Reverse racism

Reverse racism is a phenomenon in which discrimination, sometimes officially sanctioned, against a dominant or formerly dominant racial or other group representative of the majority in a particular society takes place, for a variety of reasons, often initially as an attempt at redressing past wrongs. It has been described as "preferential treatment, discriminating in favor of members of under-represented groups, which have been treated unjustly in the past, against innocent people".[1][2][3]

The usage of the term is controversial, with many groups (especially those concerning the interests of ethnic minorities) denying its existence.[4][5]

In the United States

Civil rights

The term "reverse racism" came into use as the struggle for African-American rights divided the white community. In 1966, Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), publicly accused members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of reverse racism in their efforts to exclude or expel whites from local government in Alabama to make room for blacks. Williams argued that the SNCC's intended "all-black" campaign in Alabama would drive white moderates out of the civil rights movement.[6] "Black racism" was a more common term in this era, used to describe SNCC and groups like the Black Panthers.[7]

It was not until the 1970s that discourse surrounding reverse racism emerged most forcefully, especially in reaction to affirmative action, as an outgrowth against colorblind hegemonic approaches in the post-civil rights era.[8]

Instances in which white minorities' right of franchise were threatened or denied include:

Criticism

Many advocates for racial justice argue that reverse racism is just misinterpreted racial prejudice. According to Calgary Anti Racism Education (CARED), "Racial Prejudice can be directed at white people (i.e. white people can't dance) but is not considered racism because of the systemic relationship of power."[12] Some sociologists do not believe in the existence of reverse racism because of the hierarchy in which those who are in the subordinated position do not have the power to commit reverse racism without larger, institutional support. Based on David Wellman's definition of racism in Portraits of White Racism as "culturally sanctioned beliefs, which, regardless of intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have because of the subordinated position of racial minorities," reverse racism could not exist because it cannot defend advantages of racial groups who are disadvantaged in society.[13]

Paul Kivel writes in Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice that instances of reverse racism are generally rare, and that many claims of reverse discrimination lack merit. According to Kivel, charges of reverse racism are "usually a white strategy to deny white racism and to counterattack attempts to promote racial justice".[14] Reverse racism is also said to deny the existence of white privilege and power in society.[15]

Admissions

The Supreme Court held in 2009 that racial preferences in university admissions for minority students do not necessarily violate Equal Protection in cases such as Grutter v. Bollinger. The term gained widespread use in debates and legal actions concerning affirmative action.[16]

A 2011 study conducted at Tufts and Harvard sought to quantify perceptions of reverse racism by surveying Americans who identified as "White" or "Black". The study was titled White People See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing. The study found that Whites feel as though they now suffer disproportionately from racism. (Blacks claimed that anti-black racism had decreased over time, but did not perceive or acknowledge increases in anti-white bias.) These results were constant for people of different ages and levels of education.[3][17][18]

NPSAS Results

A 2011 report challenged the widespread misconception that through affirmative action, minority students receive an unfair percentage of scholarships in the United States. The report was published using results from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), a branch of NCES, from the data analysis system for 2003-04 and 2007-08. The NPSAS is a significantly large-scale survey of how undergraduate and graduate students paid for college in the United States. An example of its scale; The 2007-08 survey included a nationally representative stratified sample of more than 80,000 undergraduate and 11,000 graduate and professional students.

Overall the report found that in 2007-08 only 5.5 percent of undergraduate students received private sector scholarships. White students were 40 percent more likely to win private scholarships than minority students. While white students represented less than 62 percent of the student population they received more than 76 percent of all institutional merit-based scholarships and grant funding. White students made up 61.8 per cent of the undergraduate student population and represented 69.3 percent of private scholarship recipients. Whereas minority students represented 30.5 percent of scholarship recipients and 38.0 percent of the undergraduate student population.

