Kevin McKenzie

Memphis Commercial Appeal

A University of Memphis police officer, John G. Hudgens, is suing the university in federal court for racial discrimination and retaliating against him.

Hudgens is white. The university police supervisors he accuses of discriminating against him are black.

Nationwide, about 80 percent of workplace racial discrimination charges filed for 2016 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were based on black or African American complaints.

Yet white-race charges were the second most frequent, making up about 12 percent of all race discrimination complaints filed for that year, statistics provided by the EEOC show.

"We can expect to see more of these"

With reports of the Trump administration’s Justice Department signaling concern about discrimination against white or Asian students in college admissions, the political climate may encourage more charges of what has been called “reverse discrimination.”

“I think in general the takeaway is that we can expect to see more of these under the Trump administration,” said Aliya Saperstein, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University.

“The president has signaled that he is open to people making these kinds of claims and that his administration is going to take them seriously,” said Saperstein.

She and Damon Mayrl, now an assistant professor of sociology at Colby College, produced a study published in 2013, “When White People Report Racial Discrimination: The Role of Region, Religion and Politics.”

Black on white police discrimination?

Hudgens, a U of M police officer for five years with more than 30 years as a Memphis Police Department officer under his belt, first filed a discrimination complaint the week after Trump’s election in November. His federal lawsuit was filed Aug. 15 in Memphis.

In the lawsuit, Hudgens contends that a black lieutenant on the university force made racially insensitive comments and that the lieutenant and a black sergeant retaliated against him and other white employees by denying overtime and through other actions.

The retaliation was triggered after he participated in a complaint filed by another officer who claimed gender and racial discrimination, Hudgens claims.

A Memphis attorney representing Hudgens, James M. Allen, and a spokeswoman for the university declined to comment on the pending lawsuit.

Sketching reverse discrimination

The EEOC offers examples of “reverse discrimination,” a term that spread with a landmark 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case on affirmative action involving a white University of California medical school applicant named Allan Bakke.

Those EEOC examples include a $20,000 lawsuit settlement in 2009 for a white hostess at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Nashville. She complained that black coworkers harassed her with racial epithets and insulted her about being pregnant with a mixed-race child.

Memphis was home to an embarrassing reverse discrimination chapter for the EEOC itself with a federal court ruling in 1996.

A white EEOC attorney in Memphis, Joseph Ray Terry, successfully sued the agency for race and gender discrimination. Terry won six-figure sums for back pay and attorney fees and a promotion to deputy general counsel at EEOC headquarters.

Emerging perceptions of anti-white bias

Even while President Barack Obama was in office as the nation’s first African American president, an increasing number of studies showed that many white people felt that anti-white bias was a bigger problem than anti-black bias, Saperstein said.

Researchers Michael Norton and Samuel Sommer summed up that perception with the title of an 2011 article: “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing.”

Saperstein and Mayrl looked at data from 2003-06, when George W. Bush was president and reverse discrimination lawsuits were more frequent than during the Obama administration, Saperstein said.

Then, 11 percent of Southern whites reported being victims of racial discrimination, compared with 6 percent outside the South. The study cited other research that placed the share of white Americans who reported experiencing racial discrimination as high as 38 percent.

Who is most likely to perceive discrimination?

Their study found that among white Southerners, evangelical Protestants are more likely to report experiencing racial discrimination.

Outside of the South, political affiliation trumps religion. White Republicans are more likely to report racial discrimination.

“The way we interpreted the findings about evangelical churches in the South and the Republican Party outside of the South is that those are likely contexts where people are hearing the message, are sort of learning to perceive their situations as the result of racial discrimination,” Saperstein said.

“Those are not messages that are widely shared, but there may be certain communities in certain kinds of institutions that either promote these messages or provide welcoming environments for people who believe that about their own experience,” she said.

Reach Kevin McKenzie at kevin.mckenzie@commercialappeal.com or (901) 529-2348.