In two studies, the authors investigated guilt as a response to group-based advantage. Consistent with its conceptualization as a self-focused emotion, White guilt was based in self-focused beliefs in racial inequality. Thus, guilt was associated with belief in White privilege (Study 1) and resulted from seeing European Americans as perpetrators of racial discrimination (Study 2). Just as personal guilt is associated with efforts at restitution, White guilt was predictive of support for affirmative action pro-grams aimed at compensating African Americans. White guilt was not, however, predictive of support for noncompensatory efforts at promoting equality, such as affirmative action pro-grams that increase opportunities (Study 2). In contrast, the other-focused emotion of group-based sympathy was a more gen-eral predictor of support for different affirmative action policies. Our findings demonstrate the benefits and limits of group-based guilt as a basis of support for social equality and highlight the value of understanding the specific emotions elicited in inter-group contexts. World history, and six decades of social psychological research, suggest that social groups prefer to be at the top of societal hierarchies rather than at the bottom. For example, a great deal of work on ethnocentrism (for a review, see Brewer, 1986) and ingroup favoritism (for a review, see Mullen, Brown, & Smith, 1992) has shown that ingroups often create and defend advantages over outgroups. Beyond this understandable preference, however, we know little about how members of advan-taged groups actually experience intergroup inequality; very little research has examined how it feels to be advan-taged. It is typically assumed that members of advantaged groups feel good about their social position. Indeed, there is some evidence that the advantaged can experi-ence something akin to pride when they see themselves as superior to members of other groups (Branscombe & Wann, 1994; for a review, see Leach, Snider, & Iyer, 2002). However, there is reason to believe that those who are advantaged also might feel bad when systemic inequality illegitimately favors their group and disadvan-tages others (for a review, see Leach et al., 2002). For example, Shelby Steele (1990) has argued that Euro-pean Americans can feel guilty about the ways in which racial inequality advantages them and disadvantages African Americans. Such group-based guilt is debilitat-ing because it may undermine internal attributions for ingroup success (Branscombe, 1998) and may threaten the ingroup's identity as moral and good (Branscombe, Doosje, & McGarty, 2002). The possibility that members of advantaged groups experience their position relative to disadvantaged groups in different ways underscores the importance of group-based emotion in intergroup relations (Leach et al., 2002; Montada & Schneider, 1989; Smith, 1993). Intergroup emotions describe the specific ways in which