A recently released study shows that lessons in “white privilege” aren’t as effective at cultivating feelings of empathy as social justice warriors would hope.
The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that after going through white privilege lessons, white liberals’ sympathy for poor blacks remained relatively unchanged, whereas their sympathy for poor whites actually decreased.
In explaining the increased blame social liberals placed on poor whites after the white privilege lessons, the study conjectured, “one possibility is that perceivers implicitly play the ‘oppression Olympics’ — that is, they draw upon default hierarchies of groups in order to mentally rank who is worst off and prioritize one group over other groups,” according to Campus Reform.
The study, which was authored by professors from the University of Kentucky, Colgate University, and New York University, consisted of two separate studies administered to groups who ranked themselves on social and economic issues, such as abortion, gun control, gay rights, government spending, and taxation.
In the first, researchers gave an experimental group of participants a short reading on how white people have more social power than other racial groups in America.
In the second, researchers asked this group to rate the sympathy they felt for a hypothetical man named “Kevin,” a New Yorker who they were told was poor, on welfare, raised by a single mother, and had been in jail multiple times. However, individuals in the group were “randomly assigned” a “Kevin” who was either listed as black or white.
In both studies, a control group received no such reading, but was also asked to rate their sympathy for a “Kevin” with a randomly assigned race.
The study found that Kevin’s race was a significant factor in the sympathy the groups felt for him: after the readings, social liberals had less sympathy for poor whites, blaming them for their poverty rather than other social factors that could explain their position in life.
“Social liberals showed significantly less sympathy for Kevin when he was described as white … as compared to black,” the study concluded.
“Across two highly powered studies, we find that learning about privilege based on race may sometimes lead to reduced sympathy for White people experiencing poverty,” the study said. “As a result, social liberals who think about White privilege (vs. control) may become more likely to blame poor White people for their poverty.”
Erin Cooley, a Colgate professor who co-authored the study, told Greater Good magazine she was surprised by the findings because she expected the white privilege lessons to increase sympathy for poor blacks.
“Instead, what we found is that when liberals read about white privilege … it didn’t significantly change how they empathized with a poor black person — but it did significantly bump down their sympathy for a poor white person,” she says.
Cooley, a longtime researcher of prejudice, suggested that future discussions about white privilege should take into account class divisions among white people, not just between whites and blacks.
“If you compared any given poor white person to a poor person of color, would you necessarily be able to say one had it worse off than the other? No, of course not,” she told the magazine.
The fact that whites are, on average, wealthier than blacks “doesn’t mean that white people don’t have individual struggles … because a lot of people hear it as that,” she added.
Courses and retreats dealing with “white privilege”— a term first coined by feminist activist Peggy McIntosh in the 1980s, according to the journal — have become more and more common in recent years on college campuses.
For example, In June 2018, the University of Vermont held their annual “Examining White Identity: A Retreat for Undergraduate Students Who Self-Identify as White” weekend event for the upcoming school year, where participants were schooled in exactly how their white privilege affects the community. In April 2018, the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, offered its students a chance to earn up to 3 academic credits for a course titled “Intersections of Privilege,” requiring them to attend an annual White Privilege Conference.
Troy Worden is a recent graduate in English and philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was president of the Berkeley College Republicans in 2017.
