Cries of reverse discrimination grow

McClatchy Newspapers

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A black president tabs a Latina for the Supreme Court. She had made a ruling against white firefighters. That ruling gets reversed by her prospective high-court colleagues.

It was pretty easy to guess what would come up in her confirmation hearings.

America, it seems, isn’t over race after all.

Rather, now the race card is being dealt in every direction.

More and more whites — weary of a generation of minority racial preferences, fighting for scraps in a feeble economy, feeling the sting of skin color as a disadvantage — are joining minorities in crying foul.

“The pendulum is swinging where people are challenging things on both sides,” said Denise Drake, a Kansas City employment lawyer. “Everybody is saying, ‘You don’t get to consider race at all.’”

Earlier this month, two of Kansas City’s white budget analysts filed suit against City Manager Wayne Cauthen, who is black, and the city, claiming that age and race discrimination led to the losses of their jobs and the retention of minority workers.

Their attorney accused the city of a “whites need not apply” policy. (Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser and his wife were the subject of a just-settled racial-discrimination lawsuit brought by a black woman.)

Advocates of affirmative action say that just because a clueless boss sometimes impedes a white guy instead of a minority does not mean the playing field has been leveled.

Yet they see a series of court rulings, most recently in the New Haven, Conn., firefighters case, seemingly chip away at how far an employer can go to overcome generations of discrimination that favored whites over minorities.

In 2007, writing on a case unrelated to employment discrimination, Chief Justice John G. Roberts seemed to signal the Supreme Court’s shift: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

From 1998 to 2008, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recorded a 45 percent rise in race-based discrimination claims filed by whites. (The agency shuns the term “reverse discrimination.”) Today, complaints from whites of racism make up 10.4 percent of all complaints to the agency, up from 8.5 percent in 1998.