Why reverse racism doesnt exist

On a color-coded map of metro areas throughout the entire country, the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration circled places in red to indicate they were too risky to insure mortgages.

Anywhere a Black family lived or lived near was circled red. When Black people applied for loans, whether they had secured benefits from the G. Bill or not, they were segregated to areas within the red lines. If a Black family persevered through racist red tape to buy a house in one of the nicer, low-risk areas, there was "white flight," a concept referring to white people moving from an area to keep people of color separate.

Another example of structural racism is President Richard Nixon's declaration of the "War on Drugs. Laws created on "clearly" racist principles to keep people of color, minorities and immigrants oppressed and controlled, Lyman said, have continued to this day.

This has culminated in drastic incarceration rates. In a recent Harper's Magazine article , Nixon aide John Ehrlichman was quoted admitting the War on Drugs was a ruse to fight the Nixon White House's "two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.

Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. Some white people may diminish racism in by justifying that they, their parents or grandparents came from nothing and worked hard to get what they have.

But federal legislation and structures like the G. Bill and the War on Drugs are crucial to understanding that hard work was not enough for Black Americans to overcome the structural barriers they faced. Both Lyman, who is white, and Nida, who is Ethiopian, emphasized that racist beliefs and structures in the U. When groups of enslaved laborers began to rebel against their exploiters and plantation owners, who were comparatively few in number, Nida said the ideology of white supremacy was crafted and distributed to all groups of white people.

This promoted a political system that for hundreds of years would align working class and poor white people with the elite white people over Black communities with a similar socioeconomic standing.

However, racism refers to that prejudice in addition to the socialized power structures at play. So, not everyone can experience the racism that Black people do because the power dynamic that has existed since the Atlantic Slave Trade is just not equivalent to any other racial experience in the States. Its premise completely disregards any of the overwhelming evidence of institutionalized racism.

In reality, affirmative action programs were put in place in order to mitigate the results of institutionalized racism, and they work to establish guidelines that find qualified applicants, regardless of their socioeconomic status, race or gender. Affirmative action started with President Lyndon B. This allows them to move through the world expecting, realistically, every need to be met.

Blay, Zeba. Harriot, Michael. Sherover-Marcuse, R. Wise, Tim. Krishnan, Manisha. Rahman, Aamer. Back Episodes. Discrimination refers to the biases one exhibits against a racial group. Racism, by contrast, reinforces discriminatory attitudes with social, political, cultural, and economic institutions that have historically disenfranchised a group of people simply because of their racial identity.

When reverse racism is treated as discrimination, as is the case for the PRRI study, racism is flattened into a set of attitudes without the power dynamics that give certain biases salience over others. According to the aforementioned Pew Research Study, 23 percent of white Americans believe African Americans experience discrimination in the workplace, compared with 64 percent of African Americans.

Yet disproportionately racist hiring practices against people of color have been documented. For example, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that applicants with stereotypically white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to get a callback than applicants with stereotypically African-American-sounding names.

And despite belief, rarely, if ever, do white people experience the systemic negative effects of racial discrimination. Michael I. Sommers, a psychology professor at Tufts University, published a paper in that found belief in anti-white bias among white people has been rising since the s and '60s — a moment marked by the beginnings of the civil rights movement. Neither professor claimed to know the source of the changing sentiment. But as power dynamics shift and white people begin to navigate a new terrain of racial relations notably through policies like affirmative action , they begin to perceive themselves as victims under threat:.

For the white people surveyed, anti-white bias came with a zero-sum fallout — white people saw rising racial tolerance for people of color in direct contrast to rising intolerance for whites. Other studies corroborate the "zero-sum" view.

A sociological study showed that white people were more likely to advocate for merit-based admissions policies based on test scores and grades alone instead of affirmative action — but only insofar as it gave them an upper hand against the nonwhite applicants they were competing against.