White people feel like they've been oppressed They marched on Washington to reclaim civil rights.<br /><br />They complained of voter intimidation at the polls.<br /><br />They called for ethnic studies programs to promote racial pride.<br /><br />They are, some say, the new face of racial oppression in this nation -- and their faces are white.<br /><br />"We went from being a privileged group to all of a sudden becoming whites, the new victims,'' says Charles Gallagher, a sociologist at La Salle University in Pennsylvania who researches white racial attitudes and was baffled to find that whites see themselves as a minority.<br /><br />"You have this perception out there that whites are no longer in control or the majority. Whites are the new minority group."<br /><br />Call it racial jujitsu: A growing number of white Americans are acting like a racially oppressed majority. They are adopting the language and protest tactics of an embattled minority group, scholars and commentators say.<br /><br />They point to these signs of racial anxiety:<br /><br />• A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found 44% of Americans surveyed identify discrimination against whites as being just as big as bigotry aimed at blacks and other minorities. The poll found 61% of those identifying with the Tea Party held that view, as did 56% of Republicans and 57% of white evangelicals.
