Matthew Yglesias flags this new political survey, which he suggests many whites now “see themselves as a persecuted, put-upon minority that happens to hold over 90 percent of political offices.”
The researchers contacted a random national sample of 209 whites and 208 blacks, and asked them how much discrimination each group faced, on a scale of one to ten, for each decade since the 1950s.
Black Americans saw anti-black bias as declining steadily, from 9.7 in the ’50s to 6.1 in the ’00s. Over the same period, they perceived a small increase in anti-white bias, from 1.4 to 1.8.
White Americans saw an even steeper decline in anti-black bias: from 9.1, in the ’50s, to 3.6, in the ’00s. But more striking, according to the researchers, was the sharp increase in perceived anti-white bias: Among whites, it shot up from 1.8 to 4.7.
White Americans, in short, thought that anti-white bias was a greater societal problem by the ’00s than anti-black bias.
Another way to look at this is that for all the right wing complaints about a “culture of grievance,” among minorities, black people have a fairly realistic assessment of racial progress in the U.S. while many whites have an unwarranted sense that they’re being persecuted. This goes a long way toward explaining the current state of American identity politics.
