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In the 21st century, many white Americans feel that they suffer more race-based discrimination than their fellow Americans from minority backgrounds. A 2011 study by researchers at Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School found that whites believe that anti-white bias, or “reverse racism,” is at an all-time high. But is this perception accurate? Sociologists and social activists are among those who argue that reverse discrimination is actually not on the rise because it’s more of a myth than a reality.

They say that while some people of colour may be prejudiced against whites, they don’t have the institutional power to discriminate against whites in a systemic manner that whites have historically discriminated against racial minorities. Quotes about reverse racism from prominent social progressives explain why it’s far from widespread and why complaints about such discrimination are reactionary. They say that those who complain about reverse discrimination fear to lose racial privilege as society moves to level the playing field.

People of Color Lack the Institutional Power to Discriminate Against Whites

In his essay “A Look at the Myth of Reverse Racism,” anti-racist activist Tim Wise discusses why he thinks U.S. society has been organized in such a way that people of colour can’t oppress whites in the same way that whites have historically oppressed minorities.

“When a group of people has little or no power over you institutionally, they don’t get to define the terms of your existence, they can’t limit your opportunities, and you needn’t worry much about the use of a slur to describe you and yours, since, in all likelihood, the slur is as far as it’s going to go,” Wise writes.

“What are they going to do next: deny you a bank loan? Yeah, right. … Power is like body armour. And while not all white folks have the same degree of power, there is a very real extent to which all of us have more than we need vis-à-vis people of colour: at least when it comes to racial position, privilege and perceptions.”

Wise elaborates on his argument by discussing how even poor whites have advantages over middle-class blacks. For example, poor whites are more likely to be employed and own property than blacks is because they don’t experience racism in the workplace and they’ve inherited property from family members. Blacks, on the other hand, have long faced barriers to employment and homeownership that continue to affect their communities today.

“None of this is to say that poor whites aren’t being screwed…by an economic system that relies on their immiseration: they are,” Wise asserts. “But they nonetheless retain a certain ‘one-up’ on equally poor or even somewhat better off people of colour thanks to racism. It is that one-up that renders the potency of certain prejudices less threatening than others.”

Minorities Can Be Prejudiced, But Can They Be Racist?

Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva labels the concept of reverse racism “nonsensical.” The author of Racism Without Racists remarked in a 2010 interview with website The Grio:

“When whites talk about reverse discrimination, I feel that they are making a silly argument because what they really want to say is that we, people of colour, have the power to do to them what they have done to us from the 13th century.”

Bonilla-Silva says that some people of colour are prejudiced against whites but points out that they lack the power to discriminate against whites on a massive scale. “We do not control the economy. We do not control politics — despite the election of Obama. We don’t control much of this country.”

The Idea That Minorities of Influence Seek Revenge Against Whites Is Fiction

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson says that political conservatives make claims of reverse discrimination to advance the idea that people of colour in influential positions are out to get whites. He wrote in a 2010 column on the issue: “A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.”

Robinson asserts that not only isn’t this idea false but also that prominent conservatives are playing it up to win over white voters. He doubts that most conservatives actually believe that vengeful decision makers of colour are using their influence to hurt whites.

“Most of them…are merely seeking political gain by inviting white voters to question the motives and good faith of the nation’s first African American president. This is really about tearing Barack Obama down,” Robinson said. “These allegations of anti-white racism are being deliberately hyped and exaggerated because they are designed to make whites fearful. It won’t work with most people, of course, but it works with some—enough, perhaps, to help erode Obama’s political standing and damage his party’s prospects at the polls.

Reverse Racism Denies the Minority Experience With Discrimination

Bill Maher, comedian and HBO’s “Real Time” host, takes issue with reverse racism because it ignores the people of colour continue to experience oppression today. Maher particularly objects to conservative Republicans making more of an issue of so-called reverse racism than they do of racism against minorities. In 2011, he remarked, “In today’s GOP there is only one correct answer to the discussion about racism. And that is: There is no racism in America anymore. Except for reverse-racism against whites.”

Moreover, Maher points out that Republicans have offered up no solutions to combat reverse racism. He suggests that this is the case because reverse racism isn’t real.

Brighton Park is a predominantly Latino community on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood threatened by poverty, gang violence, ICE raids, and isolation—in a city where income, race, and zip code can determine access to jobs, schools, healthy food, and essential services. It is against this backdrop that the Chicago teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett arrived at the neighborhood’s elementary school in 2014.

Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.

“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”

Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.

“If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.

“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job? You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”

The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.

“If you’re [inclined] to believe that … the system is fair, then you’re maybe going to accept stereotypes about you more easily.”

Nine months after its first appearance, the set of intelligence reports known as the Steele dossier, one of the most explosive documents in modern political history, is still hanging over Washington, casting a shadow over the Trump administration that has only grown darker as time has gone by.

