(Background here and here.)

Joan Walsh’s response to Cathy Young (whom I cited in my Spectator piece) is here. I’ll keep this brief, because my biggest objection is to a single paragraph:

To her credit, Young does acknowledge that on the indicators of what the University of Washington researchers call “racial resentment,” white Tea Partiers differ notably, not only from white Tea Party skeptics, but from all whites in the study. Young puts forward an interesting defense: That’s conservatism, not racism. I’m not sure why Young seems to want to tar all conservatives, not merely the Tea Partiers, with racially blinkered views. Here, let me defend my conservative brothers and sisters: I don’t think it’s mere conservatism to be much more inclined than other white people to say that the prejudice white ethnics faced is comparable to that faced by African-Americans; that the legacy of slavery and discrimination has little to do with persistent black disadvantage, and that such disadvantage would be erased if blacks worked as hard as other [sic] whites.

Walsh botches the paraphrasing here, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, but always in ways that make the questions seem more racist than they are.

Respondents were not asked whether “the prejudice white ethnics faced is comparable to that faced by African-Americans”; they were asked whether blacks should overcome disadvantage without government help, as white ethnics did, with no mention of the disadvantages’ relative severity.

They were not asked whether “the legacy of slavery and discrimination has little to do with persistent black disadvantage”; they were asked whether that legacy to this day prevents blacks from overcoming their disadvantage through work. That is, they were asked about how the past affects the future prospects of someone who works, not about the past’s effects on the present situation in general.

They were not asked whether “such disadvantage would be erased if blacks worked as hard as other whites”; they were asked whether that would happen if blacks worked harder than they do now — which does not preclude the possibility of their working harder than whites. In fact, if you assume blacks and whites work equally hard now (an assumption that, to be fair, according to the survey, at least 14 percent of tea-party supporters don’t share), agreement with that statement entails blacks’ working harder than whites.