A high ranking House Republican contends there isn’t enough support for white people in this country.
“It’s time for a Council of Christian Relations and a NAAWP in this Country,” reads a comment posted by House Majority Floor Leader Sheila Butt on Facebook last month.
The Republican floor leader posted the comment on Jan. 27 on the Facebook page of Cathy Hinners, who operates Daily Roll Call, a website critical of Muslims in America and specifically in Tennessee. The comment, obtained by Pith, was deleted and later replaced with, “We need groups that will stand for Christians and our Western culture. We don’t have groups dedicated to speaking on our behalf.”
Butt’s comment was posted in reaction to a link to an open letter by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national civil rights and advocacy organization, about 2016 Republican presidential candidates embracing Muslim Americans
The acronym “NAAWP” is a spinoff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, seemingly to mean a National Association for the Advancement of White People.
Butt, a tea party-leaning Republican from Columbia who was newly elected as floor leader, repeatedly refused to explain to Pith what she meant by the comment and the meaning of NAAWP. She said only that reading the acronym as the National Association for the Advancement of White people is “totally misinterpreted.”
“I think that’s funny because that isn’t even what that’s supposed to be. You’re making a story out of nothing,” said Butt, who then refused to explain what she meant by the comment. “Oh, I know exactly what it is, but it’s not what you say it is.”
“I’ll let people decide,” she said.
“There’s nothing else it could be,” said Rep. Johnnie Turner, who has served on the Board of Directors of the NAACP state conference and executive director of the association’s Memphis branch.
“It’s a sign of an underlying belief that whatever special privileges that are afforded to people who are white are now being taken away by people of other races, color, ethnicity, etcetera,” said Turner. “It just reinforces my belief and others who think like I do that there is still a lot of do that we still have a lot to do, that there is still racism prevalent.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling on Tennessee's Republican leaders to reject what they characterized as a "racist" comment by Butt.
"This is not a caucus position," read a statement from House Speaker Beth Harwell. "You will need to seek out further clarification on the meaning of this comment from Rep. Butt.”
NAAWP has been used by various white-power organizations over the years. In 1980, David Duke announced that he was leaving the Ku Klux Klan to head an incarnation of the NAAWP. He used the organization to deny the Holocaust and promote racism.
From Duke's NAAWP News in 1983:
" ... Immigration along with nonwhite birthrates will make white people a minority totally vulnerable to the political, social, and economic will of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Orientals. A social upheaval is now beginning to occur that will be the funeral dirge of the America we love. I shudder to contemplate the future under nonwhite occupation; rapes, murders, robberies multiplied a hundred fold, illiteracy such as in Haiti, medicine such as in Mexico, and tyranny such as in Togoland. "Am I an alarmist? Is my vision unreal? All one has to do is look around this globe and see the Third World reality. Are whites holding every one of the nonwhite countries down, or are we in fact pumping billions of dollars into them along with every technological aid that the West can produce? And now the West itself is gradually being enveloped by nonwhite immigration. The exploding numbers of nonwhites are slowly wrapping formerly white nations in a dark human cocoon. Shall a butterfly emerge, or the beast that has haunted the ruins of every great white civilization that submitted to invasion by immigration and racial miscegenation?
A less virulent
Facebook groupwith the NAAWP name exists, claiming that it "is dedicated to preserving the culture of America's Euro-Caucasian ethnic groups as The United States' White population transitions from a majority to a minority and preserving its traditions."
