Maybe it’s because I live in a state where registered Democrats outpace Republicans by nearly 9 percent but is still characterized as a “red state,” that I have always rejected the red state/blue state nomenclature. Or maybe it’s because I have also long recognized that racism is not a place, and argued that the rest of the country lets itself off light by labeling racism as something that only happens down south. When announcements for black people to leave Wal-Mart are made in Washington Township, N.J., no one explains the incidents by saying that everyone in New Jersey — or even the entire Northeast region — is like that, as they do when racism is displayed in the Southeast. When Hillary Clinton presaged the Tea Party movement by making an appeal to “hard working white Americans” in Pennsylvania, no one moved the Keystone State — or Hillary herself — from the blue side over to the red.
For whatever reason, I am fascinated with the Tea Party movement. At last, thanks to Tea Baggers, who are found in every city and state in this great land (although I still doubt their totals), I feel like we can move beyond the inaccurate red state/blue state, racist area/nonracist area categories and embrace a more precise Us vs. Them label. We no longer have to struggle with “Trailer Park voters,” or “white trash,” or “ignorant rednecks” or even “residents of Glennbeckistan.” Now we can sum it all up in one tidy tag: Tea Baggers. Instantly, the picture of not so bright, chronically aggrieved, red-faced white people springs to mind. Screaming slogans that make no sense, waving signs with misspelled words, and threatening to shoot if only someone will give them the excuse, Tea Baggers prove that even though you live in San Francisco or Taos or Manhattan or the Research Triangle, you can still be eat up with hate and anger.
A new study published by FiveThirtyEight shows again that ideological divides are more complicated than geography. Despite U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s (R-Minn.) pleas to trash your Census form, people in “red states” are sending them in at or above “blue state” rates. Bachmann’s state, of course, is characterized as red despite the fact that it gave us Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun (who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade), Garrison Keillor, Sen. Al Franken, the Coen Brothers, and Vietnam War protester Father Philip Berrigan. The study shows the Dakotas leading the red states, at about 62 percent response each, while Alaska, which as of 2006, received 13,805 federal dollars for every man, woman, and child there, was last with only 41 percent responding to their Census mailing. And according the to the Census Bureau’s map, blue state California is tied with red state Alabama, both with only 48 percent participation.
If it has added nothing else to the public discourse, the Tea Party should get credit for proving that fear, racism, selfishness, and mean-spiritedness know no homeland.
I understand what you are getting at here, but I am compelled to disagree on the racism issue, and the reason is due to the fact that I was born in and have lived in a very red state for over 50 years. I also lived my first 18 years under southern segregation. Racism is still very much alive and well in my state , and one doesn’t have to go far to find it. I went to a local WalMart today to pick up a few groceries. An older white couple saw my Prada handbag, and I heard the guy tell his wife, “See, that’s what I mean. She has an expensive handbag.” They made an immediate decision that because I am an African American with a Prada handbag, that I must be spending my money on unimportant things rather than on helping to provide for myself and my family. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Last year I retired after teaching high school for 33 years and decided that I had earned at least the handbag. Many whites here make assumptions based solely on one’s appearance. This couple did not consider that I am a highly educated individual who worked and paid my taxes for 35 years , 2 of them before I began teaching, or that I’ve never been unemployed, on welfare, or on any kind of government assistance. They didn’t bother to think that I am a homeowner, or that I might have been one of their grand kids’ former teachers. This and other things I’ve experienced are the reasons why I know that one of the main reasons for some of the tea partiers’ rejection of all things Obama is based on racism. In the city where I live, many whites are members of tea party groups, the KKK, the League of the South, white supremacist groups, and/or militia groups, and they make no bones about it. Every time anything about an African American committing a crime is published in the online version of the local paper, the derogatory remarks appear, but if a white person commits the same crime, the rationalizing and forgiveness flows freely. There is a different perception and standard for anyone who isn’t white or doesn’t believe what they believe and this includes Hispanics, gays, immigrants, and undocumented immigrants. The behavior is atrocious and is perpetuated and reinforced by the group as a whole, and there is no way to avoid being subjected to it since it permeates everything in the state in one way or another. If you’ve ever heard the names Nathan Deal, Paul Broun, Bob Barr, Neal Boortz, and Erick Erickson, you can understand my POV on this issue because they also live in my state, and Erickson is on the city council in the city where I live.
I have relatives in Georgia. While visiting them, I found some of that latent racism lurking in their daily existence.
At the museum housing the famous General locomotive, they show a video which ends using the phrase “defending our Southern Way of Life”. As a Northerner with Union Army ancestors, I took great offense at that infamously racist phrase and its clearly deliberate inclusion in a subtle manner to prod “real” Southerners to remember that for them that terrible war isn’t yet over.
North Carolina can’t shake the red state label either. Democrats have controlled both houses of the legislature for years, and the governor is a Democrat. Also went for Obama, but he’s in trouble there at the moment. Plus, there were 1 million more registered Dems than Gops in the state, last time I checked. And it is, as I always point out, the ninth largest state.
Re. the Census: I get the larger point but would point out that 48 percent of the returns from California accounts for about 17.7 million people, while 48 percent of returns from Alabama accounts for roughly 2.2 million people. Seems like volume should be a factor. Yes, South Dakota wins the derby at this point with a 62 percent response — but that accounts for a whopping 503,677 people.
On racism, as I’ve said in these pages many times, having lived in the South (until I was 29) and New York City and now for 20 years in Los Angeles, my experience has been that where there are conservatives, there is racism. The more conservatives there are, the more racism is supported and tolerated.
Racism is less acceptable, vastly more unacceptable, social behavior among liberals — but not because, as conservatives claim, we’re striving to be politically correct. Liberals eschew broad characterizations because we discovered early in life that making generalizations based on a group’s physical appearance is an inaccurate and illogical way to think. Shoddy reasoning produces the erroneous results. Anyone whose eyes are open has learned, or should have, that some white people are saints, some are devils, but 999.9999% are somewhere in between. Ditto blacks, Jews, Muslims, etc. It’s the human condition and has connection with appearance.
We’re also more apt to be aware of the science — race only determines superficial physical characteristics and genetic propensities (as in susceptibility to certain diseases). Race has no role in determining behavior, intellectual capacity or emotionally stability, etc..
For whatever reason, many, maybe most, conservatives don’t see it that way, maybe because they are more tribal and doctrinaire or because they’ve grown up steeped in racial fears — and so are more apt to ascribe negative stereotypes to groups based on skin tone, etc. All black women carrying Prada purses are welfare queens, for example. (That’s just nasty.) Or on other factors: All gays are diseased. Women are weak. Whatever. There’s a lack of critical thinking. Plus — no application of the Golden Rule.
Propensity toward generalizing about groups base on race is fundamental to American conservatism today. Looking past superficial characteristics is fundamentally what separates us from them. It’s why we are not them.
That said, generalizations can be made about ideology, including the fact that more conservatives are racist than are liberals, and the fact that tea baggers are mostly conservative, ergo tea baggers are more likely to be racist than normal people.