A lot of people are reacting negatively to this CNN piece titled, “are whites racially oppressed?” But I think they’re reacting more to the sensational headline than the piece itself, which is a rather interesting look at the way white racial identity is evolving in the U.S., particularly with regards to politics:

A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found 44% of Americans surveyed identify discrimination against whites as being just as big as bigotry aimed at blacks and other minorities. The poll found 61% of those identifying with the Tea Party held that view, as did 56% of Republicans and 57% of white evangelicals.

Conservative intellectuals have, for decades argued that the left in general and black people in particular are hampered not by any systemic racial problems, but by pervasive racial victimhood. Today, the core of the conservative movement is comprised of people whose sense of racial grievance is widely shared as their views on abortion. This is related to one of the more interesting ironies of the Tea Party movement–they are extremely sensitive to any allegation of racial prejudice, but the idea that Obama‘s politics are motivated by a hatred for white people is so commonly expressed that it’s almost an afterthought.

The piece also does a good job, I think, of explaining why that has happened:

For many decades, white people saw themselves as individuals, not as members of a race, says Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University in Pennsylvania, who writes books about white studies.”We are often offended if someone calls attention to our race as shaping how we view the world,” says Wray, author of “Not Quite White.”

“We don’t like to be pigeon-holed that way. Non-white Americans are seldom afforded this luxury of seeing themselves as individuals, disconnected from any race.”

You often hear this objection from conservatives about the way liberals talk about race, that liberals refuse to see people as “indiviudals.” And liberals often respond by accusing conservatives of bad faith, of wanting to paper over racial injustice and inequality by feigning an insincere colorblindness. But if Wray’s observation is accurate–and I think it is, we’re mostly just talking past each other. For the first time, a lot of white people are thinking of themselves as members “of a group,” while minorities haven’t had any choice in the matter. Not having to think of themselves in that way is a remnant of the social architecture of racial discrimination that is beginning to crumble.

Losing that privileged status however, isn’t the same as being subject to “racial discrimination,” and those who believe that whites are subject to as much racism as minorities are mistaking the former for the latter, often with really dramatic results.