{"id":3481,"date":"2010-04-21T07:44:50","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T11:44:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=3481"},"modified":"2010-04-21T07:47:22","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T11:47:22","slug":"is-the-tea-party-movement-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/04\/21\/is-the-tea-party-movement-racist\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Tea Party movement racist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting article at the Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> on how a charge of “racism” works, even when there’s no actual racist action involved:<\/p>\n

\n

Blogger Conor Friedsdorf notes that there is a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to the Blow approach [. . .]<\/p>\n

Or, for that matter, to any nonpolitical institution that aspires to become more inclusive. Imagine Kelly O’Donnell questioning a black man in a largely white company or university or country club or suburb the way she interrogated Darryl Postell. She would come off as clueless and prejudiced — as, come to think of it, she does. (Kudos to NBC for airing this revealing though embarrassing footage.)<\/p>\n

The political left claims to love racial diversity, but it bitterly opposes such diversity on the political right<\/em>. This is an obvious matter of political self-interest: Since 1964, blacks have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. If Republicans were able to attract black votes, the result would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party. <\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

These charges of racism are partly based on circular reasoning. Among Blow’s evidence that the tea-party movement is racist is “a New York Times\/CBS News poll released on Wednesday [that] found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic.” Other polls have put the black proportion as high as 5% (and, as Tom Maguire notes, Blow misreports his own paper’s Hispanic figure, which is actually 3%). But with blacks constituting some 12% of the population, there’s no question that the tea-party movement is whiter than the nation as a whole.<\/p>\n

Yet to posit racism as an explanation is to ignore far more obvious and less invidious causes for the disparity. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to LibertyIdeals<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting article at the Wall Street Journal on how a charge of “racism” works, even when there’s no actual racist action involved: Blogger Conor Friedsdorf notes that there is a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to the Blow approach [. . .] Or, for that matter, to any nonpolitical institution that aspires to become more inclusive. Imagine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[86,198,99,327],"class_list":["post-3481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-criticism","tag-equalrights","tag-racism","tag-teaparty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-U9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3481"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3483,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3481\/revisions\/3483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}