(PS9-90) Navigating the Path from Racism Awareness to Antiracist Action: Uncovering the Influence of White Fragility

Background: Many White individuals endorse awareness of racial injustice and White privilege but often fail to catalyze that awareness into consistent antiracist action (Pieterse et al., 2016). By assessing potential moderators to the relationship between critical awareness of White privilege and engaging in antiracist action, we may then begin to explore points for intervention that foster antiracist behaviors in aspiring White allies. One identified obstacle for White allies is White fragility, a defensive response or denial of racism when confronted due to a perceived cognitive threat to one’s core values (Langrehr et al., 2021). White fragility encompasses three aspects: Emotional Defensiveness (emotional reactions to racial stress), Accommodation of Comfort (expecting others to accommodate their need for racial comfort), and Exceptionism (distancing oneself from Whiteness; Langrehr et al., 2021). Given the distinct categories that make up White fragility, we hypothesized that the relationship between critical awareness of racism would be moderated by the presence of (1) Emotional Defensiveness, (2) Accommodation of Comfort, and (3) Exceptionism in three distinct moderation models. By assessing the three facets of White fragility separately, we utilized a more nuanced lens to understand the unique effects of each type of White fragility on the association between awareness of White privilege and antiracist action.

Methods: White college students (n = 254; M_age = 22.9, 55.5% Cisgender Women) completed the Racial Allyship Characteristic Scale (RACS; Hinger & DeBlaere, 2024) and the White Fragility Scale (WFS; Langrehr et al., 2021). The RACS contains 3 subscales of which only two were utilized for this study: (1) Critical Awareness of White Privilege/Racism as our predictor variable and (2) Engaging in Antiracist Action and Skills as our outcome variable. The 3 subscales of the WFS were utilized as the moderator variables. Three simple moderation models were examined utilizing Model 1 of the PROCESS macro for SPSS (Hayes, 2017).

Results and

Conclusion: While all models exhibited significant main effects, only Exceptionism (model 3) moderated the association between critical awareness and antiracist action such that the relationship was significantly weaker at mean and higher levels of exceptionism (F [3, 250] = 40.41, p < .001). The interaction explained 2% of the variance in the outcome (β = −.13, t = −2.60, p < .001) and the total model explained 33% of the variance in antiracist actions. The study highlights the need for targeted interventions to address White exceptionism as a way to combat cognitive barriers to engaging in antiracist action for aspiring White allies. The full study results, implications, and future directions will be discussed in the final poster.