Growing up in Guntur, India, structural inequality was not an abstraction — it was the street I grew up on. For centuries, the caste system fixed entire communities into place at birth, and the doors that mattered — schools, government jobs, land — opened or closed accordingly. India’s fix was Reservations, an affirmative action system so large it now sets aside as much as half of university seats and civil service jobs for historically disadvantaged groups.
The goal in 1950 was reasonable: repair a specific, documented harm. But policy has a way of outliving its purpose once politicians discover what it can do for them. Over the decades that followed, Reservations shifted from repair to political currency. Every election brought pressure to add another group to the list or raise the ceiling again. The pendulum, once aimed squarely at fixing a real wrong, swung past the center of the arc and kept going — until communities with no personal connection to the original injustice found themselves locked out by the very system built to correct it.
I have watched a similar shape take form in the United States, and it deserves a plain, unemotional description rather than a partisan one.
A familiar shift
America’s civil rights era responded to a real and well-documented history: slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and decades of legal exclusion that shut black Americans and other minorities out of housing, credit, education, and the vote. Affirmative action, fair housing law, and voting rights protections were a defensible response to that record.
But political incentives, once set in motion, rarely stay in their lane. Minority voters became an organized and decisive force in American politics, visible most dramatically when a first-term senator from Illinois overcame his own party’s establishment favorite in 2008 and went on to win the presidency twice. Instead of the national conversation narrowing as old barriers came down, much of it kept expanding outward — from dismantling specific, provable barriers to a broader and vaguer suspicion of white people in general, and white men in particular, with young white men absorbing the sharpest edge of it despite holding the least institutional power of any of them.
Some of that pressure has already started to reverse, which is itself evidence the pendulum is real rather than a rhetorical device. In 2023, the Supreme Court ended race-conscious college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. In 2025, the federal government moved to unwind a wide range of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across agencies and federal contractors. People will disagree, fairly, about whether those specific moves were right. But the larger point holds regardless of which side one takes: policy in this space has been swinging on a wide arc for 60 years, and it is swinging hard again right now — precisely the pattern India lived through with Reservations, and precisely why it deserves study rather than dismissal.
Who are we actually talking about
Public debate treats “white men” as a single, dominant bloc, as though the label alone settles the question of power. The actual arithmetic tells a narrower story. Non-Hispanic white Americans make up just under 58% of the population, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates — down from roughly 63% as recently as 2010. Cut that figure roughly in half for gender and white men lay at around 29% of the country. Now subtract the two groups that hold the least day-to-day economic or institutional power: retirees living on Social Security and Medicare at one end, and boys and teenagers still financially dependent on their parents at the other. What remains — the working-age, college-age cohort actually competing for seats, jobs, and promotions right now — is commonly estimated at somewhere near 1 in 10 of the public.
The precise figure matters less than the direction of the numbers underneath it, and those are unambiguous. Women made up 57.3% of U.S. undergraduates in the fall of 2024, against 42.7% for men — a gap of nearly 15 points that barely existed 50 years ago, according to National Center for Education Statistics data. Among adults 25 to 34, 47% of women now hold a bachelor’s degree compared with 37% of men, a 10-point gap the Pew Research Center has tracked widening every year this decade. Detachment from both school and work is rising for young men specifically: Census-based research puts the share of men aged 16 to 24 who are neither enrolled nor employed at roughly 8%, double the 1990 rate. And in the year from July 2024 to July 2025, women accounted for slightly more than half of all net job growth nationally, with the surge concentrated heavily in sectors expected to keep growing fastest.
None of this makes young men today a historically oppressed class on the order of what black Americans endured under Jim Crow, or what lower castes endured in India for centuries. Drawing that equivalence would be dishonest, and I am not drawing it. What the numbers do show is narrower and more useful: the cultural shorthand of “privileged white male” no longer describes the daily reality of a large share of the group it is meant to describe. Numerically and practically, they are behaving less like an entrenched majority and more like a shrinking cohort absorbing blame for a structure most of them never built and had no hand in running.
Two wrongs still don’t make a right
The lesson from India’s decadeslong experience with Reservations, and from the U.S.’s own more recent experience, is not that discrimination was ever acceptable, or that correcting it was a mistake. It is that any remedy built to punish a group, rather than to repair a specific and provable harm, eventually becomes its own injustice — just aimed at whoever is standing in the crosshairs next.
Replacing one system of collective blame with another does not produce fairness. It only relocates the target. And the people caught in the new one rarely had any say in building the old one; most were children, or not yet born, when the harm they are now implicitly asked to answer for actually took place.
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The way forward is not complicated, even if it is politically inconvenient to say plainly: judge people as individuals, on merit and character, not as stand-ins for whatever group they were born into. Correcting historical wrongs is a moral obligation society owes itself. Turning that correction into a permanent, rotating system of collective blame is not — it only guarantees that somebody, somewhere, stays aggrieved indefinitely, and that the cycle never actually closes.
India is still living with the consequences. Reservations remains a system politically untouchable there, decades after much of their original justification expired, because no politician wants to be the one who took something away from a voting bloc. America seems to have a choice. The real question is not whether historical wrongs deserve correction — they do. It is whether that correction is designed to end once the harm is repaired, or whether, quietly, it is designed never to end at all.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D. is director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he focuses on the analysis of human behavior, public health, and global affairs, drawing on an interdisciplinary background. He has published in multiple RealClear platforms, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., The Humanist, AFRO American, South Asia Monitor (on editorial board, and host of a show), and others.