Study: White people react to evidence of white privilege by claiming greater personal hardships

[tishaLA]

57. from the study...

Our work suggests that privilege reduction efforts might need to focus not only on convincing or educating advantaged group members about privilege, but also on reducing the feelings of self-threat this information induces. Another approach may be to address cognitive fallacies and misunderstandings of privilege: privilege requires a comparison to someone of another group membership with the same life circumstances. The existence of hardships does not reduce racial privilege, since racial privilege entails comparison to someone of a different race with equivalent hardships. People may erroneously think privilege entails complete ease in life and that the presence of any hardships denotes an absence of privilege. Future work should explore ways to correct these fallacies.

Our work further reveals the motivated nature of hardship claims in response to evidence of privilege, as supported by the fact that self-affirmation reverses Whites' hardship claims. While we focus on threat to self here, it is also possible that threat to social structure, including the racial hierarchy, also motivates hardship claims. For instance, Whites may claim increased hardships to maintain not only a positive sense of self, but also the material benefits associated with racial privilege. Whites' claims of hardship might also serve to legitimize the racial advantages they enjoy, and thereby justify a system that benefits their group.

Our results suggest that people may distinguish between group and personal privilege. However, we found these variables to correlate; in fact, it seems a prerequisite to believe some existence of group-level privilege in order to believe that privilege extends to oneself. And, although people may be able to strategically separate group from personal privilege beliefs, it does not mean this is always the case. Future work should further explore the nature of this relationship, and how it manifests across outcomes, such as group versus personal hardships or support for group-relevant versus personally-relevant policies (cf. Crosby, 1984 and Taylor et al., 1990).

<...> The current work demonstrates that individuals exhibit a previously unknown response to evidence that they benefit from group inequity: people may accept that in-group privilege exists, but change their perceptions of their own lives in order to deny the role of systemic advantages in their success. In particular, when provided evidence that their group has benefitted from privilege, Whites suggest that they have instead suffered the hard-knock life by claiming increased personal life hardships. This may serve to bolster their sense of legitimacy and reduce the negative attributional implications of privilege (e.g., Feather, 1992 and Knowles and Lowery, 2012). Such a response has the potential to erode acknowledgement of racial inequity, and support for policies designed to reduce such inequity. To successfully address inequity, understanding the privileged is likely as important as understanding the underprivileged.<...>

I'd also say there's a great essay by law professor (and prominent Critical Race Theorist( Chery Harris called "Whiteness as Property" that explores this stuff in ways that are, to my mind, more fulfilling than this study. I'm almost positive you can find a pdf of it online.