem with our president being a black man. However, I was also not going to refrain from attending simply because I share the same skin color as our president. While this is what many on the Left expect of me, I am nobody’s puppet. I think for myself. And I refuse to reside on anyone’s plantation, including any political plantation.

Ross picks up on issues that I wrote about earlier this week. Any deviation from some liberal-approved path is wrong. Empowering individuals, regardless of sex, race, income level or religion, to make their up their own minds and creating a society that allows them to act on those opinions is apparently not the meaning of “equality.”

Anyone who has legitimately given the Tea Party movement a chance will agree with Ross’ assertion:

I wish the Left could just be honest: the Tea Party movement isn’t about race, and they ought to know it. It’s about America. It’s about doing what’s best for the future of a country God blessed us with. And if the President can’t handle the heat of being criticized, then he shouldn’t have signed up to take on an adult job when he only had a child’s experience. It’s that simple; I don’t care what color he is.

Right now, liberals can’t respond to the fiscal debate, so they change the topic. 18 months into Obama’s presidency, everything he touches fails miserably. The American people can only be viewed as an ATM for so long. Liberals know they’ll have to answer for this eventually, so they’re desperate to change the conversation. There’s no better issue than the one that has dogged our society for fifty years now.

As a woman, I get sick of how my uterus is constantly used to win political points with certain factions of our political system. Aren’t black people sick of that happening with their skin color? We won’t be able to enter our post-racial world until the Democrats stop crying wolf.

Racism is terrible, and it does exist. However, until there is solid, irrefutable evidence that racism does occur at Tea Parties, the NAACP and liberals do more harm to their cause. Every fake call of racism cheapens all attempts to repair race relations and call out bigotry. But then winning political points and losing the issue war is pretty much how all liberal causes operate.