The Tea Party and the right-wing in general is very excited about the recent Herman Cain boomlet. The support he's seen in recent polling, including Cain grabbing the lead in a few recent state and national polls, are leading Tea Party folks to crow about how not racist they are. This meme is finding it's way into the mainstream media now, as seen in this CNN story:
"I think that having an African-American with so much tea party support does show that, yeah – it's another example that the tea party movement is not racist," [Tea Party Patriots' national coordinator Jenny Beth] Martin said. "[It shows] that we're looking at the issues and we're not looking at skin color."
(snip)
It's something that conservatives really like about him," [Time Magazine's Michael] Crowley said. "To have someone like Herman Cain come out to kind of fight back and to have a black man saying this is exaggerated, it's overstated, the Republican Party is not racist and a different set of possibilities for what you could have from a black candidate I think really does energize a lot of white conservatives."
So, do Cain's strong polling numbers mean that right-wing conservatives and Tea Partiers are less racist than previously thought? Let's explore this a bit.
The NAACP and the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights produced a painstakingly researched report that details the racial bigotry in the Tea Party movement. I can't begin to do justice to this report here, check out the website. There are tabs for various sections and you can explore it all.
Additionally, there is the study done by Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol, et. al., titled, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” (click on this link-which has the downloadable pdf of the study). The authors interviewed a significant number of Massachusetts Tea Party supporters and observed them in action at Tea Party events/activities. Although Tea Party supporters are upset about issues like the role of government, they are mostly upset about "undeserving" people receiving benefits:
Tea Party anger is stoked by perceived redistributions – and the threat of future redistributions – from the deserving to the undeserving. Government programs are not intrinsically objectionable in the minds of Tea Party activists, and certainly not when they go to help them. Rather, government spending is seen as corrupted by creating benefits for people who do not contribute, who take handouts at the expense of hard-working Americans.
Herman Cain fits this thinking perfectly when he tells people, "Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself!"
It's also worth noting that Cain has sought to tap into the right's sentiments on race and Barack Obama. Cain recently declared, "[Obama's] never been a part of the black experience in America."
So, presented with someone who is black but thinks like they do, Tea Partiers are willing to go along. That is certainly more open-minded than rejecting someone who agrees with you just because they are black. So, bully for the Tea Party!
However, the Skocpol study really listened to Tea Party supporters and found that their views on politics and indeed on American society more broadly are fundamentally bigoted, in particular their understanding of who is "undeserving" compared to who is "hard-working." More broadly, Tea Party supporters--who are overwhelmingly white, are afraid that America is changing into a society in which they, as white people, will not feel comfortable:
Tea Party concerns exist within the context of anxieties about racial, ethnic, and generational changes in American society...racial resentment stokes Tea Party fears about generational societal change
These well documented reports make clear that Tea Party supporters have a set of beliefs that grow out of racial anxiety and, in many cases, racial bigotry. This anxiety and the bigotry are obviously not part of the Tea Party's public stance (excepting those cases where its spokespeople are unable to hide it).
Yes, a good number of Tea Party types have expressed a willingness to support someone black, like Herman Cain, who comes along and parrots their political positions--which are little more than typical hard-right, anti-New Deal boilerplate. Does that mean that the bigotry that underlay those positions no longer exists? Sadly, no.
One can have bigoted views about blacks and other groups and yet still feel positively toward individual black people, those whose actions or beliefs perhaps don't "fit" the prejudices one has about the group. Cain fits into that scenario perfectly.