Tearing down bridges

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the tea party movement may be two of the most misunderstood entities in the United States, and their clash this week only serves to create more confusion and discord around each of them.

For its part, the NAACP has done more good for America even in the recent days of its proud 100-year history than tea party groups may ever accomplish, but the historic group is wrong to pick an unnecessary fight with this loosely affiliated group of conservative activists.

At its annual convention on Tuesday, the NAACP adopted a resolution that "calls on the tea party and all people of good will to repudiate the racist element and activities within the tea party," according to an association spokeswoman. While the NAACP is indisputably correct that racism anywhere ought to be condemned, the insinuation that bigotry has a prominent place within the tea party is false and harmful to any national discourse.

We can only have reasonable discussions when we are not calling one another names. But the thumb-biting NAACP resolution inevitably provokes equally senseless responses from the tea party: "I am disinclined to take lectures on racial sensitivity from a group that insists on calling black people, 'colored,'" the spokesman for one tea party group told CNN this week, childishly ignoring the sad fact that for much of the NAACP's history, the antiquated term "colored" was among the nicer terms some white Americans would use for black people.

Supporters of the NAACP split hairs when they point out that their resolution does not call the tea partiers racist, but only calls on them to repudiate their racist supporters. The fact is, as even some NAACP defenders acknowledge, leaders of various tea party groups have done so time and time again. There is no central "Tea Party National Committee," so the NAACP request seems either redundant or in bad faith, akin to calling on opponents of the Iraq war to repudiate anarchy because some of the war's more foolish protesters committed acts of vandalism.

The NAACP's instigation of this rhetorical one-upmanship not only hardens the opinions of tea party sympathizers, but more tragically, it alienates the center, those of us who would gladly work with the NAACP on more important issues such as the governmental policy toward urban areas or the official display of the Confederate flag.

Look at the extremes of talk radio or the Internet today. Liberal pundits are agog over a Northern Iowa Tea Party billboard comparing Obama with Hitler, a stupid and wrong comparison that was also made of President George W. Bush with appalling frequency. Their conservative counterparts are meanwhile talking themselves into a lather trying to link a hate group called the New Black Panther Party to the Obama administration.

Both sides are caught in the vicious cycle of concentrating on their opponents' worst actors, rather than looking for solutions with its best. The NAACP ought to be ending such nonsense, rather than instigating it.