A new poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health finds that a majority of white Americans believe they have to deal with discrimination today, meaning a majority of white Americans either don’t understand what discrimination is or what white people are.
Fifty-five percent of white Americans believe white people face discrimination, although less than 20 percent say they’ve ever personally experienced discrimination. Also, 84 percent of white American believe racial and ethnic minorities face discrimination, so there’s a lot of ground to cover here.
The poll basically breaks white Americans down into three categories: white people who believe they face discrimination and have personally experienced it (NPR spoke with an individual who fell into this category, although he struggled to think of specific examples for some reason); white people who believe they face discrimination but have not personally experienced it (NPR also spoke with a man who fell into this group, who hastened to say he believed other racial and ethnic groups faced discrimination as well), and white people who don’t believe they face any discrimination at all.
