Abstract
Why is racial and gender privilege such a difficult concept for Americans to accept? This research proposes that individualism in the United States has contributed significantly to resistance to the idea of racial and gender privilege. Past research has consistently shown that white people and males feel as though their hard work is being challenged when presented with the idea of privilege (Farrough 2003; Gallager 2003). While there have been many studies on privilege and how people react to the idea of privilege, they have almost exclusively been done qualitatively. The present research attempts to measure the effect of individualism on one’s ability to recognize privilege. The General Social Survey (GSS) asks several questions that can be interpreted to measure one’s level of privilege awareness and individualism. Logistic regression analysis of the 2012 GSS data reveals that individualism, as well as race, are predictive of one’s awareness of racial privilege. However, there were not any significant variables that predicted awareness of Gender Privilege. This may be the result of somewhat subjective measures of the Dependent variables (Racial and Gender Privilege Awareness) and the Independent variables (Individualism), thus showing the need for better measures and more quantitative privilege research.