By Lee A. Daniels

If you’re black and can spell “vote,” raise your hand.

If you’re Latino and can say “vote” in English, raise your hand.

Tom Tancredo, the former Republican congressman from Colorado who was the opening speaker at the Tea Party Convention last week in Nashville, needs to hear from you.

Poor man. He’s consumed by the mistaken notion that, as he said to the nearly lily-white Tea Party audience, “people who could not even spell the word “vote,” or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.”

Tancredo went on to bemoan the fact that “we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country.”

Not since Trent Lott, the former Senator from Mississippi, publicly pined in late 2002 for the old days when blacks knew their place and white elected officials could whistle “Dixie” without fear of rebuke, has a prominent political figure so nakedly revealed his racism. Perhaps Tancredo imagined himself at the podium of the Dixiecrat Convention of 1948 or a meeting to revive the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, the White South’s middle-class version of the Ku Klux Klan.

Or perhaps Tancredo just knew his audience.

After all, his virulent fear-mongering earlier in the decade against a sensible solution to the crisis of Latino immigration propelled his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination two years ago. Perhaps he knew that the Tea Party crowd, bedeviled by a wrenching racial identity crisis now that a black American is President, were primed to accept the most racist and loony “explanations” for the electoral results democracy has wrought.

Judson Phillips, a Tennessee attorney who was one of the convention’s organizers, declared that he agreed with Tancredo, who, he said, “doesn’t feel like a lot of people who supported Barack Obama understand the basics of this country.” Phillips added that “it is very clear that [socialism] is the political ideology of Barack Obama.”

One can find no better summary of the Tea Party Movement’s animating force and its true, tawdry credo, displayed in its innumerable rallies and “town halls” last summer, than Tom Tancredo’s “Trent Lott moment.”

They are a reminder, now, as in the past, that the extreme Right’s wrapping itself in all sorts of red-white-and-blue regalia and rhetoric can’t disguise the fact that its so-called patriotism is really a xenophobia that would relegate Americans who don’t happen to be white to second-class status – again.

As it happened, the Tea Party Convention, which began last Thursday and ended Sunday, was bracketed by two documents which cast in sharp relief the true nature of the political struggle that burst into the open when Barack Obama won the Democratic Party nomination for President and then captured the White House.

The first is a comprehensive survey (PDF) of racial attitudes of blacks, whites and Latinos the Pew Research Center conducted last fall and released last month. One of its major findings is stated in its title: “A Year After Obama’s Election: Blacks Upbeat About Black Progress.”

The second is a report (PDF), “The Power of the Latino Vote in the 2010 Elections: They Tipped Elections in 2008; Where Will They Be In 2010,” that was released just this week by America’s Voice, an advocacy group working with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR).

Both documents are vitally important for the “hard” data they provide:

Among other things, the America’s Voice study stated that the 9.7 million Latinos who voted in 2008 – a growth of 2.5 million more than in 2004 – are spread across the country such that they now comprise more than 25 percent of voters in one-fifth of all U.S. House districts.

Fully two-thirds of Latino voters supported Obama in 2008 and, with immigration reform “a threshold issue” for many Latinos, Republican-Conservative prospects for attracting more Latino votes appear slim.

So, it appears many, many Latinos can say “vote” in English.

As for black Americans, the Pew Research Center survey found a “sharp rise in optimism” about black progress, race relations, local community satisfaction and their future financial prospects. “In each of these realms,” it states, “the perceptions of blacks have changed for the better over the past two years, despite a deep recession and jobless recovery that have hit blacks especially hard.”

In other words, blacks have again displayed the sophisticated understanding of the art of politics and a steadfast commitment to democratic reform – even in the midst of very hard times – they showed during the feverish, two-year-long run-up to the 2008 election.

I will plumb the Pew survey more fully in a later essay. Suffice it to say here that both its findings and those of the America’s Voice report, dispassionately documenting the brimming self-confidence of blacks and Latinos, offer a striking contrast to the Tea Party Convention adherents’ wallowing in the language of racial resentment and anxiety.

They’re just part of the evidence to show the Tom Tancredos of America that it’s not blacks and Latinos who don’t understand the “basics” of America. When they say those words, they should be looking in the mirror.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.