Study: Whites say they face more racism than blacks
Whites in America now believe that they face more racial bias than blacks, according to a recent study.
Samuel Sommers of Tufts University and Michael I. Norton of Harvard asked 208 blacks and 209 whites to use a 10-point scale to indicate how much they thought blacks and whites were a target of discrimination each decade from the 1950s through the 2000s. Less than 2 percent of blacks and whites gave anti-white bias the maximum score in the 1950s. More than 9 percent of both groups also gave anti-black bias the maximum score for that same decade. Blacks and white agreed that racism against blacks decreased as the decades progressed. But whites, unlike blacks, felt that anti-white bias had increased along with the drop in anti-black bias. Eleven percent of whites rated anti-white bias at the maximum during the 2000s, while only 2 percent of blacks did. "We propose that Whites' belief about the increasing prevalence of anti-White bias reflects a view of racism as a zero-sum game," researchers wrote (PDF), "which can be summed up as 'less against you means more against me.'"