Majority of US whites believe they face racial prejudice

The majority of white Americans believe that whites are the victims of racial discrimination in US society, a new poll of more than 3,000 people has found.

In a survey carried out by public radio broadcaster NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 55% of whites said that white people in the US face racial prejudice.

The results of the poll display a disparity between the high number of white people who believe that whites are discriminated against and those who report personal experience of such bias.

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Only 19% of respondents said they thought they had been treated unfairly when applying for jobs based on race, and 13% reported discrimination in promotion or pay. A smaller number, 11%, said their race had negatively affected an application for higher education.

There was also a class divide in the responses. “Lower- and moderate-income white Americans were more likely to say that whites are discriminated against,” says NPR.

One respondent quoted by NPR complained that African-Americans get “the first crack” at job openings.

"Basically, you know, if you want any help from the government, if you're white, you don't get it. If you're black, you get it,” he added.

A majority of every ethnic group surveyed believed that their group faced discrimination, with 92% of black people saying that African-Americans still encountered prejudice against in present-day America.

The survey comes as the same far-right movement behind the Charlottesville rally prepares to organise two “White Lives Matter” rallies in Tennessee this weekend.

Unite the Right, an umbrella organisation representing a number of alt-right and white nationalist groups, is to hold back-to-back rallies in the towns of Shelbyville and Murfreesboro on Saturday.

At least four of the organisations set to march on Saturday are classified as hate groups by civil rights monitor the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Daily Mail reports, including the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.

Brad Griffin, a spokesman for the white supremacist League of the South group, said that rally organisers chose the small Tennessee towns as a symbol of shifting demographics in the heartland.

“There has been a big dumping of refugees all over the area,” he told The Tennessean.

“Over the last 15 years around 18,000 refugees have arrived in Tennessee,” the paper reports, although this still amounts to “ just over one-quarter of 1 percent of the state's population”.