Compared to middle-of-the-road whites, Tea Party supporters show far more agreement with the statement that blacks should work their way up “without special favors” the way other minorities such as Italians and Jews did, or that blacks would be as well off as whites if they worked harder. The standard left-of-center view, shared by the UW researchers, is that such attitudes represent a subtler form of racism, or “racial resentment.” In some cases, that is surely true. Yet these sentiments may also reflect a genuinely race-neutral belief in self-reliance and self-help—or the view, shared by many black commentators, that the black community’s problems are partly rooted in damaging behavioral and cultural patterns.
John McWhorter, a noted black scholar and author whose works include the 2000 book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, says that “the idea that ‘racism’ is behind the Tea Partiers is based on a lazy and vain extension of the term ‘racism’ to meaning ‘that which many black people would not approve of.'” According to McWhorter, “The position that the government does too much to help black people is not necessarily one based in inherent bias against people with black skin—it can be argued as a reasonable proposition based on the spotty record of social programs since the 1960s.”
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