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.