Alan Chin: Black Tea

(This is a first post taking a close-up look at the 9/12 Tea Party demonstration in Washington D.C. as seen by Contributing Photographer, Alan Chin.)

What do we think when we see a Black Tea Party Member?  We’ve got some questions:

Has this guy been drawn into the fold through manipulation (perhaps exploiting some identity issues), given the need of the Tea Party to put forward more people of color?

Or, is this scene completely straight, showing a true black conservative, his ideological concerns transcending race as an issue for him?

Or, does the photo subvert both left and right-wing story lines, representing, instead, at least the partial arrival of post-racial society — as demonstrated by the instance where an African-American guy can just walk around with a huge poster of Obama with a Hitler mustache, as if race didn’t play into it —  as if, he’s just ahead of the curve.

–Michael Shaw

PHOTOGRAPH by ALAN CHIN/ facingchange.org

caption: At the U.S. Capitol, a Tea Party protester with a large poster of a Hitler-moustache Photoshopped onto President Obama. Other demonstrators harangued this protester on the grounds that such imagery is inflammatory and reinforces perceptions of Tea Party racism and extremism.