Meet Roan Garcia-Quintana, South Carolina’s non-Native Tea Party Nativist

Roan Garcia-Quintana of Greenville is, despite his name, a white supremacist. Being a white supremacist, it is not so surprising that he is a Tea Party activist.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Garcia-Quintana is also a rabid nativist. Merriam-Webster defines nativism as “a policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants.”

Where you think this would become a problem for Garcia-Quintana is that he was born in Havana and is a naturalized citizen. So here we have a non-native endorsing a policy which would make him a second-class citizen.

In other words, Garcia-Quintana does not want America to be for others what it has been for him.

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Nobody said the Tea Party made any sense. Therefore, the befuddled Garcia-Quintana can say, apparently without a sense of irony, that Latino immigration is an “illegal alien invasion.”

If you want to know Garcia-Quintana’s logic, it runs thusly, reports the SPLC: “Although Cuban by birth, Garcia-Quintana does not consider himself Latino. His ancestors, he says, were Spaniards and this makes him white. He refers to himself as “Havana born, Savannah raised” and as a ‘Confederate Cuban.'”

Never mind that the Spaniards themselves were immigrants. Never mind that every white person born in America is the descendent of immigrants. Being bigoted and careless with facts, Garcia-Quintana can advocate that English be made the official language of South Carolina.

Given his logic that he is a Spaniard, you would think he would advocate for Spanish. He may be a white person, but he is certainly not English. Garcia-Quintana is all about Europeans and opposes “the mas­sive immi­gra­tion of non-European and non-Western peo­ples into the United States that threat­ens to trans­form our nation into a non-European major­ity in our lifetime.”

I would like to remind Mr. Garcia-Quintana and everyone else, again, that he is not English and that the language of Europe is not English.

According to his “Quintana for SC Senate” website in 2008, reports the SPLC, Garcia-Quintana said: “‘What we want to accomplish is to STOP the enticements for illegal aliens. To do that we must remove the license to operate a business from anyone who continually hires illegal aliens and make it unpleasant for illegals to live here in South Carolina.”

Welcome to the “do as I say and not as I do” world of Tea Party activism. No wonder South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, like Garcia-Quintana enough to name him to a “164-member steering committee comprising folks from all 46 of her state’s counties.”

The SPLC says that,

Garcia-Quintana is a lifetime member and current board member of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which is listed as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The CCC is the linear descendant of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South, and has evolved into a crudely racist organization. Its website, for example, has published pictures comparing pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape and referred to blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “the CofCC has called mixed-race mar­riage ‘the mon­gre­liza­tion of the races.'” I realize people hate Hitler comparisons but this language is right out of the National Socialist playbook.

You have to laugh at this too, because a little farther north, in the Dominion State, Right Wing Watch reports that Virginia Republican Lt. Gov. nominee E. W. Jackson wants to know, apparently also without a sense of irony, “why [blacks] are “allowing the Tea Party to be made into [their] enemy.”

Gosh, I dunno Mr. Jackson…I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s because the Tea Party is racist.

Jackson pretends it’s all about God. He knows that black voters cannot be made to vote Republican because the GOP is all about Jim Crow. But he apparently harbors that GOP fantasy that black voters will leave Obama and the Democratic Party behind on account of their religion.

Hope springs eternal when reality doesn’t enter into the equation. Jackson claims that liberal indoctrination is responsible for “the radical homosexual rights people to be made into your friends and allies when they reject everything you believe and most of the Tea Party activists embrace everything you believe.”

Yeah. I don’t think black voters embrace being treated like second class citizens. Let’s face it, the Confederate flag is a bit obvious. It’s not liberals, after all, who embrace the fantasy that blacks were better off as slaves, but God-fearing Tea Partiers.

The Tea Party need only look in the mirror to find the answer to all their questions and complaints. They may be able to convince themselves that up is down but the truth is pretty obvious with those who have eyes to see, or ears to hear.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.