Politics and Pucks

One of the most popular posts on this blog is one that I wrote last summer that showed a video of a Tea Partier with a Confederate Flag talking to a young African-American teen in Baton Rouge, LA. In the exchange the teenager seemed a little upset with the Confederate flag. Since I posted it, I've received responses from the Tea Party faithful that have essentially called me an idiot for not considering that these people were "bad apples". I've also been told a lot of other things about myself that are very untrue. Today I received a response from Soopermexican that states the following:

One Sparrow does not a Spring Make. Also, you're an idiot. Why the TeaParty is not racist ===> http://bit.ly/TPrtRace

So I decided to read this post by Soopermexican, and I still disagree. Soopermexican claims:

According to CNN polling taken after the 2010 election, some states have a much higher approval for the Tea Party than others, as we might expect. Now, the Congressional Black Caucus has gone all around the country trying to rile up the unemployed black folk to blame the Tea Party for historically tragic unemployment figures in that community. Is this fair? Let’s take a look at some American states by their approval of the Tea Party and also the rate of African American unemployment. If you were an academic, you should expect that if a state is pro Tea Party that they would be more likely to be racist. Now that wouldn’t be represented by merely the unemployment of African-Americans because historically, they have higher levels than most Americans. What if we looked at the rates of African-American unemployment as compared to that of white unemployment? Let’s take a look!

He then shows a few charts that doesn't really illustrate much other than that. However, I would like to say that I am an academic, I'm not convinced unemployment rates are exactly what you want to measure here. Unemployment rates are percentages of the out-of-work African-Americans in a given state, and by this argument larger numbers should be in more racist states.

Racism occurs at other levels outside of employment, so measuring unemployment rate is not going to exactly going to show incidents that occur outside of work. What if a neighborhood that decides to hold a Klan meeting in local park? Measuring unemployment won't catch that incident, because in that case the perpetrators would be white, and may hold views that have been in the community a long time. Maybe to make your analysis cleaner you need more variables. How about percentage of the community that are minorities? Racism is not strictly an issue that effects African-American individuals. What about historical popularity of the KKK or John Birch Society in a local area? Some communities are the way they currently are, due to factors surrounding that issue (especially in some parts of the Midwest). The presence of either may have encouraged some minority communities to relocate. Also, both of those movements (moreso the John Birch Society) were quite conservative and reactionary in the same way as the Tea Party. What about Tea Partiers in office? You could measure how conditions have changed for African Americans since they have taken office. That would be a much better indication, coupled with current polling data about the popularity of the Tea Party.

As for Soopermexican's conclusion:

My point is this – if there is such great disparity in Tea Party approval among states, then why isn’t there a matching, corresponding disparity among relative unemployment rates? Apparently the Tea Party racists hate blacks, but hire and fire them at the same rates as Whites? Or maybe there are the same relative rates of black ownership of businesses hiring other blacks in these Tea Party states – but that would mean that blacks have even greater opportunities in Tea Party states than others.

Since you have a small sample, you're looking at a small number of cases. Plus, you very well could be looking at something that has no trend. A larger data-set would help you solve this problem, and might make it more convincing. How do we know that this is actually just a fluke among the states you picked? How come Ohio isn't on your list? Every President, since Ohio became a state, has carried Ohio to win the electoral vote. Arguably, Ohio is a snapshot of the America. The communities within the state vary wildly in culture and political ideology depending on where you are in the state.

CNN is credible, but that's one polling company that uses a certain polling methodology. There's others that are good, but you need to check more than just CNN or Rasmussen*. Then you can see if your assertion is broadly correct.

It doesn't take a PhD to recognize this analysis proves nothing, and really just raises more questions rather than answers. Seriously, next time you call a political scientist an "idiot" get some better evidence to back up your research.

 *-Rasmussen generally is terrible for measuring polling. Most of the polls are skewed further right than everyone else, mostly because their methodology favors people who are more likely to agree with conservative ideology. They use mostly land-lines which favors older individuals, who tend to vote Republican.