Reverse racism: Are whites the real victims?
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams argues that Black people are the real racists, said Lucian K. Truscott IV in Salon, and an alarming number of white people seem to agree. In a recent YouTube “rant” calling for resegregating society, Adams, 65, claimed he had proof of “so-called reverse racism”: just 53 percent of Black respondents to a recent poll agreed with a statement popularized by far-right extremists on a 4chan internet group: “It’s ok to be white.” The reluctance of Black people to endorse this statement makes them a “hate group,” Adams said, urging his fellow whites to “just get the hell away.” Hundreds of newspapers responded by dropping Adams’ once popular workplace satire. But Adams is hardly alone in claiming that white people “are the victims of racism, not Black people”—that sentiment got Donald Trump elected president in 2016, and fills Fox News’ airwaves every day.
Adams has exposed America’s “bizarre double standard” on the subject of race, said Wilfred Reilly in National Review. Imagine that “a witty Black cartoonist” said “most American whites are at least a bit racist,” and so Black folks
“have no choice but to view whites as dangerous.” There would be no outcry; indeed, it’s now commonplace for hip progressive journalists to accuse “whites en bloc of being violent threats.” If Americans really want to have an “honest conversation” about race, we should discuss the fact that federal statistics show that of the roughly 600,000 documented violent crimes in the U.S. involving Blacks and whites, 90 percent “involved a Black perp and a white victim.” That should be “fair game.”
It’s also fair game to discuss why most Black people are still stuck in impoverished neighborhoods, said Charles M. Blow in The New York Times. In recent years, statistics show, white flight has left 80 percent of major metropolitan regions “more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990.” As a result, black schoolkids attend underfunded urban schools and have a much lower chance of going to college—and even when they do, their white peers accumulate an average of “seven times more wealth.” The continuing reality of actual racism never penetrates the right-wing “echo chamber,” said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. There, the consequences Adams is suffering only reinforce the “white victimhood” narrative: “Here’s another White man, punished for his views.”