Do whites face more discrimination than blacks do? Considering that African-Americans largely suffer from higher rates of unemployment, hunger and poverty than whites do and struggle to receive quality educations and healthcare of the same caliber as whites, you'd think not. However, a new study conducted by researchers at Harvard and Tufts universities found that white Americans believe they suffer more racial bias than blacks do.
More than 200 white and black men and women participated in the study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Although both blacks and whites agreed that anti-black bias had decreased from the 1950s to the present day. Caucasians believed that anti-white bias had increased on a scale of 1 to 10 from 1.8 in the 1950s to 4.7 in the 21st century. Meanwhile, blacks believed that anti-white bias had only slightly risen--from 1.4 to 1.8 during the same timeframe. To boot, while 11 percent of Caucasians said that anti-white had risen all the way to 10 on a scale from one to 10, just two percent of whites felt that anti-black had risen to such a drastic degree. Clearly, there's a gaping disconnect between each group's perception about racism toward the other.
According to the Daily Mail, researchers of the study concluded: "A flurry of legal and cultural disputes over the past decade has revealed a new race-related controversy gaining traction: an emerging belief in anti-white prejudice. Whites believe...the pendulum has now swung beyond equality in the direction of anti-white discrimination."
Since when did the U.S. become a nation that's grown "beyond equality" concerning race? If that were true, the resumes of job applicants with "black-sounding names" wouldn't be 50 percent more likely than applicants with "white-sounding names" to be passed over. The legal system wouldn't penalize blacks more than whites for committing similar crimes. Blacks, even those with good credit, wouldn't have been disproportionately steered towards sub-prime loans to buy homes doing the housing boom. And, for that matter, housing discrimination would be a thing of the past. I could go on and on providing examples of how the United States has not moved beyond equality. Yes, there's a biracial man in the White House, but he's an anomaly in terms of how power is distributed in the nation.
Evidently, whites' perception of growing anti-white bias has little to do with the reality of being black or white in the United States. Researchers of the bias study concluded, for example, that whites typically view "any focus on ethnic minorities as an 'attack' on white values." This could mean that whites at a corporation with a diversity agenda may feel victimized, even though blacks make up a small minority at the company and the diversity team aims to have a workforce that better reflects the racial makeup of society.
Certainly, some of the whites who took part in the study were thinking about affirmative action when they answered the survey questions. But given that several states have banned affirmative action and that cases of alleged "reverse discrimination" make news headlines precisely because they're fairly rare, whites by and large aren't being disadvantaged by equal opportunity practices.
For those readers who still don't believe that blacks face more discrimination than whites do, ponder how many whites would be willing to swap places with a black person in this country, you know, to take advantage of all the supposed benefits African Americana enjoy.
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