It was reported this week that the document’s author, former British intelligence official, Christopher Steele, has been interviewed by investigators working for the special counsel on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The Senate and House intelligence committees are, meanwhile, asking to see Steele to make up their own mind about his findings. The ranking Democrat on the House committee, Adam Schiff, said that the dossier was “an essential and useful guide to help us figure out what we need to look into”.

The fact that Steele’s reports are being taken seriously after lengthy scrutiny by federal and congressional investigators has far-reaching implications.

How the Trump dossier came to light: secret sources, a retired spy and John McCain

Originally commissioned by a private firm as opposition research by Donald Trump’s Republican and then Democratic opponents, they cite a range of unnamed sources, in Russia and the US, who describe the Kremlin’s cultivation over many years of the man who now occupies the Oval Office – and the systematic collusion of Trump’s associates with Moscow to help get him there.

The question of collusion is at the heart of the various investigations into links between Trump and Moscow. Even a senior Republican, Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, admitted this week it was an open question.

Burr said his committee needed to talk Steele himself to assess the dossier accurately and urged him to speak to its members or staff. According to an NBC report on Friday, Steele had expressed willingness to meet the committee’s leaders.

In his remarks this week, Burr said his committee had come to a consensus in supporting the conclusions of a US intelligence community assessment in January this year that Russian had conducted a multi-pronged campaign to interfere in the 2016 election, in Trump’s favour.

It is a finding that echoes the reports that Steele was producing seven months earlier. Trump has called the assessment a “hoax”, but there is no sign the three agencies that came to that conclusion, the CIA, FBI and NSA, have had any second thoughts in the intervening months.

“Many of my former CIA colleagues have taken [the Steele] reports seriously since they were first published,” wrote John Sipher, a former senior officer in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service on the Just Security website.

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer who compiled the reports. Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA

“This is not because they are not fond of Trump (and many admittedly are not), but because they understand the potential plausibility of the reports’ overall narrative based on their sophisticated understanding of both Russian methods and the nature of raw intelligence reporting.”

Sipher emphasised the “raw” nature of the reports, aimed at conveying an accurate account of what sources are saying, rather than claiming to be a final summary of events. There are spelling mistakes and rough edges. Several of the episodes it described remain entirely unverified.

But as every passing month brings more leaks, revelations in the press, and more progress in the investigations, the Steele dossier has generally gained in credibility, rather than lost it.

Trump Tower meeting

One of the more striking recent developments was the disclosure of a meeting on 9 June 2016 in Trump Tower involving Trump’s son, Donald Jr, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with a Russian lawyer closely tied to the government, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

After the meeting was first reported on 8 July this year, the president’s son claimed (in a statement dictated, it turned out, by his father) that it had been about adoptions of Russian children by Americans.

The next day that was exposed as a lie, with the publication of emails that made it clear that Veselnitskaya was offering damaging material on Hillary Clinton, that an intermediary setting up the meeting said was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump”.

“If it’s what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer,” Donald Trump Jr replied.

Just 11 days after that meeting – but more than a year before it became public – Steele quoted a source as saying that “the Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton”, for several years.

A later report, dated 19 July 2016, said: “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them and the Russian leadership.”

Paul Manafort: why Trump’s old ally could hold the key in Mueller’s Russia hunt

The report said that such contacts were handled on Trump’s end by his then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who participated in the 9 June Trump Tower meeting.

Manafort has denied taking part in any collusion with the Russian state but registered himself as a foreign agent retroactively after it was revealed his firm received more than $17m working as a lobbyist for a pro-Russian Ukrainian party. He is a subject of particular counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and in July the FBI raided his home in Virginia.

Other key protagonists in the Steele dossier have surfaced in subsequent disclosures and investigation. Two of them, an Azeri-Russian businessman Araz Agalarov and his son Emin, are described in emails released by Donald Trump Jr as offering to serve as intermediaries in passing on damaging material on Clinton and is reported to have helped set up the Trump Tower meeting.

Carter Page

Another key figure in the Steele dossier is Carter Page, an energy consultant who Trump named as one of his foreign policy advisors. Steele’s sources describe him as an “intermediary” between Manafort and Moscow, who had met a Putin lieutenant and head of the Russian energy giant, Rosneft, and a senior Kremlin official, Igor Diveykin.

Page denied meeting either man on his trips to Moscow, which he has said were for business purposes and not connected to his role in the Trump campaign.

Nonetheless, he has become a focus of investigation: it was reported in April that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued an order last year for his communication to be monitored. To obtain the warrant, investigators would have to demonstrate “probable cause” to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power. Page has said he welcomed the news of the order as it demonstrated he was being made a scapegoat of the investigation.

