5 Feet of Fury

‘[W]hile only 35 percent of strong Tea Party supporters rated blacks as hardworking…’

writes Cathy Young at Reason:

…only 49 percent described whites as such (…)

Whites in every group are less likely to rate blacks than whites as “intelligent” by similar margins:

14 points for Tea Party supporters (45 percent vs. 59 percent),

13 points for all whites (49 percent vs. 62 percent),

10 points for Tea Party opponents (59 percent vs. 69 percent) (…)

Compared to middle-of-the-road whites, Tea Party supporters show far more agreement with the statement that blacks should work their way up “without special favors” the way other minorities such as Italians and Jews did, or that blacks would be as well off as whites if they worked harder.

these sentiments may also reflect a genuinely race-neutral belief in self-reliance and self-help—or the view, shared by many black commentators, that the black community’s problems are partly rooted in damaging behavioral and cultural patterns.

John McWhorter, a noted black scholar and author whose works include the 2000 book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, says that “the idea that ‘racism’ is behind the Tea Partiers is based on a lazy and vain extension of the term ‘racism’ to meaning ‘that which many black people would not approve of.'”