Whites’ belief in reverse discrimination vastly exceeds firsthand experience of it

Evidence

Other survey data, however, suggest caution; this no-man’s-land will be safely occupied only if perceptions of affirmative action are brought more closely into line with its practice. Relatively few whites (under 10 percent) claim to have been harmed by the workings of affirmative action policy. Nevertheless, more (up to 20 percent) claim to know someone who has been so harmed, and still more (30 to 40 percent) claim to have heard about someone who was so harmed. Up to 80 percent of whites believe it likely that a white will lose a job or promotion to a less-qualified black due to affirmative action. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1991

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the status/threat literature and to ‘moral panic’ theory — perceived harms amplified through hearsay, echoing Cohen’s amplification spiral. — connects to: Whites now perceive anti-White bias as exceeding anti-Black bias — Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game…, 3