In the first part of the experiment, they gave participants a short reading about how white people have more social power than other racial groups in America. (A control group did not get the white privilege lesson.) In the second part, participants were told about a hypothetical man named Kevin who was down on his luck in New York City. Kevin was described as being raised by a single mother, a welfare recipient, and someone who had been in jail. However, they told one group that Kevin was a white man, while others heard he was black.
How sympathetic did the people feel toward white Kevin vs. black Kevin?
The results surprised the researchers. Cooley had wondered if teaching a liberal person about white privilege would increase their sympathy for a poor black person who doesn’t benefit from it. But that’s not what happened.
“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’s finding suggests that lessons about white privilege could persuade social liberals to place greater personal blame on poor white people for their social circumstances, out of the belief that their “privilege” outweighs other social factors that could have brought them to their station in life. At the same time, according to this study, these lessons may not be the most effective way to encourage support for poor African Americans.
So, how can we talk about racial inequality—a very real phenomena in the United States and the rest of the world—without inadvertently causing people to have less sympathy for poor whites?
According to Cooley, part of the answer lies in understanding the difference between individual reality and a statistical reality that exists on average.
“I do think that gets forgotten a lot,” she says. If you’re going to talk about white privilege, she argues, then it needs to be explicitly said that “this doesn’t mean that white people don’t have individual struggles . . . because a lot of people hear it as that.”
She adds: “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.” Whites, on average, are privileged in terms of race—but some of them are born with more disadvantages than others. If we can recognize these nuances, Cooley’s work suggests, then it might help us to feel more empathy for everyone.
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