Earlier this month, the University of Washington’s Institute for
the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Sexuality released some data
from a survey it had conducted. In seven states (Georgia,
Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and
California), the Institute had asked white people whether they
supported the tea parties, and also whether they agreed with a
variety of race-related statements — such as that blacks and
Hispanics are hardworking, trustworthy, and intelligent.
Forty-five percent of those who said they strongly supported the
tea parties said they agreed that blacks were intelligent, for
instance, compared with 59 percent of strong
tea-party opponents.
Left-wing media outlets, most notably two
different
writers for Salon.com, jumped on the numbers. The Institute
itself, apparently unfamiliar with the difference between
correlation and causation, claimed the results suggested that
tea-party supporters are “motivated by more than partisanship and
ideology.” (That statement has since been removed from the
Institute’s website, but a blogger’s quote of it is available
here.)
But almost immediately, skeptics raised some questions about the
results the Institute had provided — they pointed out, for
example, that only the views of strong supporters and strong
opponents of tea parties were included, and that the Institute’s
table didn’t provide the full range of responses to the questions
about blacks and Hispanics. Relative to the average white person,
did tea-party supporters express more racism, did tea-party
opponents express less, or both? Did the people who didn’t
“agree” with these statements actively disagree, or did they
refuse to express opinions?
It took requests from three different journalists (that I know
of), but at last, the truth is out: The Institute’s full data set
provides no evidence whatsoever that supporters of the tea
parties are disproportionately racist.
First up was the politics website FiveThirtyEight.com.
In response to a request from the site’s Tom Schaller, the
survey’s lead investigator, Prof. Christopher Parker, provided
this table — which doesn’t even include the questions about
industriousness, trustworthiness, and intelligence. Instead, the
questions measure what Parker calls “racial resentment” — though
they can reasonably be called transparent attempts to bait
conservatives into giving “racist” answers. Here’s an example:
It’s really a matter of people not trying hard enough; if
blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as
whites.
Mainstream conservatives believe that people of all races can
improve their lot in life through hard work, and further that
most poverty is the result of behavior. (These are not crazy
beliefs: Those who finish high school, work full-time, and marry
before having children rarely
end up in poverty (pdf) and usually end up in the middle
class.) When presented with a statement that racializes that
sentiment, should conservatives decline to agree? Maybe, but
liberals — who believe that structural barriers, more than
behavior, affect people’s outcomes in life — face no such
tradeoff, so any gap between liberals and conservatives could
represent mere differences in political beliefs.
So, I asked Parker for more data about the questions that were in
the original table. He provided
some (pdf). These results show that the more a white person
supports the tea parties, the more likely he is, when prodded by
a pollster, to disagree with statements that
express positive views about racial minorities.
But a key fact about the survey had yet to enter the discussion:
Respondents were also asked whether whites are hardworking,
trustworthy, and intelligent. Parker provided
the details to Cathy Young of RealClearPolitics, who wrote:
While only 35% of strong Tea Party supporters rated blacks as
hardworking, only 49% described whites as such. While the gap
is evident, these responses are close to those for all whites
(blacks are rated as “hardworking” by 40%, whites by 52%).
While whites who are strongly anti-Tea Party seem free of bias
on this item — blacks and whites are rated as “hardworking” by
55% and 56%, respectively — this is not true for intelligence
and trustworthiness. Whites in every group are less likely to
rate blacks than whites as “intelligent” by similar margins: 14
points for Tea Party supporters (45% vs. 59%), 13 points for
all whites (49% vs. 62%), 10 points for Tea Party opponents
(59% vs. 69%). On “trustworthy,” the gap is smaller in the
pro-Tea Party group (41% vs. 49%) than in the anti-Tea Party
group (57% vs. 72%). One could write headlines about the
“racial paranoia” of white liberals who consider blacks less
trustworthy than whites!
So, the question is: When the Institute released its initial
summary of the results, why did it include results for opinions
about blacks and Hispanics (which suggest disproportionate racism
among tea-partiers across all questions) but leave off opinions
about whites (which show a completely different trend)?
In a phone interview, Parker explained that he simply hadn’t been
able to analyze that portion of the data yet — when Young
“pressed” him for the additional numbers, he had a grad student
put them together, and Young had to wait for “days.” “You’ve got
to understand, this is a huge data set, and I’m the only one
working on it,” he said. “The question at the time was whether
tea-party supporters are racially intolerant, so I started right
in on that.”
Of course, the new data — especially when seen in the light of
the Institute’s speculation about what “motivated” tea partiers
— raises questions about bias. “First and foremost, I’m a
scientist,” Parker said. “The data is what the data is, whether I
agree with it or don’t agree with it.”
