The hard-knock life? Whites claim hardships in response to racial inequity

• We explore why and how Whites deny the existence of racial privilege • We introduce belief in personal privilege as important to psychology of privilege • When given privilege evidence, Whites claim more life hardships • Whites use hardship claims to deny personally benefitting from privilege • Self-affirmed Whites acknowledge personal privilege and support equality policies a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Intergroup processes/relations Privilege/advantage Hierarchy Race/ethnicity Inequality/inequity Racial inequity continues to plague America, yet many Whites still doubt the existence of racial advantages, limiting progress and cooperation. What happens when people are faced with evidence that their group benefits from privilege? We suggest such evidence will be threatening and that people will claim hardships to manage this threat. These claims of hardship allow individuals to deny that they personally benefit from privilege, while still accepting that group-level inequity exists. Experiments 1a and 1b show that Whites exposed to evidence of racial privilege claim to have suffered more personal life hardships than those not exposed to evidence of privilege. Experiment 2 shows that self-affirmation reverses the effect of exposure to evidence of privilege on hardship claims, implicating the motivated nature of hardship claims. Further, affirmed participants acknowledge more personal privilege, which is associated with increased support for inequity-reducing policies. and access to high-quality education (Rumberger, 2010) than do Blacks. Despite this reality, policymakers and power brokers continue to debate whether racial privilege even exists and whether to address such ineq-uity (e. One reason for this inaction might be an unwillingness among Whites to acknowledge racial privilege — acknowledgment that may be difficult given that Whites are motivated to believe that meritocratic systems and personal virtues determine life outcomes (Knowles & Lowery, 2012). What do people do when they are exposed to evidence that they are helped along by racial privilege? In a society roiling with questions about how to deal with expanding inequality (e.g., Noah, 2012; Porter, 2012), it is increasingly important to understand how the privileged – who are most likely to have power to make changes – respond to inequity. Racial privilege means that Whites' life chances and outcomes are better than they would be if they happened to be another race (McIntosh, 1989). Thus, racial privilege is not determined by idiosyn-cratic life circumstances. Rather racial privilege is either present or absent as …