First and foremost, reverse racism is not a real thing.

           Reverse racism is a term used to describe perceived discrimination against white people by people of color. According to ThoughtCo racism is, “a variety of practices, beliefs, social relations, and phenomena that work to reproduce a racial hierarchy and social structure that yield superiority, power, and privilege for some, and discrimination and oppression for others.”  By that definition alone, white people are basically exempted from experiencing any type of racism. They are the ones who have set up the complex social structures that continue to oppress people of color. Racism is discrimination caused by an imbalance of power.

           For many years, white people have used Affirmative Action programs as evidence of reverse racism’s existence. They claim that affirmative action takes away opportunities from deserving white kids and gives them to people of color who get those chances not by the merits of their accomplishments but because of their race. The people who have an issue with affirmative action conveniently overlook the statistics that prove the still apparent discrimination obvious in education and the work place. For example, white college students are 40% more likely to get a private scholarship that college students of color. What they also seem to forget is the reason for the creation of such programs. Affirmative Action programs were made to address the obvious inequalities of the representation that people of color get in schools and work places in comparison to the representation that white folks get. Comparing that to the real and proven racism that people of color on a regular basis is completely unfair.

Things like BET and Black History Month are constantly said to be “reverse racist ” against white people. That’s obviously not true. The reason there is no White Entertainment Television, is because basically every show is starring white actors and telling the stories of a white person. The reason there is no White History Month is because every month is White History Month. Even the stories of people of color are told in relation the white people who came and colonized or stole their land. Kids are taught from the first grade about Christopher Columbus, the Revolutionary War, and other markers of white society. They know all that, but barely get to hear the amazing history of generations of people of color like the Navajo Code Breakers or where the earliest humans were found (Ethiopia).

White people like to pull out reverse racism when they are confronted by the realities of the pain they and their ancestors have inflicted. Instead of accepting their privilege, they deflect and develop a victim mentality.