Now It's Whites Who Feel Discriminated Against in the U.S.

Poverty rates reveal inequality; now it’s Caucasians who feel discriminated against in the U.S. Policies favoring Hispanics and African-Americans awaken a feeling of victimhood in a white minority.

Nowadays, racism disguises itself as a sense of victimhood. According to a number of recent studies in the United States, following half a century of government policies to put an end to institutional segregation, a white minority feels discriminated against and demands that the state end the protection it has given to racial and ethnic minorities, especially African-Americans. These newly offended Caucasians assert that the various races are now on equal terms and that, in times of economic crisis, companies should treat all citizens with impartiality and the government should refrain from squandering funds on policies of inequality. Socioeconomic statistics disagree with them completely. The divisions between races are as wide as ever. Recent research assures that racism is not a strategy game, as some view it, in which some win at the expense of others: It is an institutionalized evil that has not yet been eradicated from society.

One recent study by two researchers from two reputable universities found an increase in the victimization of Caucasians in the U.S. Those experts, Michael Norton of Harvard and Samuel Sommers of Tufts, have surveyed North American citizens regularly since the ‘50s, and have come to the conclusion that nowadays a white minority is convinced that it is the victim of “an emerging belief in anti-white sentiment.” The professors testify to the existence of “trends [that] epitomize a more general mindset gaining traction among whites in contemporary America: the notion that whites have replaced blacks as the primary victims of discrimination.” That idea has won many followers among the ranks of the tea party, the ultraconservative movement of the right wing of the Republican Party in the U.S.

It has been a year now since this radical group used the iconic anniversary of one of the most famous speeches of the activist Martin Luther King (the celebrated “I have a dream”) to convene in the same place he delivered it: the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Thousands of people responded to the summons of Glenn Beck, a controversial commentator highly regarded in those circles. On a television program in 2009, this same man said something that reflects the new sentiment of inverse racism, in reference to Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the country: “This president I think has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture.”

Norton and Sommers argue in their study, entitled Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing, that there are more whites than blacks who believe that there is now full equality between the races. Among those whites, a smaller group asserts that that equality has been won at their own cost — the concept of zero-sum, which in game theory is used to describe a situation in which the winnings of one party (the equality of blacks) is won at the expense of the other’s losses (disadvantages for whites). “On the practical side,” state the professors, “affirmative action policies designed to increase minority representation may focus whites’ attention on the impact of quota-like procedures on their own access to education and employment, in effect threatening their resources.”

Since the ‘50s, and according to the researchers’ statistics, the notion that there is discrimination against African-Americans has declined radically. Nowadays, 11 percent of Caucasians surveyed believe there is predominant anti-white racism in today’s society. Only 2 percent of those same Caucasians state that there persists an institutional sentiment of racism against African-Americans. This trend can be seen in various circles in society; it would be a mistake to disregard it as residual or marginal. In the academic realm, new disciplines have arisen in the past two decades, united in a field christened “Whiteness Studies” taught at various universities. It is an imitation of the African-American Studies, which arose in the years of struggle for civil rights in the last century.

In 2003, one of the symptoms of this sentiment of animosity among some Caucasian citizens reached the highest court in the country, the Supreme Court. It is the case of Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the student Barbara Grutter, white, 43 years old, sued the University of Michigan for denying her a spot on the faculty of law. She alleged that, in general, the university evaluated its applications on a scale of 150 points. To persons of black or Hispanic descent they gave an automatic advantage of 20 points. The law school did not use the same scoring system, but according to Grutter, operated in a similar way. The applicant alleged that, despite her impeccable grades, she was rejected because of racial quotas. She added that, looking at figures from 1999, the university had accepted 81 percent of blacks and only 3 percent of whites with identical credentials.

Various lawyers from the George W. Bush administration then came to support her and alleged that the University of Michigan did not act neutrally in regard to the race of its students and that the quotas in that and other universities could be deemed unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decided, in a close vote, to maintain diversity in educational institutions through the use of certain policies. The court authorized the school leadership to continue considering skin color when allocating posts in their educational programs.

“Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our Nation is essential if the dream of one Nation, indivisible, is to be realized,” said Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in the majority opinion. With that opinion, the judge recalled that 25 years had passed since the Supreme Court had authorized the use of quotas for the first time. “Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased,” she added. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Eight of those 25 years have passed. Slavery ended in North America in 1865. Segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1954. But the figures of inequality between Caucasians and African-Americans in the U.S. have maintained an obvious gulf that has existed for decades.

