Why ‘reverse racism’ is so appealing to white millennials

I’m going to try and make a point about Charlottesville without spending too much time on the president. That press conference yesterday was just bonkers, so I’m going to stay away from that quagmire.

So what are we talking about here?

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about this, and trying to figure out what’s going on under the surface; what’s fueling all of this anger and hate. I came across some really interesting research and analysis done by political statistician Nate Silver. You remember Nate, he successfully picked all of the political races the year Obama was elected.

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The really interesting thing they found: 20 percent of Republicans feel that there is a “great deal” of discrimination against white people. So If I’m doing my math right, that’s more than 25 million Americans who hold this belief (just so you follow my math: population of the U.S. is 323 million, times 39 percent who self identify as Republicans, times 20 percent).

Think about that for a minute — 25 million people in this country feel that there is a “great deal” of discrimination against white people. If you took even a 7th grade US History class, how could you believe this to be true?

Perry Bacon Jr., a writer over at Nate’s website, Five Thirty Eight, has come up with an interesting theory:

And in my own conversations with some conservative activists after Black Lives Matter emerged, there was confusion about why exactly America needed a movement to improve the lives of black people. If you’re a white man in your 20s or 30s, as many of the Charlottesville protesters appeared to be, a list of the dominant American culture icons of your lifetime might start with Oprah, Beyoncé, Lebron James and Serena Williams. And it isn’t just culture: A black man, Barack Obama, has served as president, and African-Americans have led institutions from the State Department to McDonald’s. Black people as a group remain under-privileged in American society, but this is not the 1960s — or even the 1990s — in one important way: Blacks literally have (or have had) some of the most coveted jobs in America … It’s easier for many whites to convince themselves that the problem isn’t racism, it’s ‘reverse racism.’

That paragraph completely reframed this entire thing for me. Go back and look at the photos of the first march in Charlottesville on Friday Night. Almost all of the torch carrying people are white men in their 20s and 30s — millennials. That means they were born in 1987 at the earliest. Their perception of America is vastly different than someone born even 20 years earlier.

So what’s the take away here? If you are on the other side of this issue, you are dealing with perception and feelings. You are dealing with a generation of millennials that was told that their feelings matter and are important. We have to find the language to communicate the ideas about discrimination and equality that will resonate with this generation.

Lamenting how different millennials are has become a cottage industry. Maybe we just need to reframe this entire issue to make sense to them in the world they grew up in.