Consider this: A white-male job candidate with a 3. 8 GPA
interviews for a position at a company known for its
commitment to diversity. He doesn’t get the job, assumes
it was given to a black person, and alleges he’s a victim of
“reverse discrimination.” The thing is, he doesn’t know who
else applied for the job or what was on their résumés.
That’s the typical “
reverse-discrimination” case—white men who
complain they’re disadvantaged
by virtue of the mere existence of
an affirmative-action or corporate-diversity program, which results
in alleged “preferences” for people
of color.
“It wasn’t the fact merely that
hypothetically, an African American got a position that ‘I thought I
should have gotten,’” says Gilbert
F. Casellas, Dell’s vice president
of corporate responsibility and
former U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
chair. “That’s because [the] company, [the] employer was either
under some affirmative-action
obligation or some corporate
commitment to achieve diversity
that I, white male or white female,
suffered as a result.”
DOES REVERSE
DISCRIMINATION EXIST?
“Reverse discrimination” can take
multiple forms. Sometimes it involves white men who are treated
poorly by their supervisors of a
different race because of alleged
prejudice. Former New Orleans
District Attorney Eddie Jordan’s
decision to resign in late October
is an example of this. The department he led was sued by a group
of 36 white men who claimed they
were fired by Jordan, who is black,
and replaced with black employees.
A judge found the office liable for
$3.7 million.
Fred Pincus, associate professor, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at the University
of Maryland Baltimore County,
interviewed more than a dozen
self-described victims of “reverse
discrimination” in his book
Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling
the Myth. One of two scenarios
usually happened.
In some cases, “it really seemed
that … either a white male or white
female was wronged in one way
or another. In other cases, there
didn’t seem to be anything there,”
says Pincus, who recalls a particular
conversation with a white woman
who didn’t get hired in a library
job at a university and complained
of discrimination. When Pincus
asked, “Who got the job?” she said,
“I don’t know. It probably was a
black person,” he recalls. “She had
absolutely no idea. She may have
been right; she may have not.”
More often than not, so-called
“reverse-discrimination” claims
turn out to not have much merit.
That’s because “reverse discrimination” is a politicized term used by
affirmative-action critics such as
Ward Connerly, who successfully
campaigned to ban affirmative
action in public education, employment and contracting in California,
Washington state and Michigan.
Affirmative-action critics “are
arguing that folks are being given
‘preference’ and that as a result
of the preference given to others,
they—in this case, white males—
didn’t get the position, the promotion, the thing that he was entitled
to,” says Casellas.
“Unfortunately, the lens
through which they view this is one
that tends to focus on alleged preferences being given to folks who are
allegedly without merit,” he adds.
IS THERE A LEGAL
DEFINITION?
There is no legal definition for
“reverse discrimination,” which is
widely used in popular speech to refer to affirmative-action programs,
laws and policies that allegedly deny
certain opportunities to whites “in
favor of other, government-defined
‘disadvantaged’ racial groups,” according to reverse-discrimination
web site Adversity.net.
However, even some opponents of affirmative action are
reluctant to use the term “reverse
discrimination.” According to a
disclaimer on this web site, “There
really is only one kind of discrimination, and that is old-fashioned
racial and sexual discrimination.
