White privilege, white grievance, and the limitations of white antiracism

ABSTRACT

In the Trump and Black Lives Matter eras, many of the trends observed by theorists of colorblind racism have reversed, making whiteness newly visible to white Americans. This new white awareness of whiteness has emerged through divergent frames of white grievance and white privilege. In this article, we use a survey experiment to examine the effects of these frames on white antiracism, or opposition to racist institutions and beliefs. Results indicate that neither frame is able to significantly motivate white antiracism. These results suggest that the newly open discussions of white privilege by white Americans might not translate into the kinds of deeper behavioral and attitudinal changes for which racial justice advocates have hoped. However, the white grievance frame, which could be expected to elicit a backlash against racial progressivism, did not elicit significantly lower levels of antiracism, either. These null findings have important implications for the empirical and theoretical study of whiteness, the possibilities for and limitations of white antiracism, and white solidarity with racially minoritized groups. Further, this study takes an innovative approach by empirically testing insights from political theory, contributing to the study of race and politics by bridging disciplinary and methodological divides.

KEYWORDS:

• White grievance
• white privilege
• antiracism
• racial attitudes
• United States
• framing
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

Names in reverse alphabetical order; authors contributed equally. The authors would like to thank David Attewell, Nathan Kelly, Andreas Jozwiak, Eroll Kuhn, Jana Morgan, Kelsey Shoub, Andrew Tyner, Ryan Williams, and the members of the Western Political Science Association’s Critical Whiteness Studies Virtual Community for their helpful comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Of course, racially minoritized groups have long been aware of whiteness, as W.E.B. Du Bois captured in his theory of “double-consciousness,” in which Black people have to be aware of both their own perspective and the perspective of white people (Du Bois [1903] 1994).

2 All question wording can be found in the online appendix.

3 We included this because we fielded the experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

4 Answering yes to these questions directed them to links to the petition and their representatives’ phone numbers, respectively. While we did not have a way to analyze whether they signed the petition (as this is an anonymous survey) or made the call (as this is not something we could capture), we wanted to ensure that those who were motivated to take action were indeed given the opportunity.

5 We found similar null results in a pilot version of the survey experiment conducted on a convenience sample.

6 Note that there are no moderation effects by partisanship, ideology, education, age, income, or gender. See the appendix for these analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Tennessee.