Get loud. Get proud. It doesn’t have to be this way, European America.
Despite the rush in some quarters to anoint contemporary American society as ‘‘postracial’’ in the wake of Barack Obama’s election as president, a flurry of legal and cultural disputes over the past decade has revealed a new race-related controversy gaining traction: an emerging belief in anti-White prejudice. Although legal challenges concerning so-called ‘‘reverse racism’’ date back as far as the 1970s (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978), such claims have been at the core of an increasing number of high-profile Supreme Court cases in recent years, in domains such as equal access to education (Gratz v. Bollinger, 2003; Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003) and employment discrimination (Ricci v. DeStefano, 2009)—two of the very issues at the heart of the African
American Civil Rights Movement a half-century ago.
We suggest that these trends epitomize a more general mindset gaining traction among Whites in contemporary America: the notion that Whites have replaced Blacks as the primary victims of discrimination. This emerging perspective is particularly notable because by nearly any metric—from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education—statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans (e.g., Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Knowles, Persico, & Todd, 2001; Krueger, Rothstein, & Turner, 2006; Munnell, Tootell, Browne, & McEneaney, 1996).