Elsewhere, a Steele memo in September 2016 mentions a “Mikhail Kulagin” who had been withdrawn from the Russian embassy in Washington because of his “heavy involvement in the US presidential election operation”.

There was no diplomat of that name at the mission, but there was a Mikhail Kalugin; five months later, it emerged that he had left the embassy in August 2016.

McClatchy reported he was under investigation for his role in Russia’s interference in the campaign. The BBC said that the US had identified Kalugin as a spy.

Facebook

More recently, there has been a slew of revelations about the role of disinformation spread by Russians and other eastern Europeans posing as Americans on social media. The New York Times reported that hundreds and possibly thousands of Russian-linked fake accounts and bots on Facebook and Twitter were used to spread anti-Clinton stories and messages.

Facebook disclosed that it had shut down several hundred accounts that it believes were fabricated by a Kremlin-linked Russian company to buy $100,000 in ads that often promoted racial and other divisive issues during the campaign.

This week, Facebook handed over to Congress 3,000 ads bought by a Russian organisation during the campaign, and it was reported that many of those ads, some of them Islamophobic, were targeted explicitly on swing states, Michigan and Wisconsin.

A Steele memo from August 2016 states that after Russia’s hand had been discovered in the hacking of Democratic party emails and passing them to WikiLeaks for publication, another avenue of influence would be explored.

The memo says “the tactics would be to spread rumours and misinformation about the content of what already had been leaked and make up new content”.

The Russian official alleged by Steele’s sources to be in charge of the operation, Sergei Ivanov – then Putin’s chief of staff – is quoted as saying: “The audience to be targeted by such operations was the educated youth in America as the PA [Russian Presidential Administration] assessed that there was still a chance they could be persuaded to vote for Republican candidate Donald Trump as a protest against the Washington establishment (in the form of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton).”

The Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met Donald Trump Jr and other campaign figures. Photograph: Yury Martyanov/AFP/Getty Images

The Steele dossier said one of the aims of the Russian influence campaign was to peel off voters who had supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and nudge them towards Trump.

Evidence has since emerged that Russians and eastern Europeans posing as Americans targeted Sanders supporters with divisive and anti-Clinton messages in the summer of 2016 after the primaries were over.

Unsubstantiated claims

There are other details in the Steele dossier that have echoed in subsequent news reports, but there are also several claims and accounts for which no supporting evidence has emerged.

Trump in Moscow: what happened at Miss Universe in 2013

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The startling claim that Trump was filmed with prostitutes while staying at a Moscow hotel in November 2013, when he was staging the Miss Universe contest there, has not been substantiated in any way.

Nor has the allegation that Trump’s lawyer and vice-president of the Trump Organisation, Michael Cohen, travelled to Prague in August 2013 to conspire with a senior Russian official. In a letter to the House intelligence committee, Cohen said he never went to Prague and took issue with a string of other claims in the dossier.

It has however emerged that Cohen was involved in exploring a real estate deal in Moscow for the Trump Organisation while the campaign was in full swing. He has been summoned to appear in open hearing before the Senate intelligence committee later this month.

The Steele dossier, its author and the firm who hired him, Fusion GPS, have become favoured targets for Trump’s loyalists on Capitol Hill. They point to the fact that the genesis of the documents was a paid commission to find damaging facts about Trump.

This is starting RIGHT NOW! 

“While Mr. Trump revels in the distraction, here is the ball we should all be keeping our eye on:

1. Trump fires all Ambassadors and Special Envoys, ordering them out by inauguration day.

2. House brings back the Holman rule allowing them to reduce an individual civil service, SES positions, or political appointee’s salary to $1, effectively firing them by amendment to any piece of legislation. We now know why they wanted names and positions of people in Energy and State.

3. Senate schedules 6 simultaneous hearings on cabinet nominees and triple-books those hearings with Trump’s first press conference in months and an ACA budget vote, effectively preventing any concentrated coverage or protest.

4. House GOP expressly forbids the Congressional Budget Office from reporting or tracking ANY costs related to the repeal of the ACA.

5. Trump continues to throw the intelligence community under the bus to protect Putin, despite the growing mountain of evidence that the Russians deliberately interfered in our election.

6. Trump breaks a central campaign promise to make Mexico pay for the wall by asking Congress (in other words, us, the taxpayers) to pay for it.

7. Trump threatens Toyota over a new plant that was never coming to the US nor will take jobs out of the US.

8. House passes the REINS act, giving them veto power over any rules enacted by any federal agency or department–for example, FDA or EPA bans a drug or pesticide, Congress can overrule based on lobbyists not science. Don’t like that endangered species designation, Congress kills it.

#Grabyourwallets @peopleforprogressworldwide ・・・ rp. @collective_voices great news!! Keep boycotting!