Addressing the “Why” in White privilege: The limits of mere evidence confrontations and the potential of contextualizing White privilege in national colonial history

Abstract

Past studies found that when confronted with evidence of White privilege, White individuals claim life hardships to distance themselves from it. However, these effects were only barely significant, and samples were predominantly from the US, which is a unique context for White privilege. Merely presenting evidence of White privilege also overlooks its socio-historical embedding in colonialism. Drawing from collective memory research, we expected that contextualizing White privilege in national colonial history will trigger moral concerns. None of three experiments with White Germans (N = 646) replicated the effect on life hardships. Instead, the contextualized confrontation activated moral motives for social justice among White German students and White Germans with a migration background. We highlight the need for theoretical models that explicitly consider how cultural contexts shape reactions to White privilege even among "Western" nations. We discuss the social change potential of framing White privilege as a systemic rather than individualized issue.