Based on the 2007-08 results, the report concluded that for minority students to get an equal footing in private scholarships, annual private scholarship awards for African-American students would have to increase by $83 million and for Latino students increase by $197 million. “Equalizing just the probability of receiving a private scholarship without changing the average scholarship amount per recipient would require increasing total private scholarship funding by $138 million for African-American students and $179 million for Latino students.”[19]

In South Africa

The term has been used actively by both black and white South Africans after the end of apartheid. Accusations of reverse racism have been leveled particularly at government efforts to transform the demographics of South Africa's white-dominated civil service.[20]

Nelson Mandela in 1995 described "racism in reverse" when Black students demonstrated in favor of changing the racial makeup of staff at South African universities.[21] Students denied Mandela's claim and argued that a great deal of ongoing actual racism persisted from apartheid.[22]

Some charged that Mandela's government moved slowly in other areas of social change, due to fears of being perceived as "reverse racist".[23]

Mandela was later himself charged with reverse racism, during 1997 proceedings of the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission[24] and for supporting the 1998 Employment Equity Bill.[25][26]

Claims of reverse racism continued into the 21st century. Helen Suzman, a prominent white anti-apartheid politician, charged the African National Congress and the Mbeki administration with reverse racism since Mandela's departure in 1999.[27] In 2004, a group of young white members of the trade union Solidarity locked themselves into a zoo to protest discrimination against whites.[28]

South African critics of the "reverse racism" concept use similar arguments as those employed by Americans.[29]

