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This chapter examines excerpts from speeches by and interviews with Sarah Palin while and after campaigning for vice president as she talks about the classificatory terms of motherhood and feminism to show how the Tea Party’s rhetoric functions as early public testing grounds for identity politics of white -<American-> outsiderism, naturalizing matriarchy and [white] maternal feminism. Using ideographs such as -<America-> and -<freedom of speech-> and classification of womanhood based on motherhood and “maternal feminism,” Tea Party figureheads like Sarah Palin use white nationalist arguments to target conservative white women. However, after limited public success, the Republican Party supports white women like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann as shield maidens for white political agendas by simulating unrealistic ideals of “having it all,” while not articulating systemic oppression. Affluent white motherhood, where white women exist as primary and default parent, serves as a performance of contained agency.

This chapter delves into the many issues that arise when the Korean adoptees explored and reflected on their multiple identities—namely their White cultural, racial, and transracial adoptee identities. The tensions presented themselves in a number of areas, including within the Korean adoptee community and the institution of transracial adoption, and with parents and spouses. The adoptees reflected on how their relationships with parents and spouses became increasingly strained the more they involved themselves in Korean adoptee issues as well as in topics dealing with race, racism, and White privilege. They also discussed the many tensions within the Korean adoptee community, especially regarding the differing philosophies on the institution of transracial adoption.

This chapter illustrates how and why Korean adoptees assimilated to a White cultural identity, especially during the childhood and adolescent years. Assimilation came naturally, as the majority was surrounded by Whiteness on a daily basis. Some were filled with the idea that White is “right” and Asian “wrong.” These adoptees developed a negative sense of themselves as Korean/Asian and expressed a desire to be accepted as White. Overall, the majority of the adoptees were happy in this state of “obliviousness.” While there were times when their White cultural identity was challenged, for the most part they were able to gain acceptance as “one of us” (acceptance as an honorary White) at least within their families and communities.

This chapter outlines how social identity is formed by groups as a means to create a positive social construct of themselves. Mississippians, white and black, during the sectional conflict, Civil War, and Reconstruction, fashioned new social identities as external events fractured and threatened the status quo. The resultant group identity culminated in a white social identity encapsulated in the Lost Cause that celebrated their American and Confederate heritage.

This chapter discusses the life and work of Jared Taylor, the leading American advocate of “race realism” and the claim that white people have legitimate and important racial interests that need to be both better articulated and publicly affirmed. Through his American Renaissance magazine, annual conferences, and videos, Taylor has set the intellectual standard for highbrow white racial advocacy and what is variously called “White nationalism,” “White identitarianism,” or simply the perspective of the “alternative” or “dissident” Right. Taylor’s thinking combines conventional conservative ideas regarding family and community, classical liberal and libertarian ideas regarding freedom of association and basic property and economic rights, and ideas championing ethnoracial homogeneity within nations and disdain for multiculturalism. His arguments are drawn from both historical experience and contemporary sociobiology.

This chapter traces the emergence and transformation of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). Evangelistic strategies created in caste-conscious India in the 1930s came to be deployed in American metropolitan areas decades later to grow white evangelical churches. During the 1970s, the CGM defined white Americans as “a people” akin to castes or tribes in the global South. Drawing on the revival of white ethnic identities in American culture, church growth leaders imagined whiteness as pluralism rather than hierarchy. The CGM allowed colorblind Christians to imagine that their segregated churches were benign expressions of American diversity in the years after the civil rights movement. In an age of white flight, the CGM helped to structure the evangelical mainstream as white, suburban, and middle class.

This chapter focuses on John Lindsay’s appointment of Robert O. Lowery to serve as the FDNY’s Fire Commissioner during the onset of one of the most tumultuous periods in the department’s history, “the War Years.” Within the department itself, the first half of “the War years were characterized by a highly racialized, contentious, internal struggle for institutional control that escalated throughout John Lindsay’s and Robert Lowery’s two terms in office. Efforts to reform departmental race relations, increase minority access and representation, and maintain fire protection levels were complicated by budget problems, escalating racial, political, and cultural conflicts; rising workloads; labor militancy; and white backlash.

This chapter chronicles the remergence of the Vulcan Society during the late 1990s and early 2000s and charts how the landmark case, U.S. v. City of New York, came to fruition. In particular, the chapter focuses then Vulcan President Paul Washington and the Vulcan Society’s various allies who after decades, helped bring the issue of racial discrimination in the FDNY before the courts. It closes with a discussion of the scope of victory secured through this case, as well as potential areas of struggle in the future.

This chapter looks at the Black experience in the FDNY during the last quarter of the 20^th Century. During this period, the City, fire department, and the fire unions all vigorously resisted efforts by the Vulcan Society and the United Women Firefighters to address structural and institutional racism and sexism. Black representation, after growing slightly and then stalling in the mid 1980s, receded slowly and steadily as the century closed.