Meritocratic belief blinds white Americans to network advantages they received

Evidence

Our racial habits hide this advantage. Americans of all colors insist that individual initiative and hard work are the keys to success. We believe in meritocracy, because we like to believe in the power of our abilities. But favoritism shows that this kind of robust individualism blinds us to the way social networks reproduce inequality: white individuals benefit from being part of white social groups. Nancy Ditomaso, Rochelle Parks-Yancy, and Corinne Post interviewed 246 randomly selected whites from New Jersey, Ohio, and Tennessee, and they said as much. As one white respondent said when asked whether he earned his place in life: “Did I earn it? Yeah, I worked for what I’ve got. Definitely. Nobody gave me nothing. Nothing.” But this wasn’t actually true. His father and his father’s friends connected him with the construction union and helped him find better work. His social network gave him the opportunity, but talk of individual initiative and hard work rendered the advantage the network provided invisible to him. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 158

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: White middle-class parents framed suburban privilege as earned individual reward, erasing government-sponsored segregation — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 42