OWS and Tea Party Demographics - Race and Gender Demographics

Having been completely distracted from the work I was doing earlier this evening by the dramatic raid of the OccupyWallStreet (OWS) encampment in Zuccotti Park by the NYPD, I was once again struck by the overwhelming whiteness of the images coming from the movement - which is so much like my first perceptions of the Tea Party movement. So I started digging around a little for demographics of the OWS movement...

Interestingly enough, the official OWS homepage summarizes one demographic study (below), highlighting political, occupational and educational stats, but the summary leaves out two key demographics: race and sex.

What is interesting - and worthy of further research and understanding - is that demographic polls of both OWS and Tea Party membership indicate that they are both predominantly White movements with very few Blacks/African-Americans involved in either movement.

Likewise, there are more males than females in these movements, although much more disproportionally male to female for OWS.

This demographic study of OWS by Hector R. Cordero-Guzman, Ph.D.
(School of Public Affairs, Baruch College, Ph.D. Programs in Sociology and Urban Education,
City University of New York) indicates that "the 99%" is a little over 80% white. Only 1.3% of the movement identifies as Black or African-American.

The 2010 NYT/CBS poll of Tea Party members indicates a nearly identical result: 89% White and 1% Black/African-American.

What's up with THAT?

While Dr. Cordero-Guzman asserts that the movement is a fair representation of the U.S. Population, (His title is: "Main Stream Support for a Mainstream Movement:
The 99% Movement Comes From and Looks Like the 99%"), the actual percentage of Blacks/African-Americans in the US is around 12%, according to the most recent Census data.

Likewise, the OWS movement is nearly 2/3 male(67%male/30%female/.8%transgender and 1.1%other). The Tea Party demographics reported also predominantly male, but by a much slimmer margin (59% male/41% female). Actual US population by sex according to Census data is about 50/50 male/female.

Ok, so maybe he is comparing the 99% to a 99% figure worked out by subtracting the demographics of the 1%, but he doesn't indicate that, and that still doesn't account for the numbers. Once again he states as his conclusion: "To conclude, our data suggest that the 99% movement comes from and looks like the 99%."

And in any case, my question remains: why are the two largest political movements since the election of Barack Obama predominantly white? Why aren't Blacks/African-Americans involved in either of these movements in any significant way?

And why are the OWS protestors predominantly male?

To be fair, one major difference in these movements is political affiliation/voting characteristics. The Tea Party poll identified (approximately) over 60% Republican/Conservative and about 20-25% independent/vote for both equally/moderate while OWS identifies nearly 70% politically independent and only 2% Republican. Democrat/Liberal identification is approximately 4-5% for the Tea Party and approximately 27% for OWS.


What would be critically interesting is a NYT/CBS poll of the OWS members using the exact same questions - many of which specifically address perceptions of the Presidency of Barack Obama and the issues of "socialism".