Racism is alive and well in the United States of America. If you rearrange the letters in “America” you get the phrase “I am race”, a very telling anagram on the state of society today. It is very possible for anyone to experience racism in America regardless of their racial background. It is rather misleading though for White Americans to attempt to equate the racism that they claim to experience with the racism that other ethnic minorities experience.

When White people talk about how they’ve been negatively impacted because of their skin color, usually they are referring to some aspect of Affirmative Action, some scholarship or “minority recruitment” effort. For those programs to fulfill their mandate it is necessary to discriminate; to give special consideration to at the expense of others, and to give more weight to a person’s race than what they deserve.

In other countries such programs are referred to as “positive racism.” This paradigm is perpendicular to one of the core values in America, namely, that all men are created equal. This point cannot be overstated: America’s failure to live up to this credo is why there are the racial problems today.  

Considering all of those things, racism against White people is minuscule at best when compared to the racism that minorities have experienced and continue to experience. There’s no need for a pissing contest here over how one discriminatory act is more severe than another, but there is a difference. Since Christopher Columbus, America has employed a system of racial control, racism and discrimination. Not all of those systems were legislated, but many of them were.

From slavery, to sharecropping, to Jim Crow, to “Separate but equal”, and the current racial control paradigm of mass incarceration of minorities- (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Michelle Alexander) the names have changed but the result has been the same: overall disenfranchisement and oppression of minorities to the benefit of the majority.  

This writer believes that many White Americans who feel that they’ve been discriminated against are really blind to the advantages that come from simply being a member of the majority. This is what social scientists call “White Privilege”. Many people fail to understand that any attempts at leveling the playing field are made not to be punitive but to correct a serious wrong. 

Too many Americans look at Affirmative Action plans as a form of payback to minorities, if you will. This line of thinking has created an environment that is writhe with resentment on the side of too many Whites and an unfounded sense of entitlement on the side of too many minorities.

Fred Pincus challenges the concept of reverse discrimination, or racism against White people, in his book “Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth” (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003).  In the book Fred writes “The empirical evidence strongly supports the conclusion that declining wages, downsizing, deindustrialzation, globalization, and cutbacks in government services represent much greater threats to the [social and economic] position of white men than so-called reverse discrimination.”

It is interesting to note that many white people who feel that they’ve been wronged ignore that there are other more logical factors to consider. Historically the same thing cannot be said with regard of racism against minorities. There are lots of examples in which seemingly race-neutral and benign rules, regulations and legislation have been used to “enforce” the racial status quo, for example the poll tax and requiring that a voter be literate but denying them an education.

It is true that any individual can experience racism. On the macroscopic scale, however, this is not the case. From the larger vantage point  White Americans cannot experience racism because any such experience would be self-defeating, i.e. since White Americans control ALL aspects of society only they can discriminate, and self-discrimination is hopelessly pointless serving no viable purpose.

Human nature tends to “spread the wealth” when it comes to such issues- ‘If I am bad, but you are bad too then my badness doesn’t seem so bad. If I am bad, but you are good, however, then my badness is so bad that it becomes almost unbearable.’ This is perhaps the crux of the matter concerning racism against White people.

Cries about the disenfranchisement of White America are historically related to the perceived encroachment of minorities in the labor market or their upward mobility on the social ladder. This phenomenon was partly responsible for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan during the middle of the twentieth century. Howard Zinn in his book “A People’s history of the United States” describes this phenomena in some detail.

America is fast approaching a cultural milestone. Within a few years the number of minorities will be larger than the number of White Americans. This is exactly the situation that existed in South Africa under Apartheid, i.e. the minority controlling the infrastructure and oppressing the majority. What will happen at that crucial moment cannot be said but a house divided cannot stand.