According to data from the office of the North American Census in 2010, there are a whole host of indicators that paint a picture of socioeconomic wrongs against racially black people.

The figures speak for themselves: If 7.9 percent of Caucasian students do not finish secondary education, the proportion is doubled, up to 15.8 percent, among African-American students. Among African-Americans, unemployment is at 16.7 percent, a figure that collapses again by half, to only 8.7 percent among Caucasians. 25.8 percent of African-Americans live below the poverty line, compared to 9.4 percent of Caucasians. In terms of wealth, it can be seen that 4 percent of African-Americans earn more than $100,000 a year, a percentage that triples among Caucasians — up to 12 percent. Among people of black races, 21 percent lack medical insurance. In the case of Caucasians, the percentage again decreases by almost half (12 percent).

Another of the major indicators of socioeconomic inequality are prison demographics: how many African-Americans there are in North American prisons. In 2009, the U.S. had a general prison population of 1.6 million. According to a report from the Federal Department of Justice: “Black, non-Hispanic males, who have an incarceration rate of 4,749 incarcerated per every 100,000 North American residents, pass through prison at a rate that is six times greater than white, non-Hispanic males (708 incarcerated for every 100,000 North American residents) and which is 2.6 times greater than Hispanic males (1,822 incarcerated for every 100,000 residents).”* In 2003, there was already a study from the federal government which stated that 30 percent of black men born after 2001 would spend time in prison at some point in their lives.

These are clear indicators of inequality in the socioeconomic structure. “There exists the idea that whites are a racially oppressed group,” explains Charles Gallagher, who runs the Department of Sociology at the University of La Salle, in Philadelphia. “Those white groups assure us that America is in an era when race doesn’t matter, and to maintain politics that protect minorities is discrimination. But they leave out of that argument all of the institutional inequalities. There is no discrimination institutionalized or supported by the government, but there continue to be socioeconomic barriers that African-Americans come up against at a very young age. You have to be blind in order not to see the inequalities that still exist between white and blacks in this country, which negatively affect the latter.”*

There is a tendency, in some academic circles, to contend that the reasons that African Americans are behind obey cultural rules. That is to say, there are those who contend that there exists a culture lacking in ambition, which fosters poverty and dependency on the State. It is not anything new: Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a study in 1965 that detailed those reasons and the consequences of the culture of black poverty. Shamelessly, the senator wrote: “In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure, which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male.” That is to say, absent fathers, who do not work, and mothers who need to care for their children on their own, dependents of Social Security.

The New York Times recently said that that cultural explanation, which is seeing a definite resurgence, is like the villain Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter saga: “That Which Must Not Be Named.” According to the sociologist Charles Gallagher, “Of all the arguments that in the past have sustained racist theories, we’ve now chosen the one about culture. Some groups, the vast majority of which are whites, say that the reasons for this inequality are cultural. That is to say, they point to the gregarious behavior of the group to justify the elevated rates of incarceration or poverty among African-Americans. They affirm that those realities obey a culture, the African American culture, which fosters abandonment or absenteeism.”*

The professor, like other intellectuals and progressive politicians from the U.S., disagrees. “We should ask those who defend the cultural explanation, which hides classic racism, if those 40 million people who live below the poverty line in the U.S. are all lazy,” he explains. “What is certain is that there are a whole host of indications that show that African-American children continue to experience many social and educational barriers, which are still structural, to progress as far as whites. The answers cannot solely be related to culture or lifestyle.”*

Are you a racist without realizing it?

To discriminate because of race is not something that is always done thoughtfully or consciously. In the majority of cases, the preference for the white race over the black race is automatic and unconscious. In 1998, Harvard University launched an online project analyzing the immediate preferences of U.S. citizens, open to any Internet user, christened Project Implicit. After 13 years and 4.5 million tests done in countries all over the world, one of the principal conclusions confirms that there exists in North American society an institutionalized discrimination: Between 75 and 80 percent of Caucasians and Asians show an automatic implicit preference for the white race over the black one. The Universities of Washington and Virginia are also participating in the project.

The test is very simple and works by associating photos of black and white people with vocabulary and concepts like good or bad, peace and war, success or failure. Even among people who believe and argue that they do not prefer one race over the other, the results among Caucasians are mostly weak, moderate or strong preference for their own race. The researchers claim that among racially black people the responses are more varied: Some register a greater tendency to view the persons of their race positively, and others prefer the white race over their own.

*Editor’s Note: These quotes, while accurately translated, could not be verified.