In the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the researchers describe three experiments that provide evidence backing up this assertion. The first two featured 94 and 91 white Americans, respectively, who were recruited online via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
“Participants completed two ostensibly unrelated surveys, the first regarding beliefs about inequality in America, and the second about childhood memories,” the researchers write. In the first, they were asked the degree to which they believe white people have “certain advantages minorities do not have in this society.”
Half addressed this touchy question cold, while the others did so after reading a paragraph describing the reality of white privilege in such realms as academics, housing, and health care.
The “personal memory” questionnaire included five items addressing hardships, including the assertion “I have had many difficulties in life that I could not overcome.” Participants expressed their level of agreement with each on a one-to-seven scale.
“In both experiments, we found that whites exposed to evidence of white privilege claimed more hardships than those not exposed to evidence of privilege,” the researchers report. In other words, evidence that their race was an advantage prompted white people to move toward a victimhood mindset.
The final experiment, featuring 234 white Americans from a national online pool, found “people claim more life hardships in response to evidence of in-group privilege because such information is threatening to their sense of self.” What’s more, “these denials of personal privilege were in turn associated with diminished support for affirmative action policies—policies that could help alleviate racial inequity.”
Altogether, the results suggest “[white] 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,” Phillips and Lowery conclude.
In other words, to deny the affects of white privilege in their lives, white people will immediately drum up stories of hardships they’ve gone through as if to say that they themselves made it through hard work NOT because of any systematic advantages for whiteness or systematic disadvantages for non-whiteness. It’s the lie of meritocracy that America has been telling the world for centuries and whites have a personal stake in believing it because without it they would have to admit that the bulk of their entire person is based on lies. Again, truth is not really America’s (or white America’s) thing. The threat to their core belief (which is based on lies) is what white people feel when confronted with evidence of white privilege. It’s that cognitive dissonance that Frantz Fanon talked about in “White Masks”
Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are
presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new
evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is
extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it
is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize,
ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.
What I find “humorous” is that white people always accuse Black people of “playing the victim” but yet they are the one who play victim the moment they can use it to deny the truth of white privilege. To deny truth, they quickly play the victim. Black people don’t play victim. We are being targeted and victimized for the benefit of whiteness and yet still we stand, fight, produce, live, love, laugh, smile, create, contribute and more. We simply speak the truth about how we are sinned against (to quote Ida B. Wells). Truth doesn’t create victims but for whites, they roll out that victim card to protect and perpetuate lies. That’s despicable but that’s white fragility for you tho.
What’s sad is when Black people (and other non-whites) join in with and back that bullshit. They’ve been so brainwashed into thinking “white is right” and they are so desparate for white approval that they can even see when bullshit is being fed to them and they just repeat it like trained dogs. That saddens me most of all.
You can buy the research paper here if you want toÂ
Or you can read it totally for free here.
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