Racial Resentment and the Tea Party

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Hey, did you know that Adam Serwer now writes for Mother Jones? Now you do! He’s blogging over at the mothership MoJo blog, and today he highlights a new Brookings/PRRI survey of American attitudes toward—how to put this? The official title is “Attitudes in an Increasingly Diverse America Ten Years after 9/11,” but the blunter version is “attitudes toward people who aren’t like me.”

Adam focuses on the retrograde attitudes of Fox News viewers, but before we get to that, I think the most interesting part of the survey is that it explicitly breaks out the views of self-described tea partiers. Here’s a sampling of attitudes among tea party followers:

  • 63 percent believes that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups.
  • 66 percent believes that the values of Islam are at odds with American values.
  • 54 percent believes that American Muslims are trying to establish Sharia law in the U.S.
  • 56 percent believes that newcomers from other countries threaten traditional American customs and values.
  • 72 percent believes we should deport all illegal immigrants back to their home countries.

This is apropos because there’s been a wee bit of discussion lately about whether tea partiers are a bunch of stone racists hiding behind the Constitution, or whether that’s just another offensive “race card” canard dreamed up by the usual suspects on the left. This survey probably won’t change any minds, and I happen to think the term “racist” conceals more than it explains anyway. Still, what this survey does show is that tea partiers clearly harbor a pretty strong set of racial resentments. That doesn’t make them all racists, but it is a simple descriptive fact, and it’s something that’s perfectly kosher to discuss openly as it relates to public policy.

As for Fox News, I think it’s safe to say that Fox considers tea partiers to be its core audience. And so its programming needs to appeal to that audience. This explains why Fox put Jeremiah Wright on virtually 24/7 rotation during the 2008 campaign, and why, over the past year or so, they’ve spent so much air time on Shirley Sherrod, anchor babies, Common’s invitation to the White House, birtherism, the Ground Zero mosque, Glenn Beck and “liberation theology,” Van Jones, the New Black Panthers, various reverse discrimination outrages, the D’Souza/Gingrich/Huckabee “anti-colonialism” meme, minority preferences from the CRA as the cause of the housing bubble, the general panic over Shariah law, and much, much more. Any one or two of those could be a coincidence. Put them all together and you’d have to be pretty gullible to believe that they were just randomly chosen topics.

Fox News is America’s headquarters for festering racial resentments. The Brookings/PRRI survey is just one more piece of evidence on this score.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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