MSNBC Panel: Alan Grayson is Right; Tea Party Should Admit Their Racism

BASHIR: "Angela, what do you think? Do you think Alan Grayson should apologize?
RYE: "I don't think Alan Grayson should apologize. I do understand the commentary around he went too far. What I cannot accept, though, is why we can't really have an honest conversation about Tea Party and bigotry. They continue to promote the kind of bigotry that led Mr. Grayson to send out this particular e-mail. And enable him to raise funds from it. There are obviously segments of the society that agree with him. If we're talking about, you know, the GOP-led or Tea Party-led secession plan immediately after Obama was elected to his second term, or the visceral reaction to ObamaCare, or even Romney saying, 'those people and their free stuff.' There is a clear racial tinge to a lot of the rhetoric from the Tea Party. And there are some even within the Republican Party itself, which is why someone like Judge Carlo Key put out an announcement saying he's leaving the Republican Party to become a Democrat. So there are some clear discussions that we need to have to his last point. But, yeah, there is definitely some bigotry there we need to discuss."
BASHIR: "Professor Peterson, what's your reaction to what Alan Grayson has done?"
PETERSON: "So I won't -- I don't know if he should apologize or not. I think that's interesting is that this -- it is a sensational ad. But it does open the door for us to actually have the conversation that people have been talking about. Unfortunately, sometimes that sensationalism leads to the right kind of discourse, which is for a long time now been trying to think about the ways in which the Tea Party and a small minority within the Republican Party use the southern strategy, play on issues of race in order to score political points. If you think about the history of populism in this nation and the ways in which race has been used to sort of fragment poor white folk from poor people of color, it seems to me that the rhetoric of the Tea Party has been coded that way. And so while it's very, very difficult to always pinpoint that, this kind of ad helps to draw more attention to it. But any time we're talking about states' rights, any time you think about the ways in which they were racialized things about entitlements, 47 percent and so on and so forth. When you talk about secession for some of these states in the south. When you have a number of different -- people running for president, using racially coded language like food stamp president and all this other stuff, the n word rants, all of the things that came out of that suggest to us there is a there there Martin, a racialized discourse that undergirds the rhetoric and at the end of the day, these ads help us get access to the folks who aren't paying attention to social nuances."
BASHIR: "To the point, we have not had a week go by in the last five years when we have not heard some Republican somewhere cast aspersions, either on the president's faith, his place of birth, or smearing him on the basis of his race."
COPPINS: "Sure. I mean, you know, there is -- I think no question that there are racist people in the conservative movement in the Republican Party. But, you know, the -- this whole debate about whether the Tea Party is racist, it's kind of a hard debate to have. It's hard to brand an entire movement the of people who are not all the same, with one big, you know, declaration of racism, right? I think that the question really comes down to is, whether the -- you know, obviously there are individual crazy people in this movement. The question is whether this movement would have been born out of frustration with a white liberal president. Right? And that's -- it's a difficult question to answer, because it's a counterfactual."
BASHIR: "Angela, quickly, because I want to get to another point."
RYE: "Really quickly. If you look at Alan West's comments about being the modern-day Harriet Tubman a couple summers ago and comparing black Democrats with 21st century plantation overseers or Ben Carson saying ObamaCare is worse than slavery. There is racism that can actually be promoted by people of color."