Race and Political movements

In keeping with the theme for today's posts, I am going to talk in this post about the allegations that the TEA party is racist because it is predominantly made up of whites. As a disclosure, I am not a TEA party member, I have not attended even ONE TEA party rally or event, and I agree with most, but not all, of what they have had to say. With that out of the way:

The Tea party has been accused lately of being a racist organization, because the majority of those in the TEA party events have been white. Actually, an organization based in the United States that is a true random sampling of the American public SHOULD be mostly white.

According to the Census Bureau, the United States has a population that is 75% white, 15% Hispanic (of any race), 12% Black, 4% Asian, and 9% other. (The preceding numbers are more than 100% because Hispanics can be white or black, or any other race for that matter). Follow the math here: For a population of 304 million, That is a mean of 43 million and a standard deviation of 82 million. To keep it simple, we will assume that there is a TEA party rally of 304 people. We will see if the TEA party is truly independent of race. 

In a normal distribution with a truly random selection, there is a 99% chance that a TEA party rally with 304 attendees would have between 221 and 235 whites in attendance, and would have between 69 and 84 non whites. Now keep in mind that we are not talking about hispanics here, as hispanic is not a race, but an ethnicity. There is a 99% chance that there will be between 23 and 57 hispanics there of all races.

I knew that Statistics class would come in handy one day. My second disclaimer: I only got a B in that class.

So our theoretical TEA party rally, if we took a random picture of it, the people in that picture should be 72.4% to 77.4% white 99% of the time. The same is true of ANY random selection of people in the US. Anything outside of that tells you that there is probably some sort of non-random selection going on. That would either be a non-random process of selecting people to be at the rally, or a non-random process in framing the picture that was taken.