OK, so how might one rebut your actual thesis? What sort of evidence would falsify it?
Time travel being an elusive goal, let’s put it aside for the moment.
Richard Parker seems to hint that even the exhaustive and fairly worded set of polls and research might face an uphill battle. Do you agree?
That’s mighty white of you.
Your premise is, the premise of the OP, is false.
To be accurate, it should read: Tea Party racists in love with Herman Cain. I doubt you could prove that, so you came up with a way to try and point out that the characterization of some Tea Party members as racists must be false because some members of the Tea Party seem to be supporting a black man.
Or do you have some cites where some people on these boards have called the entire organization racist?
The Tea Party does not LIKE Cain. They hate Romney. There is a difference. It is just that they hate a black conservative less then anyone Liberal. Even a “Liberal” GOP candidate.
If that were the case, why is their support concentrated on Cain, instead of spread out among the other choices?
Fixed it.
Not being the person who proposed the thesis, you might show the Tea Party as an organization is not racist by showing they (in general) take swift, decisive, before-the-press-blows-it-open action that comes down hard on people at Tea Party rallies with racist signs or Tea Party-affiliated politicians who send racist messages. I’ve seen some examples of the former, including the guy who had the “niggar” sign referenced upthread.
That still fights an uphill battle, because you have to consider the difference in birther outcry over Obama vs. birther outcry over McCain, given the somewhat stronger legal case for the latter actually having an issue with his eligibility. I suppose one could show that the Tea Party and the Birther movement don’t overlap, but I’m under the impression they generally do.
Maybe.
By that I mean: I have plenty of cites which read that way, but those cites could certainly be parsed to also mean your interpretation.
For example, someone said that the Tea Party’s claim of desiring fiscal responsibility was false, unless “… ‘fiscal responsibility’ [is] a code phrase for ‘get that black man out of the White House,’ because I truly don’t believe they want anything much deeper than that.”
To me, that clearly indicts the party. But I guess you could say that it didn’t mean the entire organization. But if such a clear phrase as that is held to not mean the entire organization, then I can’t imagine a comment that would.
So you tell me: if someone says, “And please, don’t respond with that tripe about how the Tea Party is all about fiscal responsibility unless you mean ‘fiscal responsibility’ as a code phrase for ‘get that black man out of the White House,’ because I truly don’t believe they want anything much deeper than that,” does it meet your standard? Or is that not about the entire organization?
NETA:
I’m also going to have to agree with the general sentiment upthread–Herman Cain’s plurality support in the Tea Party is not evidence of their non-racism, as there are two phenomena that could explain it–1, “he’s sufficiently politically representative of their views that a supermajority of the non-racist minority support him–a white candidate with his exact platform and presentation would capture 90%+ of the Tea Party”, and 2, “He’s black, but he’s perceived as an Uncle Tom type who is willing to do the bidding of his majority-white advisers and peers.”. To the extent that the Tea Party is systemically racist, which I don’t myself believe they are in any majority numbers (based on the relatives of mine who are members, I prefer to believe they’re systemically jerks who pride themselves on “telling it like it is”, and would have made woman jokes about Hillary, lawyer and philanderer jokes about Edwards, etc.), I think those two statements explain why Cain’s blackness isn’t terribly important to the Tea Party as a whole, despite the minority racists who are hangers-on at this point.
The only conclusion we can draw from that news item is that 32% of Tea Partiers are not racists.
Right?
Bricker, I’m interested in your view of how such claims about the motivations of groups of people are proven or disproven.
For example: some conservative posters on this board have said that OWS is motivated in part by jealousy of the rich. How would you go about disproving that claim? Or would you say such a claim cannot be disproven?
Do you avoid making such claims because they are too hard to support either way with objective evidence?
An interesting question. And it’s a bit unclear whether you’re asking “what sort of evidence that Bricker and MaxTheVool might be able to practically find if they set their mind to it would falsify it” vs “what sort of evidence that an eccentric billionaire who hired a crack team of researches and sociologists and political scientists might be able to practically find would falsify it”.
As I said, it’s an interesting question, partly because in this day in age everyone knows that being a racist is bad. So if you just go up to people and say “hey, here’s an opinion poll… do you agree that black people are inferior to white people” you are presumably not really going to get an honest answer… particularly if you had already asked them about their political affiliations. But there are some interesting tricks you can play. For instance, there was a study a while back involving showing people resumes and asking which one they would hire, and the resumes were identical except that one had a “stereotypically black” name like “Laquesha” and one didn’t; and people were more positive towards the non-black-named resume. So I think it’s possible to come up with some type of study/research data that gives at least some meaningful insight into how racist a particular person is. Do this to a large enough sample of people, compare this to their political affiliations (which hopefully they will give you honestly because they don’t realize you’re trying to decide if they are racist), and you can come up with some correlation between racism and political affiliation.
Of course, that doesn’t address the first part of my thesis, concerning what catalyzed the initial growth of the Tea Party. Frankly, I can’t think of an easy way to falsify that.
There’s a non-racist distinction to be made between McCain and Obama. For the majority of the population, “natural born citizen” means a citizen born on US soil. And for many people, especially those that remember that Carter “gave” the Panama Canal back to Panama, there was a sense that that Canal Zone was part of US soil. So while you’re correct that the actual legal issues make both weak cases, but McCain’s marginally more questionable, that’s not how it translated to a sound-bite populace.
We have only to look at the Truther movement to realize that we don’t need racism to have a group of people believing the outlandish if it happens to coincide with their desired political outcome. Indeed, we don’t even need partisan politics: look at tax protesters. They cling to outlandish theories in the face of all evidence, and no racism is needed there either.
Post #22 addresses this argument in detail.
I try to avoid such claims because they are facile and unsupportable.
While I have criticized OWS for their lack of clear goals, I would not say they’re jealous of the rich because I have no idea if it’s true, and it can’t really be rebutted.
We have no information whatever about the other 68%. The news item only supports the conclusion that 32% are not racist.
Absolutely unsupportable by the information you supplied.
Post #46 eloquently sums this debate up. The OP really proves nothing.
Personally I think the whole “Is the tea party racist?” Debate is just a distraction from a more important question, “Is the tea party entirely ignorant of how government and economics work?”.
As opposed to Hawaii?
Is not hating most Mexicans but hating the border jumpers and the Anglo haters racist in your opinion?