Kristin Haltinner

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

In the past decade the U.S. public has expressed varying degrees of skepticism about certain factual claims, and of “expertise” more broadly. Ideological and partisan belief polarization seems to have elevated public anxiety about topics ranging from climate change and vaccines to immigration and healthcare policy. Furthermore, polarized narratives about scientific, medical, and political topics have encouraged “directionally motivated cognition”, leading to a decline in institutional trust among some fractions of the U.S. political spectrum. Our case study of the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) (i.e. a political organization that promotes the Tea Party goals) uses data from 45 interviews, 80 hours of participant observation, and content analysis of movement literature, to examine the nature and nuance of health narratives employed by the Tea Party. Specifically, we explain a central narrative in TPP organizing that features “a villainous Left covertly seeking to harm U.S. citizens” as the root of three key TPP health care narratives: (1) Democratic health initiatives enslaving youth; (2) the political left profiting from covertly making Americans dependent on states health care programs; and (3) the left clandestinely seeking to violate the constitution as represented by their efforts to “kill grandma”. These narratives reflect the increased polarization of attitudes towards healthcare, as well as a broader distrust of the political left who, activists believe, are advancing a political agenda of social control. Ultimately, we argue that culturally driven healthcare narratives of the Tea Party have had a significant impact on right-wing public opinion and Republican politics regarding U.S. healthcare policy. Many Tea Party concerns are reflected in the Republican policy positions, including those related to the Affordable Care Act of 2010.

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

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.

Can I Live? College Student Perceptions of Risks, Security, and Privacy in Online Spaces

This study explores U.S. college students’ perceptions of risk, security, and privacy in online spaces, and the strategies used by students to manage online risks. Twenty-one students participated in in-depth interviews and shared their experiences with online spaces and their perceptions of cyber threats. Our findings indicate that student cybersecurity concerns are shaped mainly by routinization and ritualization of risk, optimistic bias, and self-efficacy. Strategies commonly employed to overcome risks include accessing sources that are perceived as credible and trustworthy, restricting information sharing, and exercising learned helplessness—or, what we term here as the “can-I-live syndrome.”

Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities in Teaching About Race and Anti-Racism in the Twenty-First Century

The election of Barack Obama is touted by many as a symbol of the United States’ movement towards a “post-racial” society. Yet, in the year after his election, there were elevated numbers of racially motivated hate crimes, with over 9,000 incidences (AP 2008; FBI 2008). At the same time, there has been a broad, collective movement in opposition to progressive reform and civil rights for people of color and immigrants (Gonzales 2009; Bunch 2010). Nevertheless, political pundits, newspaper columnists, and politicians have written at length about Obama’s election as signifying a “post-racial” America – a vision of the United States as a society in which race no longer acts as a barrier to certain populations marginalized in the nation’s past (NPR 2009; Steele 2008). Scholars have also adopted this term in considering the implications of post-racial ideology on race theory (Nayak 2006) and the possibility of post-racial states (Goldberg 2002).

Right-Wing Ideologies and Ideological Diversity in the Tea Party

ABSTRACT This article extends prior research on right-wing ideology broadly and the ideology of the Tea Party specifically. Using data from 45 interviews with Tea Party activists and participant observation at Tea Party meetings, I map five distinct ideologies, used by subsets of the Tea Party Patriots membership: Christian Conservatism, Constitutionalism, Reformed Liberalism, Libertarianism, and Conspiracism.

Gender Bending in the Classroom: Teaching Gender Inequity Without Reifying Gender Essentialism and Heteronormativity

This chapter seeks to explore the challenges placed on instructors by popular social discourses. It highlights three central challenges to teaching students to think critically about sex and gender: a lack of critical data, the constraints of popular language, and the blinding nature of cultural hegemony. It then suggests possible ways to work through these roadblocks as instructors seek to empower their students to be critical gender scholars.

How the Secure Use of Technology Could Influence Travel to and from School for Elementary School-Aged Children

A child’s ability or opportunity to walk or bicycle to school is determined by his or her parents who must weigh a number of different factors in this decision. For this study, the concerns expressed by parents were evaluated along with exploring possible technological solutions that could be used to address these concerns and to guide policy decisions. Data were collected over a six-month period utilizing an online survey sent to parents of elementary school-aged children in Idaho. The findings suggest that parents’ primary concerns regarding school safety included: distance to school, the possibility of a traffic and pedestrian accident, and child abduction by strangers. Parents were most comfortable with minimally to moderately invasive technological solutions including phone calls if students did not arrive in school, established checkpoints for students to pass en route to school, live streaming videos in the classroom, and GPS tracking of their child’s backpack.

Conclusion: Lessons Learned – Pedagogical and Theoretical Strategies for Teaching Race

Two challenges facing instructors in the twenty-first century are the social discourse of colorblindness and the fact that many teachers do not have adequate tools with which to educate students on this issue. As a result, courses about race often reinforce notions of colorblindness rather than providing students with the tools to challenge contemporary ideologies and position it and themselves within a cultural and historical context. To that end, the scholars included this book highlight and present solutions for some of the major challenges facing instructors of race and inequality.

Repacking the White Privilege Knapsack

Contemporary college students, particularly white students, often meet classroom discussions of white privilege with great resistance. My presentation will provide an overview of an activity which asks students to update Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 article “Unpacking the Knapsack” first by editing her list and subsequently adding additional examples of privileges. Through proper instruction, this activity empowers students to critically examine their community and to develop a sophisticated understanding of the operation of white privilege within society. Students begin with a cursory analysis tweaking McIntosh’s original list but, with guidance, are able to develop novel and important items based on their own experiences with white privilege. Teachers are cautioned to be cognizant to meet the needs of and challenge all class participants.

Paint the White House black: Barack Obama and the meaning of race in America

Houston of this community of multiracial/ethnic Honduran immigrants was facilitated by a Houston-based Honduran pastor. Like the Vietnamese in New Orleans East, whose language, culture and immigration status place them outside any pretense of a social safety net, family, ethnic and religious ties enabled the survival of the Garifuna through one disaster after another. In ‘Charting a Path Forward’, Rachel Luft (ch. 14) chronicles efforts by racial and economic justice organizers to galvanize a social change movement in the post-disaster environment. Her analysis of the ‘gendered nature of social change’ (234) provides rare insight into the contradictions of an inspired social movement and the extraordinary need by those very people it seeks to galvanize for change. The strength of the volume is in how it sheds new light on the work of series editor Kai Erikson, who pioneered disaster research as ‘collective trauma’. Its shortcoming is found in the lack of depth characteristic of short essays, leaving one to yearn for more in-depth studies akin to Everything in its Path (Erikson 1976). Such studies will hopefully fill The Katrina Bookshelf in the future.