reverse discrimination

NPR and PBS are old targets, but we’ve been lately hustled into a world in which the Smithsonian Institution is being examined for “improper ideology,” a phrase that smacks of Maoism, and an era of Orwellian inversions in which affirmative action becomes “reverse discrimination,” and any mention of difference is declared “divisive.”

The cases include those alleging reverse discrimination, such as unfair or illegal advantages provided to racial or ethnic minorities.

According to one study by researchers from Harvard University and the University of Tel Aviv, trainers commonly report hostility and resistance from employees who feel forced to do the training and threatened by what they see as reverse discrimination; it also says the programmes can often leave trainees feeling more hostility towards other groups.

By the ‘90s, the phrase had become a conservative catch-phrase not for workforce or university diversity policies, but for a pandemic of smart, hardworking white people having to give up their hard-earned college admission slots to lazier, less intelligent students because they aren’t white. Of course, no such pandemic was happening; the U.S. Labor Department, amid a national fervor over affirmative action, conducted a workforce study and found that so-called “reverse discrimination” was only occurring a marginal amount of times in affirmative action policies — less than 2%.

In South Korea - despite a small increase in the share of women elected - a feeling among many young men of reverse discrimination played out in this year's election.