Mixed-race South Africans have also sometimes claimed to be victimized by reverse racism of the new government.[30] Similar accusations have been leveled by Indian and Afrikaner groups, who feel that they have not been dominant historically but now suffer from discrimination by the government.[31]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Louis P. Pojman,"The Case Against Affirmative Action", csus.edu; accessed November 25, 2014.
  2. ↑ "Define Reverse Racism - Reverse Discrimination - Reverse Racism Examples". Racerelations.about.com. Retrieved 2013-05-03.
  3. 1 2 Norton, Michael I.; Sommers, Samuel R. (2011). "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing". Perspectives on Psychological Science 6 (3): 215–18. doi:10.1177/1745691611406922. Lay summary – TuftsNow (May 23, 2011).
  4. ↑ Emma Compeau (August 26, 2015). "UTMSU 'reverse racism' post faces criticism". The Varsity. Retrieved August 29, 2015.
  5. ↑ Emily Torbett (August 21, 2015). "Reverse racism: Can't exist by definition, insulting to minority groups". The Daily Athenaeum. Retrieved August 29, 2015.
  6. ↑ "Strife on Two Civil Rights Fronts in Alabama: SNCC is Scored by King Group". Chicago Daily Defender. April 25, 1966. p. 1. The move was called 'reverse racism' by Hosea Williams, Southern program director for King's Southern Christian Leadership conference. He described the effort to exclude all whites from public office as being as racist as excluding all blacks. It isn't integration, he indicated, and it isn't likely — in the long run — to help cure the nation's number one headache.
  7. ↑ Sustar, Lee (October 12, 2012). "The fallacy of 'reverse racism'". Socialist Worker.
  8. ↑ Amy Elizabeth Ansell (2013). Race and Ethnicity: The Key Concepts. Routledge. p. 136. ISBN 978-0-415-33794-6. Retrieved November 6, 2015.
  9. ↑ The government had obtained a default judgement in a civil action against defendant Minister King Samir Shabazz and dismissed charges against all other defendants.[10]
  10. ↑ "Order". Civil Action No. 09-65 in United States Civil Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. 18 May 2009.
  11. ↑ "The Justice Department has chosen this no-stoplight, courthouse town buried in the eastern Mississippi prairie for an unusual civil rights test: the first federal lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act accusing blacks of suppressing the rights of whites. To do that, the department says, he and his allies devised a watertight system for controlling the all-determining Democratic primary, much as segregationists did decades ago. Mr. Brown is accused in the lawsuit and in supporting documents of paying and organizing notaries, some of whom illegally marked absentee ballots or influenced how the ballots were voted; of publishing a list of voters, all white, accompanied by a warning that they would be challenged at the polls; of importing black voters into the county; and of altering racial percentages in districts by manipulating the registration rolls.", nytimes.com, October 11, 2006; accessed November 23, 2014.
  12. ↑ "Reverse Racism-Myth or Reality?". CARED Calgary Anti Racism Education. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
  13. ↑ Wellman, David T. Portraits of White Racism. (1993). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pg. x.; accessed November 6, 2015.
  14. ↑ Paul Kivel (October 18, 2013). Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice Ð 3rd Edition. New Society Publishers. pp. 74–75. ISBN 978-1-55092-495-4.
  15. ↑ Jane H. Hill (September 15, 2011). The Everyday Language of White Racism. John Wiley & Sons. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-4443-5669-4.
  16. ↑ Sanneh, Kelefah (August 10, 2009). "Discriminating Tastes". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on November 13, 2012.
  17. ↑ Michael I. Norton; Samuel R. Sommers (June 2011). "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing" (PDF). Perspectives on Psychological Science: 215–18. doi:10.1177/1745691611406922. Retrieved November 23, 2014.
  18. ↑ Norton, Michael I.; Sommers, Samuel R. (May 23, 2011). "Jockeying for Stigma". New York Times.
  19. ↑ Kantrowitz, Mark (2011-09-02). "Student Aid Policy Analysis : The Distribution of Grants and Scholarships by Race" (PDF). FinAid. monster. Retrieved 2016-04-12.
  20. ↑ Susan de Villiers and Stefan Simanowitz, "South Africa: The ANC at 100", Contemporary Review 294, March 2012; accessed via ProQuest, November 6, 2015.
  21. ↑ Karen MacGregor, "Mandela slams `reverse racism'", Times Higher Education", March 24, 1995.
  22. ↑ Abiola Sinclair, "MEDIA WATCH: All is not well, disappointments, racial clashes", New York Amsterdam News, September 16, 1995; accessed via ProQuest. "The students maintained that the university was living in the apartheid past with the upper echelons reserved for whites. The students are demanding that some jobs be reserved for Blacks. AZASM had denied the charge of reverse racism. They maintain it is unfair for thousands of Black teachers to be out of work while white teachers sit up in good jobs in Black schools."
  23. ↑ Paul Taylor, "Black Capitalists Rare In New South Africa; Apartheid's Legacy, Cultural Ethos Cited", Washington Post, March 19, 1995; accessed via ProQuest. "So far Mandela's government has moved slowly on that front. 'I think the government is still looking over its shoulder, afraid of the tag of reverse racism', said Thami Mazwai, editor of Enterprise, a glossy monthly magazine devoted to black businesses. He noted that [earlier that year] a white ad agency and the nation's only black ad agency competed for a major government contract to publicize the public hearing process for the writing of a new constitution. Although the black agency has won several industry awards, the white agency got the contract."
  24. ↑ Dean Murphy, "Apartheid-Era Leader Defies Subpoena; S. Africa: Truth commission urges contempt charges against former President Pieter W. Botha", Washington Post, December 20, 1997; accessed via ProQuest. "The move to charge Botha is particularly sensitive because it comes just days after President Nelson Mandela, in a racially charged address to the ruling African National Congress, harshly criticized white South Africans for protecting their positions of privilege and doing little to reconcile with the black majority. The speech, hailed as accurate by blacks, brought calls of reverse racism from many whites."
  25. ↑ Mutume, Gumisai (April 3, 1993). "Racism Spoils It for New Democracy". Inter-Press Service.
  26. ↑ Kate Dunn, "Mandela Hits White Wealth", Christian Science Monitor, February 26, 1998.
  27. ↑ Scott Calvert, "Against apartheid, at odds with blacks", Baltimore Sun, May 14, 2004.
  28. ↑ "Youth Cage Themselves in Zoo to Protest Against Discrimination", The Statesman (Press Trust of India), December 27, 2004.
  29. ↑ Dalamba, Yolisa (2000). "Towards An African Renaissance: Identity, Race And Representation In Post-Apartheid South Africa". Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (1): 40–61. doi:10.4314/jcs.v2i1.6231. Retrieved November 6, 2015.
  30. ↑ Polgreen, Lydia (July 27, 2003). "For Mixed-Race South Africans, Equity Is Elusive". New York Times. Archived from the original on November 13, 2012.
  31. ↑ Danna Harman, "South Africans try to 'beat' a segregated past", Christian Science Monitor, September 26, 2002.

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