New Study: The Affluent Are in Denial About Their Class Privilege

Race is a continuing problem in America that has no easy solution.  Another growing problem is soar wealth disparity where a small portion of the citizenry owns much more of the nation's wealth than the vast majority of the rest of us combined.  The Republican Party's reverse Robin Hood agenda and efforts to usher in a new Gilded Age with modern day equivalents of the robber barons of old has only served to exacerbate the problem.  Nowadays, one has a far better chance for upward social mobility in Europe than in America and a number of studies have labeled Canada as the new home of the American dream.  What's amazing as the concentration of wealth has intensified and millions of Americans struggle to get by financially is that the wealthy refuse to see their privilege and the advantages it grants to them.  With luck and hard work some will still live the American dream, but many will not no matter their efforts.  A piece in Salon looks at the willful denial of so many of the wealthy.  Here  are excerpts:

Income is correlated with right-wing politics, meaning wealthier people tend to be slightly more conservative. While there is no singular reason for this, both history and observational anecdotes suggest that those with wealth and privilege tend to distort the reason they were so successful, chalking up their success to right-wing ideological canards like "hard work" — rather than admit they were helped by other social factors. (President Trump is a great case study, as he exaggerates the degree to which his father helped him build his empire: during the first 2016 presidential debate, Trump bragged that his father gave him "a very small loan in 1975," which he built "into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars." That "small loan" was actually $60.7 million.)

Now, a new social psychology study has uncovered the extent to which this tendency appears to be pathological among the moneyed elite. Titled "I ain't no fortunate one: On the motivated denial of class privilege," the new study, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that those who were posed questions about their class privilege responded by "increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy." 

Dr. L. Taylor Phillips, a professor of management and organizations at New York University Business School, and co-author Dr. Brian S. Lowery, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, wrote in their study. "Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals' efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others."

The authors emphasized that, in the United States, people are conditioned to believe that we live in a meritocracy and to attribute success or failure primarily to one's talent and hard work. When members of the upper-middle or upper class are confronted with evidence that class privilege plays a major role in determining socioeconomic status, their self-regard is challenged. To maintain their sense of self-worth, they will exaggerate their own hardships or focus on the amount of work they do — even though class privilege does not preclude the reality of non-class related hardships and many people work very hard without achieving socioeconomic mobility.

All of the studies found that, when participants who came from class privilege were confronted with that fact, they tended to focus on their personal hardships and work ethic in order to protect their self-regard from facing the reality that much of what they owned was given to them through luck and systems of oppression rather than individual merit.

She said that the individuals studied will specifically claim that they work harder at their jobs and will point to struggles from their lives to make the claim, "'Oh, you say I have this privilege and that's unfair, but actually look at these other things in my life, they kind of counteract or they kind of balance it out. It's all a wash.'"

Dr. Phillips also connected this mindset to a tendency toward classist and racist beliefs. . . . Dr. Phillips explained, summarizing the mentality as arguing that "'I'm here in this position, someone else's in this different position. Rather than because the system is unfair or because I've benefited from something unfair, which would then threaten my self regard, instead it's easier for me to claim that there's actually some sort of difference between us that makes this all fair. . . . It's actually because this group is worse in some way, or this individual person is worse in some way.'"

In the study, Phillips and Lowery emphasize the importance of the meritocracy myth in creating these delusions.

"The ideology of meritocracy is woven deeply into the cultural fabric of American society," the authors write. "The very 'American dream' that attracts and attaches so many to America suggests that if one works hard enough, they can succeed, no matter their class or background. As a result, systemic inequity is a tricky subject for American psyches: while most Americans subscribe to meritocratic ideologies that abhor such inequity, many also benefit from inequities. To resolve this tension, we find that the class privileged specifically claim hardship and effort because these are symbols of merit: they help cover privilege in a cloak of meritocracy."

Until one admits they system is stacked in favor of the wealthy, real solutions will be difficult to achieve.

Hollywood’s Continued Diversity Problem

With the Academy Awards tonight, there will be much talk of Hollywood's diversity problem, with much focus on the lack of black actors among the nominees.  But in addition to the Academy's suggested racism is Hollywood's continued homophobia.  Both the Advocate and Towleroad look at the continued problem and point fingers at the system itself.  First, excerpts from The Advocate:

After the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the nominees for its 2016 Academy Awards, outrage followed. For the second year in a row, nominees in the four top acting categories (for best actor, actress, supporting actor, and supporting actress) are all white.

