An interesting article was brought to my attention today, it's not really a new thing but I just felt the need to talk about it. According to a new Harvard study white people in America feel more discriminated against than Black people. I've heard this malarkey over and over and over again. I feel the need to shed a bit of light on "Reverse Racism".
My first issue with "Reverse Racism" is that it doesn't exist, and you people (YOU PEOPLE? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU PEOPLE?!) feel the need to whine over something that isn't real. Racism is racism regardless of the perpetrator's or the victim's ethnicity. Racism isn't just a White on Black thing, it's a "everyone like me" on "everyone not like me" thing and we all need to realize this. It's true that racism in America as a whole isn't at the epidemic levels it use to be but it isn't like that was hundreds of years ago and everything is just peachy for black people now.
There are a lot of things I personally dislike about Affirmative Action but the thing that gets me the most is the notion that every moderately well off African-American individual is only moderately well off because of it. From President Obama, to Herman Cain, to Alan West there's this idiotic idea that these guys were handed everything and got to where they are because the system favors them. That they don't deserve what they have, they took high profile positions because of their skin and nothing more. More recently, since the release of Rick Perry's disastrous college grades, we have seen various Right Wing bloggers, pundits and personalities call for Obama's grades in hopes that they are horrible. Barack Obama went to Columbia and Harvard Law without being a "legacy student" and graduated from Magna Cum Laude. Because of those things I'm pretty sure his grades were fine, but why was this made into a talking point? Because they don't think he deserved to go to these schools, because he's an outsider. Darker complexion guys with funny names get into prestigious schools with horrible grades everyday right?
I mentioned this on twitter once or twice, but in case you didn't know- White women have benefited the most from Affirmative Action. Now that isn't a bad thing considering the gender wage gap is shrinking every year and that unemployment for that group is considerably lower than the national average around 6.1% while among Black men it's 16.5%. But why is it that despite this, white people still feel they suffer more discrimination? After numerous studies shown that employers will not hire "black sounding" names with the same resume as more common "white" names, after 'Mud People loans', Redlining, disproportional conviction rates, sentencing rates, and poverty rates why do they feel the most victimized? It's pretty simple, what you're feeling isn't discrimination or "reverse racism". What you happen to be feeling is known as a loss of entitlement.
You people see things as "oh Blacks and Mexicans and Asians and the Feminists are taking over because of programs that favor them". That's not it. What's happening is they are getting more opportunities that at one point were strictly only reserved for the White Protestant male. You're losing White privilege and you project this as discrimination against you. All I can really say is, calm down. People like you still pull all the strings and a lot of them are trying very hard to keep it that way.