It s always been obvious to people with half a clue or better that the hatred towards our president was more because of the color of his skin than anything he could possibly have done politically. Had a white man walked into the same mess and turned it around into hope for the future and a better country than the one he was handed, he d be Bill Clinton.A sociologist from Stanford University had the idea that the resurgence of racism in America didn t just coincide with the rise of the Tea Party, it drove it. That left a lot of analysts slack-jawed, wondering: What was this latent force that drove the emergence of this movement?  said Robb Willer. According to The Washington Post:Willer speculates that one thing connecting these two political earthquakes might be white voters  unconscious racial biases. In a series of psychological experiments between 2011 and 2015, he showed how hostility toward people with darker skin and perceived racial threats can influence white support for the tea party. He and his colleagues published a draft of a paper on their findings online last week  some of the most direct evidence of the importance of race to the conservative resurgence during Obama s presidency.The experiment was simple. Two groups of people are shown images of celebrities that include a picture of the president, one with darker skin and one with lighter. The group that saw the dark-skinned Obama were twice as likely to support the Tea Party when asked afterward. Because of the color of a man s skin and nothing else. Willer s team didn t stop there, either. They moved on to see where else race played a major role and landed smack-dab on white privilege.The groups were given conflicting innocuous reports about the U.S. population and demographics. One report said the white people should hold a strong majority in this country for the foreseeable future and the other says whites will decline into a minority by 2060. The group that heard they were safely white-washed were far more likely to support the Tea Party. When all of a sudden the support of minorities looks like it will be key, support for the Tea Party plummets.All of this, every last bit of it, is due to racism. When the Tea Party stormed Washington DC in 2010, packing congressional offices with morons as far as the eye could see, their number one agenda, along with the rest of the GOP, was to stop President Obama from accomplishing anything. They failed, but the influence is still there. When Lindsey Graham stood in front of cameras and declared that his party had gone  batsh*t crazy,  he wasn t kidding.Featured image from Wikipedia altered by Rob Willer