It doesn’t matter whether they started it, just that it was one of the first things they came out supporting. I didn’t even know it was a tax thing for a while.
And if Hillary did it, I would call her action racist, too. The determination of whether she personally is racist would be to see if she’d participated in enough anti-racist stuff that I could conclude that that racism was a fluke.
(Personally, I assume she has, but since she’s not running for office anymore, I can’t be bothered to check. I do know the Obama administration isn’t racist, and that’s enough for me.)
When I call the Tea Party a “racist organization,” I do not mean it has a White-Nationalist agenda or anything – insofar as its agenda can be discerned at all (that is a rather confusing matter). I mean it is (1) an organization mainly of racists (see the OP) that (2) would not exist but for that. And I’m right.
We have already demonstrated that the origins of the Tea Party actually began when GWB was president. You have failed to demonstrate that race is a primary motivation for even a large percentage of Tea Party members, far less for an overwhelming majority.
You are wrong. (See how easy that is?)
If you go back to the OP’s quoted text, you will find that only one poll number demonstrates a majority position, 74% saying that the government should not be involved in guarateeing equality of opportunity, (although they did also claim that the opportunity should be present). That is a libertarian position, not a racial one. We also have a vague reference to a ‘Tea Party movement supporters within those states were “more likely to be racially resentful” than the population as a whole,’ but without any numbers to indicate that that “more likely” represented 15%, 50%, or 75% of the actual numbers. If the numbers for the general population are 30% and those for the Tea Party are 33%, then Tea Party members are “more likely” than the general population, while two-thirds of the Tea Party members still disagree. And that is not even getting into the whole matter of which seven states provided the basis for the poll. I’d be willing to bet that Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire were not included.
I have seen no one arguing that the Tea Party is free of racism, (it certainly is not), but your claims are overblown and unsupported.
Well, you may be right, but you would need to present some evidence before I can believe you.
For instance, your OP presented the idea that opposition to government-sponsored affirmative action is inherently proof of racism. But that isn’t obvious - it is perfectly possible to believe that blacks and other minorities are inherently equal to other groups, and therefore are capable of achieving as much on their own as (for example) Jews or Chinese or the Irish.
Another issue with your OP is this -
It appears to me that the ones holding a stereotype are the ones strongly opposed to the Tea Party, not the Tea Party sympathizers.
Say I am looking for somebody to mow my lawn. I have had a black guy, a white guy, and an Asian guy apply. I decide to hire the black guy because I believe blacks are “hard-working”. This sounds OK to you?
I’m not sure why anybody thinks this is relevant. “My primary motivation is not X, therefore X cannot be a major factor in my motivation?” Very faulty.