Is The Tea Party Racist?

Hmmm...

I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day and I mentioned that Tea Party rallies look like an Aryan Nation Meetup. He said that the whole white domination of the Tea Party was propaganda. I decided to do some research and see for myself.

I Googled the subject and found this lovely CNN opinion poll of 1023 adults taken February 12-15th 2010 (see here for the study). To make a long study short there were 124 people who identified themselves as being involved in the Tea Party.

The results in a nutshell:

• Men were more a bit more prevalent in the Tea Party than in the general population - 60%/40% in the Party as against to 50%/50% of all respondents.
• There were more white folks in the party, but not as large a difference as you'd think - 80% white in the party vs 71% of all respondents.
• Latinos like tea. The Tea Party had 10% Latinos while the entire study had 11%.
• However, there were only 2% of the Tea Party group were African-American. In all 11% of the survey participants were African-American.
• There are a lot of Proties (Protestant religious types) in the Party - 68% of the Partiers were Proties vs a 50% of all respondents.

As I was checking out the study I saw the sampling error for this section was +/- 9%. That's big. That being said, it does look like the Tea Party is more White and Protestant than the rest of the country.

But does that mean it's racist? I'm white and I hang with a bunch of white people but we're not burning crosses. I looked at another study done by the University of Washington that was done in March of this year(check out the study here ).

What I found interesting from this study.

• 60% of Tea Party followers who agreed with, "We have gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country." Ick.
• Only 23% of Tea Partiers agreed with, "We don't give everyone an equal chance in this country." Ouch and ick.
• 31% of Tea Partiers agreed with, "If people were treated more equally, we'd have many fewer problems in this country." I need to take a shower and wash away the ickiness.

Well, there you have it. This is what I found, but as always I'm open to new data. Presently I'm going with the Tea Party as having more Protestant white folks than the general population, but that Latinos make a significant minority of the Tea Party crew.