By Chuck Larlham: A Nicely Succinct Analysis

Anti-white Bias… A Real Problem or Perception Run Amok?

May 26, 2011 12:30 AM EDT

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In a recent study about anti-white bias by researchers at Tufts and Harvard universities, they asked that question of 209 whites and 208 blacks. The answer from most whites… “It’s a real problem.” The answer from most blacks… “You’re kidding, right?”

When the answers to the questionnaires were analyzed, it wasn’t just that whites thought that anti-white bias existed, they thought that it had grown in inverse proportion to the tremendous gains against bias they thought blacks had made. Whites tended to view blacks’ gains as a “zero sum game,” in which gains for blacks could only come at the expense of whites.

Of course, when one looks at outcomes, a very different picture emerges. In terms of health, education, jobs, income, home ownership, and a host of other things that define personal and professional life in America, whites still do far better than blacks… forty-odd years after the Civil Rights Act was first passed. Yet, in the face of all that, whites will say, “Yeah, but…” and continue down their road of certainty that whites today face worse bias than do blacks.

It is true that blacks remain among the poorest, most segregated and most unemployed of all Americans. The problem is not that this is true… the problem is that such grim reality is invisible to white fellow citizens. America seems to have become a land of competitive victimhood, where whites, especially white men vie to prove they are more discriminated against than blacks are.

Blacks, however, see progress since the racial bias of the 1950s, but still see a strong hand of prejudice against them. They don’t see their progress as coming at the expense of whites in general. Blacks acknowledge, of course, that their progress came at the cost of white privilege, and at the loss of the day when a black applicant competing with a white applicant for any job, knew walking in the door he had already lost, but not that their gains against bias meant that whites became the victims of bias.

Whites tend to see programs such as affirmative action, equal-opportunity lending, education and hiring, busing, and similar programs designed specifically to overcome the ingrained habits of “hiring white first,” as programs designed instead to limit their opportunities, and as evidence of their victimization by anti-white bias.

Despite all the complaints about programs designed to overcome the prejudices built over centuries in the USA, the insistence that Affirmative Action is nothing more than codified racism, making employers hire less competent blacks over qualified whites (why blacks are always “less competent” and whites are “qualified” in these complaints will forever be a mystery), no one ever comes up with an alternative that works as well, much less better. However, the Supreme Court struck down a couple of those programs within the last couple of years, and it bothers all too few that the negative impact on the black community is already clear.

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