I'm about half-way through Kathryn Schulz's witty and informative book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error and I'm thinking about how some of what she says relates to other discussions I often have with people about white privilege or whiteness. In the book, Schulz identifies 3 problematic notions of what is going on with other people when they disagree with us. Whether they're actually wrong, or just disagreeing with us which makes us think they're wrong, we believe that they are either 1) ignorant, 2) idiots, or 3) wicked.
The first solution many of us reach for is #1. We try to persuade people by informing them of the facts. However, because of the way people's beliefs frame the way they interpret evidence or facts, this technique rarely works. If people (including ourselves) who were wrong were just misinformed and could be easily corrected life would be so easy!
Today, I saw an example of evidence avoidance in a post from one of my friends on Facebook about how white people, when shown evidence of white privilege, respond defensively with stories of their own personal hardships.
This has long been true: whether it was poor white industrial workers claiming to be worse off than slaves in the 19th century (about which see David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness), or of the average white person denying the existence of racism or put-upon men's rights activist angry at the rule by the matriarchy) today.
The researchers who did this study found that whites would actually claim personal hardships MORE when confronted with evidence of their privilege. They speculated, as I did recently, that part of what is going on may be that such information is experienced as threatening to white people's sense of self because of their framing beliefs in meritocracy. They write:
This erroneous belief that privilege and hardship are mutually exclusive categories is deeply ingrained in our society and is a framing belief that gets in the way of people being able to just look at reality: that we live in a deeply racist society and that all white people get both immediate benefits (such as the presumption of innocence) and experience long term negative effects (see James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time) as a result.
The first solution many of us reach for is #1. We try to persuade people by informing them of the facts. However, because of the way people's beliefs frame the way they interpret evidence or facts, this technique rarely works. If people (including ourselves) who were wrong were just misinformed and could be easily corrected life would be so easy!
Today, I saw an example of evidence avoidance in a post from one of my friends on Facebook about how white people, when shown evidence of white privilege, respond defensively with stories of their own personal hardships.
This has long been true: whether it was poor white industrial workers claiming to be worse off than slaves in the 19th century (about which see David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness), or of the average white person denying the existence of racism or put-upon men's rights activist angry at the rule by the matriarchy) today.
The researchers who did this study found that whites would actually claim personal hardships MORE when confronted with evidence of their privilege. They speculated, as I did recently, that part of what is going on may be that such information is experienced as threatening to white people's sense of self because of their framing beliefs in meritocracy. They write:
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,” Phillips and Lowery explained. “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.
This erroneous belief that privilege and hardship are mutually exclusive categories is deeply ingrained in our society and is a framing belief that gets in the way of people being able to just look at reality: that we live in a deeply racist society and that all white people get both immediate benefits (such as the presumption of innocence) and experience long term negative effects (see James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time) as a result.
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