7 of 10 Fox News viewers think America is unfair to White people
A few years ago, the Brooking Institute reported that, among regular viewers of Fox News, nearly 7 in 10 believe that, in the United States, discrimination against whites is a bigger problem than discrimination against blacks and other minorities. In the context of the disproportionate success of white people in America, the racism in that statement is astounding. To convince yourself that whites are more successful in business, education, politics and science in spite of a systematic disadvantage, you’d have to be quite thoroughly convinced of the genetic superiority of white people.
GOP leaders agree. In Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” speech, we mostly ignored his statement that “had [his father] been born of Mexican parents, [Romney would] have a better shot of winning this.” You heard that right. Captain Oblivious is so fundamentally superior a person that he’d have risen to the top no matter where or to whom he’d been born. And if it happened to be to one of those Mexican families that get all the breaks, he’d be a shoe-in.
“So, what?”
So, there’s a despicable racism that makes people think “reverse discrimination” is common. There’s also a perilously warped sense of justice behind the belief that society should worry more about disadvantaging the white beneficiaries of centuries of slavery and imperialism than about mitigating the damage to the children of its victims. We are only a generation or two separated from a time when Blacks were effectively precluded from voting in some states. So, instead of debating whether this-or-that program is discrimination against white people, perhaps the best reaction to accusations of reverse discrimination is “so, what?”. White men oppressed and enslaved the world for a thousand years. Will it really all come crashing down if Latinas have a leg up for a few decades?