The Disturbing, Surprisingly Complex Relationship Between White Identity Politics and Racism

The Disturbing, Surprisingly Complex Relationship Between White Identity Politics and Racism

In her new book, “White Identity Politics,” the Duke political scientist Ashley Jardina examines the increasing relevance of white identity in America. Drawing on data from American National Election Studies surveys and her own research, Jardina finds that about thirty to forty per cent of white Americans say that white identity is important to them, and she adds an interesting twist—that this group only partly overlaps with the group of white Americans who hold racist views. According to Jardina’s analysis, about thirty-eight per cent of white people who highly value their white identity are at or below the mean level of racial resentment, while forty-four per cent of white people who say their racial identity is less important are at or above that level. “For those invested in racial equality, this outcome should be of little comfort,” Jardina writes, of white Americans asserting their identity, with or without explicit racial resentment. In the past, she notes, when white people have been asked to share resources and power, they have not responded “by leveling the field; instead, they have expanded the scope of who is considered white, allowing the racial hierarchy to remain more firmly in place.”

I recently spoke with Jardina by phone. In our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed which voters exhibit the strongest feelings of white identity, how Donald Trump has unified different groups of white voters around his Presidency, and why some Americans who score low on tests of racism still identify strongly as white.

How has white identity changed over the past several decades?

One thing that’s different is how salient and politically relevant it is. We don’t have good public-opinion data going back in time to indicate that levels of white identity in the population have changed, or that now more people are identifying with their racial group than in the past. But what’s certainly clear is the extent to which white identity, or racial identity for some whites in the United States, matters for how they view the political and social world.

Think about white identity as being episodic and contextual. It’s politically relevant when something happens in the environment that makes it relevant, or when élites try to activate it, but it’s not always a force in politics in the way that we’re observing it to be today. If we could go back to the nineteen-twenties, in the wake of massive immigration to the United States, or if we could go back to the civil-rights movement, there are periods when there was a challenge to the dominant status of whites. There’s a possibility that the United States was no longer going to be defined by whiteness. These are places in time in which we might have seen white identity matter just as we’re seeing it matter today.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-disturbing-surprisingly-complex-relationship-between-white-identity-politics-and-racism