White people think that they receive the brunt of racial discrimination in contemporary America, according to a new study out of Tufts and Harvard. The Perspectives on Psychological Science paper, which is based on a nation-wide sample of 208 blacks and 209 whites, argues that "whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing."
Participants in the study were asked to rate the extent to which they felt blacks and whites were the targets of discrimination in each decade from the 1950s to the 2000s on a one-to-10 scale. While they agreed that the '50s were not a good time to be black in America, by the time they got to the aughts opinions varied dramatically. Both races saw a decline in racism against blacks over the years, but white folk apparently believe it has gone down much faster than blacks do. On average, whites rated anti-white bias as more prevalent in the aughts than anti-black bias by more than a full point on the 10-point scale. And 11 percent of whites went so far as to give anti-white bias in the past decade the maximum rating of 10 compared to only two percent of whites who rated anti-black bias a 10.
"It's a pretty surprising finding when you think of the wide range of disparities that still exist in society, most of which show black Americans with worse outcomes than whites in areas such as income, home ownership, health and employment," co-author and Tufts Associate Professor of Psychology Samuel Sommers said of the study.
The paper's authors point out that this change in public opinion could have clear implications for future public policy debates and behavioral science research, noting that "claims of so-called reverse racism, while not new, have been at the core of an increasing number of high-profile Supreme Court cases."
