Many white people generally think racism against blacks isn’t much of a problem anymore; in fact, they see racism against whites as a bigger problem now. Those are the results of a new survey published in the May issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers think that whites see racism as a zero-sum game; if there’s less racism against one group, there must be more against another.

Michael I. Norton of the Harvard Business School and Samuel R. Sommers of Tufts University wanted to compare the attitudes of white people and black people about racism. In their previous research on political correctness, they learned that whites felt oppressed by the discomfort they felt when they felt pressured to avoid certain words. They found that this was connected to a feeling of oppression that some whites had about policies like affirmative action. [continue reading…]