“This dynamic of white people feeling very defensive when the question of race and white privilege comes up is something that I see a lot of, and I’ve definitely seen it in my personal life as well,” also admitting that “to some extent” she has experienced it herself.
Stovall tells Yahoo Life that she sees similar behavior often throughout her practice. “Some people really feel that whiteness is a kind of narcissism, in terms of the psychological mindset, and it kind of makes sense, because narcissists are all about projecting - and they have an extremely fragile sense of themselves.” This kind of behavior is something that’s being widely talked about, now out in public, as opposed to privately - but I think, obviously, it’s also something that people have been observing for centuries.”įurther, because the satisfaction that one gets from being right is often linked one’s self-image, “the idea that they would be questioned or scrutinized is completely intolerable, so there’s an aggression that they’re comfortable dishing out - but they also can’t withstand it at all,” she says. People are simultaneously trying to hold on to this idea that they don’t care that much, and yet it’s so incredibly activating for them. What’s interesting to Stovall about the extremity of some of the caught-on-tape meltdowns, she says, “is the degree to which people act out in ways that they never would act out around any other subjects. Stovall says that “what happens often is that once people start to really unpack why they don’t like the idea of white privilege or why they think it’s not valid, which is often a very emotional response, they wind up digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole.” That, she adds, often means saying things like “I don’t think that white privilege exists because it’s not as bad as it used to be,” “things are better now” or “why do we have to keep talking about this?” A lot of times, she says, “it’s a coverup for more dismissive attitudes about the experience of people who are Black and brown.”
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Update your settings here to see it.īut, Stovall says, “just because they’ve experienced cognitive dissonance doesn’t mean they try to resolve the dissonance.” In fact, she explains, that’s actually the opposite of what people do, while instead ‘they just try to arrange their thinking in a way that they don’t perceive the dissonance anymore.” She says some of the most common ways to do so is by denying that white privilege exists, minimizing it or trying to contextualize it, such as by instead blaming problems of race on the functions of class. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences.
She says that the research around the theory “emphasizes this idea that when people experience cognitive dissonance, they’re usually trying to lower it, and there’s a number of ways you can lower it, but one of the main ways is to deny that there is any cognitive dissonance at all.” So by crying and screaming, she adds, these people are often “trying to hold on to a sense of themselves as a positive contributor to society and not someone that could be criticized.”ĭelving deeper into the psyche of these women, Stovall says that much of the phenomenon can be attributed to cognitive dissonance, which is when a person’s beliefs and behaviors don’t align, causing them internal conflict. “I think what is going on underneath when somebody like that has a reaction,” she explains, “is defensiveness, and showing this sense of themselves as not a bad person, or not falling into a ‘bad’ category,” which, she says, is what most people understand “racist” to be.
Natasha Stovall, a clinical psychologist self-described on Twitter as a “white lady” who is “putting whiteness on the couch,” tells Yahoo Life that the “level of hysteria” the women in these viral videos seem to experience shows that they’re “very triggered in a way that is pretty extreme - some of which involves projecting this idea of being attacked,” while some is simply aggressively attacking other people.
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