It has long been understood that many whites see racial preferences for blacks as a source of resentment.
An Old Source of Resentment
Abigail Thernstrom, author, most recently, of "Voting Rights and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections," is the vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Updated July 31, 2015, 5:02 PM
“White privilege” is the subject of much literature on racial inequality in America. But professors Norton and Sommers claim to have discovered a new phenomenon: the perception on the part of whites that blacks have become more privileged than they are.
In fact, there is nothing novel about their point. It has long been understood that many whites see affirmative action — more accurately, racial preferences — as privileging blacks. In the drive for racial equality, public policies institute inequality — a source of resentment.
To take an obvious example: White firefighters in New Haven, Conn., thought they got a raw deal when the city discarded examination results because a disproportionately high number of whites received high scores; meritocratic standards had been discarded in the interest of promoting an allegedly fair number of minorities within the department.
Likewise, preferential admissions at the University of Michigan occasioned legal challenges to racial double standards at the law school and in the college. There are only a fixed number of seats in the freshman class at each school. Blacks with dramatically weaker academic qualifications than their white classmates had been given some of those places; whites and Asians, who had to meet higher admission standards than minority applicants, lost out. The result: a perception of what authors Norton and Sommers call “anti-white bias.”
Is it really a perception that requires exploration and explanation — resting as it does on the reality of bias built into public policies?
The study asked respondents to "indicate how much you think Blacks [Whites] were/are the victims of discrimination in the United States in each of the following decades" from the 1950s to 2000s. By using the word 'victims,' the survey's question was most likely heard by whites as asking whether race-conscious policies had made them feel like collateral damage. In other words, white respondents were not claiming they were specific targets of discrimination. They were undoubtedly thinking of the harm they believed they suffered as a consequence of racial preferences.
Usually when we talk of groups as targets of bias, we think they experience racial slurs and other forms of personal hostility. But it is doubtful that many whites were making that claim.
Do whites see racial preferences as a zero-sum game in which they are losing? The answer is "of course." But that is hardly news.