Indian on Tea Party t-shirt

Fake/Fraud Azz Fridays sick pick of the week--Tea Party "official T-shirt"This week, the Tea Party is being presented as sick pick of the week for their t-shirt (see image) that states "Official Member Tea Party."

Why on earth did they choose an image representing Native people? Oh…let me guess was it to “honor” Native Americans? Yeah right…It is only a matter of time before they start dressing up in their stereotype of how they think we are. Or maybe they are going to bring up some historical reference to colonists getting dressed up as Natives because they were too chicken shit to just dress up as themselves and they wanted to make sure any retaliation would be directed towards Native people--sick sick sick….

We are not your mascots! We are not mascots for sports teams, schools, or for a bunch a teabaggers--this is 2010--and racial stereotyping is no longer tolerated.

The email for the president of the Tea Party is:

Dale Robertson: president@teaparty.org

Comment:  The TeaPartySwag.com site may have taken the shirt down already. The link to the image above wasn't working when I tried it.

I'm not sure why anyone finds this shirt perplexing. Its point is obvious: that today's teabaggers are acting in the noble tradition of the original Boston Tea Party. But it's problematical for a few reasons:

The colonial protesters probably dressed as Mohawk Indians. They wouldn't have dressed as stereotypical Plains Indians because they didn't know such Indians existed.

For the umpteenth time, the faux chief reinforces the notion that all Indians look like Plains Indians.

The image shows an actual Indian (note the dark braids and tan skin), not a white man dressed as an Indian. This implies that Indians support the Tea Party movement. With one or two exceptions, that isn't the case.

I'm not sure if the shirt makers were afraid to show a "real" Tea Partier--i.e., a white man wearing a fake headdress and warpaint. But they probably realized how stupid it would look.



Tea Party members?

A shirt like that would expose the teabaggers for the poseurs and wannabes they are. They don't care one whit about government spending or they would've slammed George W. Bush and his trillion-dollar war on Iraq. All they care about is taking back America from the scary black man and his "black agenda."

For more on the Tea Party movement, see Teabaggers = Indians?!, Buchanan Sums Up Teabaggers, and Teabaggers Support Racist Imagery. For more on the role of Indians in the American Revolution, see Fun 4th of July Facts and The Political Uses of Stereotyping.