White Tea
by digby
Well, whodduh thunk it?
Members of the Tea Party, the burgeoning conservative movement whose membership is overwhelmingly white, feel they are losing ground to African-Americans and other minority groups, according to analysts who conducted a wide-ranging survey of the attitudes of its members.
With the movement playing an influential role in next month’s congressional elections, the Public Religion Research Institute poll highlighted the role its values are playing in the electoral debate.
Almost two-thirds – 64 per cent – of people who identify as members of the movement agreed “it is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others”, compared with 41 per cent of the general population.
Almost as many – 58 per cent – said that African-Americans and other minorities were getting too much attention from the government, much higher than the national average of 37 per cent, the poll found.
The survey of 3,013 adults, published on Tuesday, is the latest in the institute’s bi-annual American values study.
Tea Party members were trying to “redefine whiteness as an object of racial discrimination”, said Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, an ordained minister and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank.
People who declared themselves part of the movement were overwhelmingly white (80 per cent) and Christian (81 per cent), the institute found.
They don’t wear white robes and they aren’t burning any crosses, but in a country that is still majority white and in which the leadership of all major institutions is still nearly all white and in which the vast majority of the wealth is owned by whites, these people seeing themselves as an aggrieved minority can only come from the idea that they shouldn’t have to share society’s privileges with non-whites.
When they say they want to take their country back, it’s this world they are lamenting the loss of:
In his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois first described the “psychological wages” of whiteness:
It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.
That world is gone. The election of a black president vividly brought that fact home to a whole bunch of people who preferred the old way.
Like all Americans, they feel insecure about their futures, let down, discombobulated. But unlike most of us, a majority of Tea Partiers (also known as Republicans) believe that the reason can at least partially be attributed to racial and ethnic minorities gaining rights and privileges at their expense. That’s modern racism. And just because they don’t define it as such and admit openly to hating blacks or thinking they are inferior, it doesn’t change that.
*The poll also found out that they are overwhelmingly socially conservative and vote Republican. And they love Sarah Palin and Fox News.
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