‘A learning process that never ends’: How advantaged social justice activists negotiate privilege and activism within their identity

Research shows that critically reflecting on ingroup privilege can motivate allyship. However, we lack a deeper understanding of how activists make sense of their privilege, how it contributes to their motivation to stay engaged, and how activism recursively affects the meaning-making of social privilege. Building on social representations and identity process theory, we explored the social representation of privilege among allies and the identity processes involved in reconciling with ingroup privilege. We conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with advantaged social justice activists (i.e., activists who are working in organizations to improve conditions for disadvantaged and oppressed groups). Applying thematic network analysis, we found convergent social representations of privilege but varying representations of its (systemic) roots, three types of identity threat elicited by privilege (morality, positionality and social threat) and four ways in which privilege relates to activism (privilege enables action, privilege is a responsibility to act, quest for meaning and relativizing the role of privilege for activism). A key insight concerns the prominent role of the coherence motive, which seems to help (re-)conceptualizing privilege threat(s) in a way that motivates dismantling systems of inequality. We discuss the need for further theorizing on the bidirectional link between allyship and privilege reflection.