New Study: Tea Party is All About Race
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The Tea Baggers don’t have a clue when it comes to health care, Afghanistan, the stimulus package or bank bailouts. These people are mostly racists, pure and simple. They are protesting the fact that Barack Obama is black, and many Republican congressional leaders, along with Fox News, are encouraging them. I saw this piece in the Atlanta Examiner yesterday, and a FaceBook headline from Matt Yeazel reminded me to publish it. Here is what most of us already suspected:
A University of Washington survey shows Tea Partiers are motivated by racial concerns. Researchers found that the Tea Party is not only about politics and the size of government, but also about race.
The survey found that among whites, southerners are 12 percent more likely to support the tea party than whites in other parts of the U.S., and that conservatives are 28 percent more likely than liberals to support the group.
It found that those who are racially resentful, who believe the U.S. government has done too much to support blacks, are 36 percent more likely to support the tea party than those who are not.
According to Christopher Parker, a UW assistant professor of political science who directed the survey:
“While it’s clear that the tea party in one sense is about limited government, it’s also clear from the data that people who want limited government don’t want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those services include health care.”
The survey found that people who approve of the Tea Party, more than those who don’t approve, have more racist attitudes. Not only do they have more racist attitudes, but they also have more homophobic and xenophobic attitudes.
These results should surprise no one. From its inception the Tea Party has been stained with a racist veneer. It also comes as no surprise that the Tea Party is filled with xenophobia and homophobia. The three – racism, xenophobia and homophobia – often travel together.
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…and to think I have the great privilege to be surrounded by Baggers. I gotta get out of this place..if it’s the last thing I ever do!
Do you think these bible toting, self rightous, tea baggers are prejudiced? Quoting the bible in one breath and saying the N word in the next. You betcha………Gotto love these good Christian folks.
Racism, xenophobia and homophobia — a Teabagger threesome!
Of course the Tea party will continue to pull out the very rare African-American member claiming they are not racists while ignoring that the overwhelming sea of faces in their mobs are a bunch of ignorant crackers.
Oso: I have kin who look you straight in the eyes and declare they aren’t racist – and in the next breath call them monkeys!
Leslie,
Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,I have family like that too.Used to tell them “could you guys at least say Negro?”.
Mike, that is really a shocker, I mean a real shocker. The next thing you are going to tell me is that Glen Beck is an insane lunatic. lol Great post.
Thomas Frank on Bill Moyers. Good stuff.
Mostly, I’d say Teabaggers have been duped by arguments that serve the interests of the affluent.
One example: A little more than a week ago, a Tea Party leader was on Letterman’s Late Show talking about how business is being “demonized.” That’s an obviously absurd argument in a country that has TV shows like The Apprentice and Shark Tank, but no anti-business equivalent. But, as Matt Taibbi has said, the Teabaggers embrace and repeat such assertions like obedient peasants sticking up for their exploiters.
Stimpson that sums it up perfectly-obedient peasants sticking up for their masters. Kind of an extension of what Thomas Frank wrote in “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”.
Thanks for reminding me of Thomas Frank’s work, Oso. Haven’t read his work yet. I must get my paws on What’s the Matter or The Wrecking Crew soon.
“The three — racism, xenophobia and homophobia — often travel together.” And are different faces of fear. Probably at the heart of it is the fear that the old fantasy-notion of a white, Christian America is evolving into something different. And we know that the concept of anything evolving (i.e., changing) scares the piss out of small minded people.
Have to smile over at Oso… I’ve heard that same thing! The demographics / numbers may be on a more moderate side… it’s the squeaky wheel… the stone in the shoe… that gives me a troubled pause.
I hope you are right my friend… it would seem it.
The one thing that keeps jumping out with all these surveying, study kind of reports is the lack of information these folks seem to have… but here’s the thing: they don’t BELIEVE the facts, either…
and that keeps me scared… hell, it influences some bloggers I know.
But then again…
I’m a ‘lefty’ ya know….
I like your post MM.
What I am so effing sick of, is whenever I bring up this topic inevitably teabaggers accuse me of “Playing the race card”. I don’t blame everything on race but neither do I ignore what is clearly there.With that stupid phrase they (in their ideologically closed minds)invalidate all arguments to the contrary.
I think my new response is gonna be to enjoy teabaggery for as long as they can.Demographics are on our side.We are outbreeding them and short of going nuclear ain’t nothing they can do about it.
The Teabaggers don’t have to play any particular race card, their whole deck is stacked with them. Everything they say is simmering with, as you say, racism, xenophobia and homophobia. A black, gay, foreign born person, would send them into a conniption.
I am glad an “official survey” has now shown what we all knew before…lol It is an interesting picture, however…
If the Tea Baggers were really all about conservative values and government spending…. they would have started protesting about 7 years ago… and they didn’t. So in my mind, it was clear this wasn’t about those things… it was about a black man living in THEIR White House, and doing things that helped all of us.
They have no clue about anything really… Just doing their taxes this year… if they paid any… would have shown them he is trying to help the middle and lower class.. Yet all they can do is complain about having to pay MORE taxes…
That shows they don’t have a clue what is really going on, they are only listening to the voices that tell them all the lies and stupid stuff and they believe all of it.
Annette is exactly right. If those baggers cared about taxes and deficits, out of control spending, they woulda been in the spotlight during the Shrubs reign of horror! A black family in THEIR White House with a garden in the backyard growing watermelons, It drives them INSANE. And insane is just what the baggers are!
I too am so glad I now have an official study to tell me what I knew from the moment the word tea party first dribbled forth from the mouths of morons. 🙂