A Study Of Giving To Katrina Victims Shows That Democrats Are Much More Racist Than Republicans

Richard Morin at the WAPO presents these captivating study results:

“Are Republicans stingy but principled while Democrats are generous but racist?

“I wouldn’t put it quite so starkly,” said Stanford University professor Shanto Iyengar. He would prefer to call Democrats “less principled” rather than bigoted, based on his analysis of data collected in a recent online experiment that he conducted with The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com.

As reported in this column a few weeks ago, the study found that people were less likely to give extended aid to black Hurricane Katrina victims than to white ones. The race penalty, on average, totaled about $1,000 per black victim.

As Iyengar and his colleagues subsequently dug deeper into these data, another finding emerged: Republicans consistently gave less aid, and gave over a shorter period of time, to victims regardless of race.

Democrats and independents were far more generous; on average, they gave Katrina victims on average more than $1,500 a month, compared with $1,200 for Republicans, and for 13 months instead of nine.

But for Democrats, race mattered — and in a disturbing way. Overall, Democrats were willing to give whites about $1,500 more than they chose to give to a black or other minority. (Even with this race penalty, Democrats still were willing to give more to blacks than those principled Republicans.) “Republicans are likely to be more stringent, both in terms of money and time, Iyengar said. “However, their position is ‘principled’ in the sense that it stems from a strong belief in individualism (as opposed to handouts). Thus their responses to the assistance questions are relatively invariant across the different media conditions. Independents and Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to be affected by racial cues.”

To test the effects of race, participants in the study were asked to read a news article about Katrina victims. Some read a story featuring a white person. Some read identical stories — except the victim was black, Asian or Hispanic. Then they were asked how much assistance they think the government should give to help hurricane victims. Approximately 2,300 people participated in the study.”

It’s not a surprise to me that Republicans were less “generous” than Democrats if generosity is measured by how much government largesse they were willing to dole out.

On the other hand, all I have to say to the racist Democrats out there (and there are a lot more of them than there are racist Republicans) is, “Stop the hate, Ok?” Oh…and quit projecting your racist beliefs onto Republicans.

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