Racial Privilege In America

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The introduction of the article opened with a statement that racial privilege still exists in America. Phillips and Lowery (2015) identify Caucasians as the most privileged of all races. They claimed that whites had better earnings (Hao, 2011) greater life expectancy (Bleich, Jarlenski, Bell, & LaVeist, 2012) better access to health care (Smedley, Stith, & Nelson, 2003) and high-quality education (Rumberger, 2010) than other races, specifically African-Americans. As a result of their view of life in a meritocratic way, they are unable to acknowledge their own racial privilege and it results in their diminished support for affirmative action policies. Moreover, Phillips and Lowery hypothesized that claiming personal hardships help Whites from …show more content…
The participants with no privilege read instructions that claimed they would be asked about American inequality. Then, they would complete questions measuring their belief in White privilege. Also, they completed questions on childhood memories which measured life hardships and information regarding their childhood and adult life, affirmative action support and belief in personal privilege. Affirmative action support was measured using five items, Belief in personal privilege was measured using three items. They sought out to test whether evidence of white privilege would affect affirmative …show more content…
Furthermore, the groups with no privilege had a mean of 4.38 and standard deviation of 1.44 while the group with white privilege had a mean of 4.52 and a standard deviation of 1.64 for belief in White privilege. The data for this table strongly supported the hypothesis in that it displayed a higher number for life hardships in the group with White privilege than the group with no privilege. The results of the experiment supported Lower and Phillips hypothesis; that participants in the White privilege group claimed more hardships than participants in the no privilege

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