Although they generally lean conservative, the passionate activists who constitute the tea party phenomenon are for the most part members of a broad-based, grass-roots movement that has no formal leaders, political platform or consistent ideology.

Yet what unites tea party supporters seems clear enough: a concern that government has grown too large and is spending too much; a fear of saddling future generations with crippling public debt; and a deep unease over a sense that the country is headed in the wrong direction. In particular, they worry that time-honored values, such as hard work, individual responsibility and personal liberty, which helped shape Americans' identity in the past, are being lost.

None of these ideas have anything to do with race or racism, even though racial bigotry and violence are also part of America's past, and even though the tea party movement itself is overwhelmingly white. In theory, at least, African-Americans and other ethnic and religious minorities ought to be as amenable to sharing tea party concerns as anyone else. Michael S. Steele, the African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee, clearly would like to broaden his party's tent by embracing both greater minority participation and the political groundswell represented by the tea party movement.

Yet the reaction this week of several high-visibility tea party members to a unanimous resolution by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calling on the movement to disassociate itself from the intolerant rhetoric and thinly veiled attacks on minorities by its extremist fringe was a painful reminder of why tea party supporters now find themselves embroiled in charges of racism.

Rather than condemn the hateful statements and actions of a misguided few who have attached themselves to the movement to further a bigoted agenda that has little to do with tea party goals, those speaking for the movement chose to lash out at the NAACP by accusing the nation's oldest civil rights group of being racist itself.

The folly of such a response ought to be obvious: By refusing even to acknowledge the harm threatened to blacks and other minorities by the white-supremacist rhetoric and intimidation on display at several recent tea party rallies, the movement's defenders are leaving the impression that the vast majority of tea party supporters really see nothing wrong with the vitriolic hate-mongering of the movement's lunatic fringe –indeed, that they may actually share such views themselves.

Tea party supporters would do far better to face the issue head-on, by recognizing the threat to their movement's credibility posed by its extremist fringe and unequivocally disavowing its vile rhetoric.

In this it could take a leaf from another successful grass-roots effort, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when the NAACP and the non-violent circle of activists around the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to let their struggle be defined by the blatantly anti-white provocations of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and his followers.

For a movement that aspires to win converts to the cause of reining in government spending and a return to traditional values, the kind of reflexive defensiveness resorted to by tea party apologists for xenophobia and racism simply won't wash. It smacks of the tactic used by overtly racist groups in the past, such as the Klan and the neo- Nazis, which routinely sought to deflect criticism by blaming their intolerance on their victims. That didn't fool anyone then, and it won't fool anyone now.

The NAACP was right to call on the tea party to condemn racism and reject bigotry wherever they raise their ugly heads -- especially if that happens to be in the movement's own backyard.