Why White People Downplay Their Individual Racial Privileges

In the past year, the killings of unarmed black men by police officers, as well as a mass shooting in a black church in South Carolina, have garnered enormous media attention. The shootings have become touch points in a larger discussion about race relations and racial bias in the United States. Amid the dialogue are references to the privileges that white Americans enjoy solely because of their race.

But in a new study, Stanford researchers found that on an individual level, whites do not think that the privileges extend to them.

The research by L. Taylor Phillips, a PhD student at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Brian Lowery, the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB, found that whites exposed to evidence of racial privilege responded by claiming their own personal hardships. Those surveyed didn’t deny the existence of racial privileges held by whites as a group, they just came up with other reasons — namely, personal obstacles — why they should be considered differently from that overall group.

How does Lowery explain this? He says, “You like to have nice things. But you don’t want to think you got those things as a result of unearned advantages.” People feel better about what they have if they believe they have earned those things as a result of hard work, not via birthright. So denying built-in advantages is essentially a form of self-protection.

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