One term that has gained quite a bit of currency in right-wing circles is "reverse racism." This phrase refers to the discrimination supposedly directed at whites by minorities, especially blacks. Reform Party leader Patrick Buchanan, for example, once described the Civil Rights Act as reverse racism (it may have come as a surprise to many people when Buchanan appointed a black woman as his running mate in the last federal election). But even individuals who don't necessarily qualify as conservative heavyweights have argued that minorities can hate whites as much as some whites hate minorities. In his book The Redneck Manifesto, white working class champion Jim Goad cites a string of quotes by black college students, such as "soon the black man will become extinct because he keeps messin' with the white woman," to show that "by becoming bigots, many black people have finally proven their equality."

The evidence for widespread reverse racism, however, is far from convincing. Though undoubtedly there are blacks who hate whites and whites who don't dislike blacks, anti-white feeling doesn't appear to be rampant in the African-American population. For instance, countless polls have found blacks to be more accepting of marriage with whites than whites are with blacks. Nor do other non-whites seem to harbor a particular anti-white grudge. Even groups historically opposed to intermarriage, like East and South Asians, tend to be more open to unions with whites than with other minorities such as blacks and Latinos. More significant yet, a white spouse or partner can be a sign of prestige in some Asian circles. A European or American wife, compared to one from, say, a poor Asian country, has become a status symbol in the purportedly xenophobic Japan. A Sikh friend similarly tells me that a white girlfriend is the rage among Indo-Canadian youths, even if Mom and Dad don't always approve. Finally, the ethnic communities most favorable to miscegenation -- blacks and Hispanics -- generally put whites at the top of their list of preferred intermarriage partners. In terms of interracial sex, whites usually come out on top, figuratively speaking.

An interesting study of mixed-race Canadians by Kay Pamela Ray, a woman of Scottish and East Indian descent, found that minorities who had taken the big step and married whites were often less than happy about their own children getting involved with members of other non-white groups. One young man interviewed by Ray, "Paul," recounted that his South Asian father, who had experienced severe discrimination from his white in-laws, himself disowned Paul for marrying a black woman. The father felt inferior because of his skin color and was devastated that Paul, who was light enough to "pass," did not choose to further whiten the family gene pool. In other words, miscegenous minorities may become more open-minded -- not to intermarriage per se but to intermarriage with whites in particular.

Whites in addition are largely protected from the most unpleasant aspects of miscegenation, namely interracial rape and sexual exploitation. Take the case of white women in the Middle East. Though urban legends abound of Western women there being abducted for the purpose of "white slavery" and though some female tourists from Europe and North America complain of being regarded as sex objects by the local men, in reality a white woman is unlikely to be raped in the Arab world. On the other hand, dozens of Filipina and other Asian domestic workers in that region have found themselves in a situation not too different from that of black slave women in the Old South, with beatings and mental cruelty on the part of their female employers and sexual abuse from the men (Asian-American activist Karin Aguilar-San Juan, who once accused Spaniards of anti-Filipino bigotry, might want to ponder the fact that by Filipinos' own admission, Filipina maids are treated much more humanely by their former colonial masters in Spain than by their brothers and sisters of color in the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, East Asia). One justification for the rape of Asian domestics is that such women are "loose." Yet while white women are also considered morally wayward in the Middle East, their race and social status, coupled with the fact that they can count on the support of their respective embassies in the case of actual rape, shield them from the threat of sexual assault. Asian women, who possess none of these three attributes, are by contrast fair game for rapists.

All this is not to say that white women have never been targetted for sexual exploitation on the basis of their ethnicity. Nonetheless, such behavior has generally occurred at the hands of white men (for example the mass rape of "enemy" women in the former Yugoslavia) or alongside the abuse of non-white women, such as the keeping of Dutchwomen -- from the Netherlands' former colony Indonesia -- together with Koreans and Filipinas as "comfort women" by Japanese soldiers during World War II.

Obviously some minorities are hostile to whites, and sometimes this is expressed as opposition to intermarriage. I myself remember the unhappiness I felt when my South Asian boyfriend and I broke up because his family wouldn't approve of a non-Gujarati* daughter-in-law. But at a time when even traditionally endogamous groups like the Chinese are coming to accept relationships with whites, it's hard to say that whites are particularly disadvantaged on the interracial marriage market. I'll conclude this essay by stating that for the most part, reverse racism on a large scale exists only in the minds of Patrick Buchanan and his ilk.

* Gujarat is a region in northwestern India.

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