Political Parties

Is the Tea Party Racist?

As we get nearer the 2012 election, and the Obama administration gets more desperate, we’re going to see more of the racecard accusations against the GOP and the Tea Party in order to shore up the 81% support from African-Americans, which has fallen from 95%.

This serves a triple purpose – to pacify African-American anger at the fact that their unemployment is reaching crisis levels, to re-direct that anger from rightfully criticizing the failing policies of the Obama administration, and to falsely accuse the greatest enemy of the Left, the Tea Party.

So it shouldn’t be any surprise that liberal-infested academia jumps into the breach to support the Leftist cause. Just recently, at the American Political Science Association’s annual conference, one such missile was lobbed against the Tea Party and received with much celebration among the hungering MSM:

“…several professors argued that tea party Republicans are more likely than other voters, and even than most others in the GOP, to harbor racial hostility, as judged by their answers in a broad pre-election survey administered in October 2010.

But it is clear that the movement is more appealing to people who are unsympathetic to blacks and who prefer a harder line on illegal immigration than it is to other Americans,” wrote Gary C. Jacobson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, in his paper “The President, the Tea Party, and Voting Behavior in 2010.”

(via Fox News)

 

The media loves to report this stuff without analyzing it all. Especially if they can pin the air of  “academia” on it – as if the arbiters of truth all have a PhD attached to their names.

So let’s take a closer look at the claims of Tea Party racism.

According to CNN polling taken after the 2010 election, some states have a much higher approval for the Tea Party than others, as we might expect. Now, the Congressional Black Caucus has gone all around the country trying to rile up the unemployed black folk to blame the Tea Party for historically tragic unemployment figures in that community. Is this fair?

Let’s take a look at some American states by their approval of the Tea Party and also the rate of African American unemployment. If you were an academic, you should expect that if a state is pro Tea Party that they would be more likely to be racist. Now that wouldn’t be represented by merely the unemployment of African-Americans because historically, they have higher levels than most Americans. What if we looked at the rates of African-American unemployment as compared to that of white unemployment? Let’s take a look!

 

For those states that Tea Party approval opinion was available, the above graph shows the rates of African-American unemployment as compared to White unemployment. Now, if these pro-Tea Party states were really racist, wouldn’t we expect to see greater rates of African-American unemployment relative to White unemployment?

The fact that we don’t see such is probably why this analysis isn’t done by academics. Instead, they measure such things by surveying, which can be easily skewed depending on how survey questions are asked, and how definitions are made. But more on this in another post.

 

This second graph permits us to look at the unemployment rates relative to each other more closely. If you look at the national average at the bottom of the graph, you see there seems to be little correlation between African-American/White unemployment rates and Tea Party support. In fact, the  rate of disparity is highest in a pro-Union state that is normally considered very left-wing – Wisconsin. Another state registers a high African-American to White unemployment that is normally considered very leftist, and displays the lowest support of the Tea Party – New York.

Again, this is not representative of ALL states, just those for which the intersection of data was available. Also, note that the national average disparity of African-American to White unemployment is still terribly high – at just under 200%.

My point is this – if there is such great disparity in Tea Party approval among states, then why isn’t there a matching, corresponding disparity among relative unemployment rates? Apparently the Tea Party racists hate blacks, but hire and fire them at the same rates as Whites? Or maybe there are the same relative rates of black ownership of businesses hiring other blacks in these Tea Party states – but that would mean that blacks have even greater opportunities in Tea Party states than others.

We can’t have that – this goes against the racist American narrative!

 

 

One last graph to help you pick up what I’m layin’ down. If you look at national African-American unemployment rates, you’ll see that employment fell down the precipice long before the Tea Party came into being at all. Unless you really believe that white racists started firing blacks and encouraging other non-racists to lay them off in anticipation that Rick Santelli would have his historic speech on the floor of the Chicago Exchange and inspire the Tea Parties, you cannot blame their hardships on the Tea Party.

But the Congressional Black Caucus sure can.

And Obama sure can.

Why? Because all they care about is re-election of their socialist messiah to spend more of our hard earned money. Now, if you want a real honest understanding of exactly why African-American unemployment has skyrocketed, I point you here:

The public sector is the most important source of employment for African Americans and a key source of high-paying jobs… African Americans are 30% more likely to hold government jobs than other workers; from 2008-2010, 21.2% of black workers were employed in the public sector, compared to just 16.3% of non-black workers.

… the public sector continues to eliminate jobs, including 17,000 in August alone. Overall, government employment has dropped by roughly 600,000 since 2008.

So, in a way, the leftists are right in saying that conservatives are causing higher rates of unemployment in African-Americans – but it’s not because we’re racist. It’s because African-Americans are much more dependent on government jobs for their employment.

And that’s the real debate in the country – do we want irrational and irresponsible spending in the public sector to quell [y]our white guilt*? Or do we want a functioning, sustainable, efficient democracy? 2012 will tell…

Tea Party support via The Audacious Epigone, culled from CNN exit polling after the 2010 election.

*By way of full disclosure, I AM of 100% Mexican descent. So any anti-White people bias must be seen in that brownish light.