Are White People Oppressed in this Age of Obama?

One of my friends from college posted a provocative CNN article entitled Are Whites Racially Oppressed on Facebook. In the article, John Blake writes:

"We went from being a privileged group to all of a sudden becoming whites, the new victims,'' says Charles Gallagher, a sociologist at La Salle University in Pennsylvania who researches white racial attitudes and was baffled to find that whites see themselves as a minority.

"You have this perception out there that whites are no longer in control or the majority. Whites are the new minority group."

Call it racial jujitsu: A growing number of white Americans are acting like a racially oppressed majority. They are adopting the language and protest tactics of an embattled minority group, scholars and commentators say.

They point to these signs of racial anxiety:


• A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found 44% of Americans surveyed identify discrimination against whites as being just as big as bigotry aimed at blacks and other minorities. The poll found 61% of those identifying with the Tea Party held that view, as did 56% of Republicans and 57% of white evangelicals.

• More colleges are offering courses in "Whiteness Studies" as white Americans cope with becoming what one commentator calls a "dispossessed majority group."

• A Texas group recently formed the "Former Majority Association for Equality" to offer college scholarships to needy white men. Colby Bohannan, the group's president, says white men don't have scholarship options available to minorities. "White males are definitely not a majority" anymore, he says.

• U.S. Census Bureau projections that whites will become a minority by 2050 are fueling fears that whiteness no longer represents the norm. This fear has been compounded by the recent recession, which hit whites hard.

• Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh argued in a radio show that Republicans are an "oppressed minority" in need of a "civil rights movement" because its members willingly sit in the "back of the bus" and "are afraid of the fire hoses and the dogs."

• Conservative news outlets ran a number of stories last summer highlighting an incident from the 2008 elections, in which activists from the New Black Panther Party appeared to be intimidating voters at a polling place. Those claims were never proven.

• Fox talk-show host Glenn Beck led a march on Washington (attended primarily by white people) to "restore honor," and once called President Obama a racist with a "deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture." He later said he regretted making that comment.

Mass rallies in Washington, voter intimidation at the polls, creating ethnic studies programs at colleges to promote racial self-awareness -- it sounds like a script from a civil rights documentary."

The notion that whites are an oppressed minority is an outrageous absurdity.  The Center for American Progress' article State of Communities of Color in the U.S. Economy is an eye opening reminder that African Americans and Hispanics remain at the lower rungs of American society.  Whites remain at the top.  The article states that:
"Substantial differences in economic security exist by race and ethnicity. The unemployment rate for African Americans, for instance, was 15.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to 12.9 percent for Latinos, 7.3 percent for Asian Americans, and 8.7 percent for whites.

Homeownership rates tell a similar story. In the third quarter of 2010, the homeownership rate for African Americans was 45.0 percent. The homeownership rate for Latinos was 47.0 percent, and the homeownership rate for whites was 74.7 percent.

The numbers indicate that Latinos and African Americans continue to hold lower-quality jobs relative to  their white and Asian-American counterparts as they typically earn significantly  less money per week. As of the third quarter of 2010, the last period for which we have data, African Americans’ usual median weekly earnings were $623 in 2009  dollars and Latinos earned $532. In comparison, whites made $774 each week, while Asians earned $871.

In 2009, the last year with available data, median household incomes were substantially lower for communities of color than for whites. The median household income of African Americans was $32,584 in 2009 dollars, more than 40 percent less than that of whites, who earned $54,461. And Latinos had a median income of $34,088, or about 30 percent below that of whites in 2009. Asian Americans had a median income of $65,469 in 2009, which was about 20 percent higher than that of whites.

In 2009, more than one in four Latino (25.3 percent) and African-American families (25.8 percent) lived below the poverty line. Conversely, poverty rates among white Americans and Asian Americans were 9.4 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively.

The number of uninsured African Americans was 9.0 percent higher than white Americans in 2009, with 21.0 percent. Latinos had the largest share of uninsured people with 32.4 percent in 2009. And 17.2 percent of Asian Americans lacked health insurance in 2009.

The current foreclosure rate on loans issued between 2005 and 2008 was 4.52 percent for whites. For Asian Americans, the rate was 4.60 percent. Latinos and African Americans had significantly higher foreclosure rates, at 7.69 percent for Latinos and 7.90 percent for African Americans."

The National Urban League's State of Black America Report for 2010 points out additional racial disparities in education and criminal justice.

"For the population over 25, whites are more than one and a half times as likely as blacks and two and a half times likely as Hispanics to hold a bachelo's degree.

..2008 data indicates that blacks are six times more likely and Hispanics are three times more likely than whites to be incarcerated."

So, people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other far right extremists need to just STFU.

In conclusion, here is my message to all the angry, conservative white people. You are not an oppressed racial group. Were you kidnapped, shackled and crammed into slave ships? Were you robbed of your language, your culture and your religion? Were you enslaved and beaten for over 200 years? Were you segregated, lynched and castrated? Instead of blaming minorities for your problems, you should stand up to the corporate interests that exploit us all.