Meritocracy, Self-Concerns, and Whites' Denial of Racial Inequity

Abstract We propose that embracing meritocracy as a distribution rule causes Whites to deny the existence of racial inequity. On this view, Whites who endorse meritocracy seek to regard themselves as high in merit, and maintain this self-view by denying racial privilege. Four studies show that preference for meritocracy better predicts denial of White privilege than anti-Black discrimination (Study 1), that the desire to see the self as meritorious mediates the relationship between preference for meritocracy and denial of privilege (Study 2), that this meritocracy–privilege relationship is moderated by Whites' need to bolster the self (Study 3), and that priming the meritocracy norm reduces perceptions of racial privilege among highly identified Whites (Study 4). Implications for the amelioration of social inequity are discussed. Keywords: Preference for meritocracysocial inequityWhite identityWhite privilege Notes 1. Importantly, the fact that the relationship between PMP and anti-Black discrimination was weaker than that between PMP and White privilege cannot be attributed to a difference in the reliabilities of the privilege and discrimination scales. Latent variable modeling serves to disattenuate associations for unreliability (Fan, Citation2003) and, moreover, the anti-Black discrimination and White privilege measures exhibited almost identical reliabilities. 2. It may also be the case that meritocratic norm endorsement mediated the relationship between idealization of merit and privilege beliefs. To test this, we ran another mediation analysis, this time with merit idealization as the predictor and norm endorsement as the mediator. When privilege beliefs were regressed onto merit idealization and norm endorsement, the relationship between merit idealization and privilege was significant, B = −0.18, SE B = 0.07, β = −0.18, t(208) = −2.60, p < .05, whereas the relationship between norm endorsement and privilege was not, B = −0.29, SE B = 0.19, β = −0.10, t(208) = −1.50, p = .14. The corresponding Sobel test failed to reach significance, z = 1.38, p = .17, casting doubt on the idea that norm endorsement mediated a relationship between merit idealization and privilege beliefs.