Whites who cannot celebrate their own status may define themselves by not being black.

Evidence

One possibility is that negational identities are the result of a motivation to escape low status or a strategy for bolstering self-esteem (Fein & Spencer, 1997). That is, if people are not in a position to celebrate who or what they are (e.g., poor, uncultured, unskilled whites), then they might be more likely to resort to celebrating what they are not (e.g., black). This might explain why negational identities may be more closely tied to out-group derogation than in-group favoritism. However, it is not clear whether membership in racist groups is associated with low socioeconomic status. Although Ezekiel (2002) reported that many of the neo-Nazi activists he interviewed came from poor homes, other research (Green, Strolovitch, & Wong, 1998) has found no relationship between hate-crime incidents and neighborhood economic status. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1116

Categorization

• XREF: Directly complicates the socioeconomic-deprivation account of prejudice familiar from the Frankfurt/Allport thread — the economic link is empirically disputed here. — connects to: White guilt stays low partly because privilege is hard to detect as an absence — Janet K. Swim and Deborah L. Miller, White Guilt: Its Antecedents and…, 134
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1116