Teach people to believe they are victims of racial oppression, and — lo and behold — they see racism everywhere. That is effectively the real takeaway from a recent poll conducted by YouGov showing the perception of the experience of racism by different racial and political demographics in the U.S.

Perception doesn’t equate to reality. Everyone used to know this. But apparently for the journalists/activists at The Washington Post, this principle can be applied only to Republicans. Ironically, those folks at the Post never question their own biased perception of Republicans’ supposed motives and beliefs. And based upon this stereotype, the Post’s scribes created a caricature of their fellow Americans so as to malign them as at best backward idiots or at worst Nazis.

In one sense, the issue is definitional, and the term being defined is “racism.”

Historically, racism has long been defined as the negative judgmental prejudice against individuals based solely upon their race. Most Americans used to recognize this definition. Indeed, combating this fundamental definition of racism — and its practice in the public square — was the driving force behind the civil rights movement.

As Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he hoped his children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But that definition runs counter to the doctrine of today’s leftists, who have imbibed the neo-Marxist ideology of critical race theory, a view that is itself fundamentally racist, as it advocates judging individuals not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin. Furthermore, it justifies this racism by erroneously asserting an oppressor vs. oppressed dichotomy that essentially erases all individual volition and, based upon race, assigns individuals to one or the other category.

When Republicans of any race hear things like “whiteness prevents white people from connecting with humanity,” as “anti-racism” race hustler Ibram X. Kendi recently espoused, they correctly identify such thinking as expressing actual anti-white racism. Imagine someone saying “blackness prevents black people from connecting with humanity”; the Left’s response would be predictable.

When white Republicans perceive more racism being directed toward themselves as white people, they are not simply reacting to a perceived loss of political power, as leftists love to assert. Rather, they are simply accurately pointing out a growing reality that has become commonplace across much of the public square — in schools, mainstream media, entertainment, and politics. Public school teachers, TV talkingheads, celebrities, and even the president of the United States incessantly lecture white people about their privilege and oppressive racism, not because of any bad behavior but merely because of the melanin level in their skin.

Leftists like those at the Post, however, appear absolutely blind to this reality. Instead, they have seemingly uncritically adopted a belief that to be Republican is to embrace racism. The irony is that nothing could be further from the truth.

Finally, one could ask a question: Why do black Americans in particular, based on YouGov’s poll, claim to experience racism at the highest rate of any other group? The Post doesn’t dare to question whether their perception matches with reality, even as the paper eagerly dismisses any white Americans’ claims of experiencing racism. Why? Because racism against minorities and especially blacks is leftist dogma. It’s the woke narrative. And to question the woke narrative, especially if one is white, is to out oneself as a racist.