Saturday, November 20, 2010

According to a poll...

...conducted by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and financed by the Ford Foundation, 62 percent of whites who identified as Tea Party members agreed with the following statement:

Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

This is astounding to me.

(Among white Republicans, the figure was 56 percent; among white independents it was 53; and among white Democrats it was 30 percent.)

I'm a middle-aged white man and, what's more, I've been white all my life -- 52 years to be exact. And I have never, ever felt discriminated against because I was white. If anything, I've become more and more aware of how lucky I am to have been born a white male in the latter half of the 20th century. In fact, you couldn't get any luckier than that -- I call it winning the sperm lottery. (Just think, I could have been born in Ireland during the Potato Famine.)

Everywhere I've been in life -- towns, schools and places of employment -- has been run by and for white people, in particular white males. (The subject of another post.) And while I'm vaguely aware that my parents and their generation felt some mild anti-Catholic prejudice growing up, by the time I arrived on the scene that was pretty much over. (John F. Kennedy was elected as the first Catholic president when I was only two years old. Oh, and by the way, my parents voted for Nixon.)

So where is all this discrimination against white people? Where are the black Lake Forests and black Kenilworths that frown on white people moving in? And where are all the black country clubs with "token" white members? Is there a black Ivy League that has a quota on white students? And where are all the black-owned companies and black-owned law firms that quietly exclude gifted young white guys who only want a shot at the American Dream?

How come I don't see any discrimination against white people in America? Am I naive, or do these tea partiers know something I don't?

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