A new poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the HarvardT.H. Chan School of Public Health, shows that a majority of White Americans said that they faced discrimination.
For every racial group surveyed, the majority of people said that they believed their own racial group was often discriminated against. What is peculiar about whites though is that while 55 percent said that there was racial discrimination against their group, only 19 percent said that they had experienced it in their lives or while looking for jobs. Thirteen percent said that they had faced discrimination when seeking a promotion, and 11 percent when they were applying or going to college.
However, most white respondents, 84 percent, also said that discrimination exists against those of other racial minorities.
Both income and partisan politics seemed to play a role in whether whites perceived their group as being discriminated against. Lower- and moderate-income whites were more likely to have faced discrimination in their own lives and to say that discrimination existed. This is also the group of people who got the most fired up during the 2016 election cycle.
Jocelyn Kiley, an associate director at Pew Research Center, said that there has always been a partisan line and that Democrats were always more likely to talk about how racial discrimination is the reason blacks can’t get ahead.
