The hard-knock life: Talking about Privilege

How difficult do you think your childhood was?   

Please think for a moment about how you would answer this.  Then ponder how you might answer this question (written for white Americans):

When considering your personal history, don’t forget that white Americans, for example, are advantaged in the domains of academics, housing, healthcare, jobs.  How difficult do you think your childhood was?   

Logically speaking, you might argue that there should be no difference between the answers to each question; the difficulties in your childhood were what they were, regardless of those experienced elsewhere, by various groups.   

This is the thought experiment described by NYU Professor Dolly Chugh in her brilliant The Person you Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias, drawing on research from Stanford psychologists Phillips and Lowery.  The book is extremely powerful in considering the psychology of how we do or do not recognize and respond to our own biases, in the moral arena.  Looking at the ‘psychology of good people’, the sections on being confronted with our own biases are especially confronting in light of reactions to the murder of George Floyd.

It turns out that the preamble in the second case above makes a substantial difference to how we answer the question; at least to the white people in the research. When I read this I thought ‘of course; being reminded to keep things in perspective would mean more white people  seeing their childhood favourably’.  But that is precisely the opposite of what happened!  White respondents actually emphasized their own childhood difficulties more after being reminded of  the disadvantages of others! Exposed to evidence of their racial privilege, they claimed more personal life hardships than those not exposed to evidence of privilege.  This really resonated with me; my reaction in a conversation with a colleagues about my own privilege was along the lines of  ‘as a half Chinese kid I was bullied too’ - as if that was remotely relevant to the issue at hand.

The ‘hey, it was hard for me too’ reaction is so common that Phillips and Lowery named it the ‘hard-knock life response’.   It’s clearly based in a misconception of the notion of ‘white privilege’ - which makes no claims that all whites have no hardships, but that whites' life chances and outcomes are better than they would be if they happened to be another race....  Whites suffer hardships, and sometimes greater hardships than other racial groups; however, Whites' non-racial hardships are not relevant to racial privilege. 

So the ‘hey, it was hard for me too’ is ill-founded; however it’s totally explicable because we are not responding to the question in the same way as we would if it were an emotionally neutral question (eg. what colour house(s) have you lived in?).  Chugh suggests the question actually poses a threat to our own self-image.  Most of us see ourselves as good people (while, of course, none of us are good all the time); for the privileged among us who have benefitted from unfair historical and current global economic systems, this good person image can be a hard position to maintain.  

Chugh is suggesting, I think, that it’s emotionally hard to maintain these three positions:

1. I am a good person.
2. There is systematic unfair and discrimination against people of colour
3. I have personally derived undeserved benefits from a system that grants me unearned privilege. 

And so, in a classic example of cognitive dissonance, we find ourselves offering examples of our own hardships, to somehow mitigate against premise 3 (even though these examples do nothing of the sort).  Phillips and Lowery argue that by claiming life hardships, [we] can protect [our] sense of self [as a good person] from the threat associated with racial privilege. How can outcomes be undeserved, how can privilege have offered personal benefits, when life has been so hard?

Chugh’s response is both a tough and compassionate one; she does not back down on #3 and asks the privileged not to avoid their privilege; instead she asks us to abandon #1; no-one is wholly good or wholly bad; wholly racist or wholly not, arguing that this binary notion is seductive but misleading and scientifically inaccurate.  She ends up saying we are all to see ourselves as good-ish; that we can accept #2 and #3 if we simply lower the bar on judging our own goodness.   

I found this analysis to be very helpful.  Firstly because tweaking #1 away from a static certainly has to be a good thing; for most of us, goodness is not a state of being, it's work-in-progress, subject to the ebbs and flows that come in any lifetime. It's something we all need to work at all the time. Secondly, knowing that a threat to our self-image is an issue gives us a great practical tool for any conversations about privilege.  Evidence from Phillips and Lowery’s study is that the best way to avoid the defensive response of the hard-knock life is to start by acknowledging that every individual has come through their own challenges, and only then to address the fact that these challenges may be harder for some racial groups.   It seems that it can help to frame things:

There’s no such thing as a perfect childhood; everyone faces their own difficulties and everyone has worked hard to overcome challenges and difficulties.  Spend a moment thinking about the difficulties you have overcome in your lifetime.

Then when asked about their childhoods, the participants in the study were more likely to recognize their privilege. So simply asking people to recall how hard they have worked and how many challenges they have overcome serves to affirm self-image and avoid self-threat. 

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As any teacher or storyteller knows, getting things right is as much about approaching things in the right way, as it is getting the facts right.  Practical tips like this can make the difference between open, reflective conversations and tense, defensive ones.  They are worth their weight in gold.

With thanks for Doline Ndorimana for ideas and conversation on this topic

References

• Chugh, D. (2018) The Person you Mean to Be. Harper Business.
• McIntosh, P. (1989). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom (July/August: 10–12).
• Phillips, L. & Lowery, Brian. (2015). The Hard-Knock Life? Whites Claim Hardships in Response to Racial Inequity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.