Charges of persistent racism spread like wildfire on social media in the #OscarsSoWhitecampaign. Jada Pinkett Smith, Spike Lee, and several other prominent people of color in the film and television industry vowed to boycott Sunday's Oscars ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

“These are all legitimate complaints,” says the Oscar-nominated actor Ian McKellen of the accusations of bigotry in Hollywood. McKellen suggests that actors of color aren't the only ones shut out of top honors. No openly gay man — including McKellen himself, twice nominated for an Academy Award, and one of our generation’s most impressive openly gay actors — has ever won an Oscar in the acting categories either. 

Commentators have taken Eddie Redmayne to task for playing a transgender woman in The Danish Girl. Redmayne, the film’s star, is a cisgender (nontrans), straight, white, British, Eton-educated actor who last year won a Best Actor Oscar for The Theory of Everything. For me, attacks against Redmayne seem similar to criticism of the Emmy-nominated transgender actress and advocate Laverne Cox for accepting the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the upcoming television restaging of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Advocacy and education can change the hearts and minds of liberals and conservatives alike. But, some will still hate certain kinds of marginalized people no matter what we say or do. That's why we need legal protections for all of us, even those that appear (often mistakenly) to lack the respectablity of the "model minorities." Moreover, all gender-variant people deserve protections, regardless of our identity and our expression — whether we're medically transitioning or cross-dressing. 

But, the attention paid to individual performers obscures the root of the issue. Just as I said in 1993, it's the system that's the real problem. The New York Times recently unpacked the considerable impediments to changing the Academy's system of voting and membership. Despite the influence of its (relatively new) black female president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, and the advocacy of Phil Alden Robinson, a progressive white director who serves as the Academy’s secretary, the organization’s bylaws pointedly prevent changes to many of its voting procedures and membership rules. 

A new report from the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that the film and television industry is mired in an out-of-control “inclusion crisis.” The structure of the Academy epitomizes this crisis. Its voting members are 94 percent white, 76 percent male, and, on average, above the age of 63. And the bylaws of the organization appear designed to keep it that way.

Fundamentally, changing the composition of those in power is threatening to the powerful because it means that eventually they must share power with the very same people that they systematically ignored, excluded, or promoted only as tokens.

  Towleroad looks at the homophobia issue in particular:

What started as a reaction to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ failure to nominate any actors of color for the second year in a row has expanded into a broader conversation about minority representation in Hollywood.

As more voices have emerged in that conversation, additional attention has been paid to the inequity which the LGBT community faces in the industry. While the Academy failed to nominate any person of color this year for an acting Oscar, it also failed to nominate any openly LGBT actors. . . . Yet, three were nominated for playing LGBTQ characters: Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as lovers in Carol and Eddie Redmayne for playing a trans woman in The Danish Girl.”

And this year is not an isolated year of exclusion for LGBT actors, as O’Keeffe notes
In the 10 years since Crash beat Brokeback Mountain for the best picture Oscar, things have improved little for movies about trans or queer characters. Only four movies about LGBTQ protagonists have been nominated for best picture: Milk, The Kids Are All Right, The Imitation Game and Black Swan. (Dallas Buyers Club‘s protagonist, played by Matthew McConaughey, is straight.) That number looks all the lower in context.

Hollywood, it seems, has a big problem with the LGBT community; one of representation and inclusion. And some of Hollywood’s top talent agrees.

Academy Award-nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor recently commented that he thought it was “harder to be gay” than to be black in Hollywood. He told The Times, “Sexuality is still marginalized in a way that is pretty open. I think it’s tough.”

Ian McKellen went on record saying that the frustration felt by black actors in Hollywood is not so dissimilar from that felt by gay actors.

To rub salt in that already festering wound is another reality LGBT actors experience in Hollywood: when straight actors get cast to play gay characters, they’re called brave; when gay actors get cast to play straight characters, they’re called lucky.

On a personal note, I would like to add that much of what the statistics and stories shared by LGBT people in entertainment about Hollywood’s LGBT inclusivity problem rings true for me as someone who has worked in various roles in “the industry.” While there are voices of support in many corners—individuals who champion LGBT actors, business professionals and stories— the overarching hegemony is one which does not value actors coming out as L, G, B or T, marginalizes and pigeonholes actors who are out, and ghettoizes LGBT stories, treating them as universally “edgy”, “controversial”, “risky” and “dangerous.”