On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 5:40 PM, David B. Shemano <[email protected]> wrote: > Raghu writes: >>> That's easy: you want to see if black people are very highly >>> under-represented in the Tea Party or not. > > That does not work at all. By that logic, the Democratic Party is > anti-Christian; anti-Cuban; etc.
I don't get this analogy at all: it is not as if the the vast majority of Christians oppose the politics of the Democratic Party. >>> Liberal anti-Zionist views are not all that uncommon among the US >>> Jewish community. > > The point is that no argument citing Finklestein fails to point out he is a > child of holocaust survivors, with the implication that because he makes an > argument, it is more compelling because of who he is. That is not > conceptually different than a conservative pointing to somebody black who > attacks the benefits of the welfare state on the grounds that the argument is > more compelling because of the person making the argument. Such arguments > are logically deficient, but they have rhetorical force, which is why they > are used, and their use is not evidence of racism, etc. > Fair enough. If that's the only argument for the racism of the Tea Party, I'd also agree with you that such an argument is logically deficient. But consider that the Tea Party (a) has extremely low support among black people, (b) is fundamentally committed to ending the welfare state which benefits black and Latino people who are far more likely to be poor, (c) has a large proportion (though not a majority) of its membership who still continue to insist that Obama is an illegitimate president for one reason or another, and (d) has a strong nativist element opposed to Latino immigration etc. Taking all of this together, we cannot escape the conclusion that a significant portion of Tea Partiers are racists. Of course, there are also various libertarian Ayn Rand-types who are not racist who are also part of the Tea Party. No one ever claimed that all Tea Partiers are racist, just that a significant proportion of them are and these racists have a strong influence on the politics of the Tea Party. -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
