Individual Responsibility, Culture, or State Organized Enslavement? How Tea Party Activists Frame Racial Inequality

Abstract

This article explores how Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party activists produce and circulate stories about racial inequality, presenting four distinct frames that reflect nonconformity in the Tea Party's racial narrative. Activists engage with four racial frames: racism denial, individual responsibility, cultural responsibility, and structural responsibility. The Tea Party unites using frame amplification to emphasize the master frame of color blindness that allows activists, regardless of the frame with which they engage, to unite under the broader notion that they are all idyllically color blind.

Tea Party Health Narratives and Belief Polarization: the Journey to Killing Grandma

“…Producerism is the perception that true Americans work hard and produce despite having to fend off the threats of “parasites at the top and bottom of society” [37] . The Tea Party movement engages with these historical ideas of right-wing populism and creates a tertiary identity narrative: the antagonist (an amorphous, shifting villain embodied by “the Left”), the victim (the American citizen), and the hero (the TPP) [50] . This narrative, embraced and manufactured by the TPP, has a common place in American society and mirrors the stories of superhero movies, comic books, and Disney films: an evil force seeks power and brainwashes or enslaves the innocent population whom are saved by a central hero.…”

Online discourse in the post‐ “new racism” era?: Toward a theory of colorblind nationalism

“…Colorblindness, the dominant ideology of New Racism, is comprised of four main ideological frames, although others have been proposed (Brooks, 2020; Haltinner, 2016; Jayakumar & Adamian, 2017): Abstract Liberalism, Minimization of Racism, Cultural Racism, and Naturalization (Bonilla‐Silva, 2022). These frames represent the ideological underpinnings from which people draw to create styles of racetalk which undermine claims of contemporary racism and redirect the causes of racial inequality back to the communities who experience the negative consequences of structural and systemic racism (Bonilla‐Silva, 2022; Myers, 2005).…”

“…This explicitly racist language was deemed (mostly) unacceptable in mainstream culture and discourse after the Civil Rights era and therefor the sentiment of the language was rearticulated into covertly racist codewords (López, 2013; Omi & Winant, 2015) and styles of racetalk (Bonilla‐ Silva, 2022; Myers, 2005) which repackage racist ideas into less incendiary language. While the social norms around what is and is not acceptable to say in public has changed, the sentiment of Black inferiority and cultural and personal deviance persist through the many ideological frames of colorblind racetalk (Bonilla‐Silva, 2022; Brooks, 2020; Haltinner, 2016; Jayakumar & Adamian, 2017). While socially these two styles of racetalk are treated differently, they are the same in that they both justify and reinforce structures and systems of racism.…”

What makes violence martial? Adopt A Sniper and normative imaginaries of violence in the contemporary United States

“…Until about 2011, AaS's merchandise, though overtly masculinist and martial, tended to reference the military mission and/or snipers themselves. The racialized demonization of Others occurred at a time when white nationalism and white supremacy became a more explicit component of far-right (and, now, 'mainstream' right) discourse (Haltinner, 2016b). This is most apparent in AaS's 2014 'challenge coin', which depicts the helmet of a medieval knight -identified as a 'Knight Templar' -over the skull that signifies the sniper within the organization's iconography.…”