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In a race sensitive society, how people racially identify and the salience of these identities influence their associations, including the churches they to choose to attend. This chapter explores the racial identities of interracial church attendees, and the role of racial identity for explaining who attends interracial churches.

This chapter provides evidence of the increasing visibility of whiteness to white people themselves. It explores a variety of responses by white people as they struggle to understand the full political and historical meaning of white identity today. Topics discussed include white women and identity, white antiracism, new traditions in Mississippi, and white doubleconsciousness.

The introductory chapter reviews the basic thesis of the book: whiteness (which includes the normativity of white culture, white privilege, and white structural dominance) governs how interracial churches work. Therefore, interracial churches work to the extent that they are first comfortable places for whites to attend. The chapter explains what is meant by whiteness and why whiteness matters. An historical overview of religious race relations in the United States is also provided. And the methods employed for this study are briefly reviewed.

When one realizes the indeterminacy of racial categories — their fluid borders, arbitrary criteria, and cultural variety — it may be tempting to adopt a nominalism about race, that race is no more real than phlogiston or witchcraft. This chapter resists this conclusion based on phenomenological grounds and insists that race is real. It explores reasons for the current confusion about race, considers various approaches to knowledge about race, and proposes a preliminary phenomenological account of racial identity as it is lived in the body of various racialized subjects at a given cultural moment. It is argued that only when we come to be very clear about how race is lived, in its multiple manifestations, and only when we can come to appreciate its often hidden epistemic effects and its power over collective imaginations can we entertain even the remote possibility of its eventual transformation.

This introduction suggests that the contours of the critical study of whiteness in order to convey a working knowledge of the scholarship is further explored in later chapters. It then follows by a brief account of the way studying white identity has come into vogue in the recent past and of the far longer and more important tradition of such study by intellectuals of color. The book is divided into three parts. The first part makes the case that the United States is “still white” from other angles. The second part invokes the past to show that the sway of whiteness is not inevitable, unalterable, or simple. The last section determines the areas in which recent history suggests new possibilities for looking at the past and the future.

This chapter explores how five dimensions of white racial identity are associated with one another and with white Americans’ racial attitudes. Drawing on data from the 2014 General Social Survey Identity Module, we first examine the relationships among five aspects of whites’ racial identities: prominence, salience, private self-regard, public self-regard, and verification. We then examine the implications of these aspects of racial identity for whites’ reported and preferred distance from, stereotypes about, and support for policies designed to benefit black Americans. In so doing, we contribute to the long-standing identity theory project of demonstrating how identities shape other elements of social life, including the construction and maintenance of social inequalities. We also contribute to the growing research literature on “whiteness” and its implications for intergroup relations in the United States.

Chapter 2 begins by surveying the literature on white racial prejudice and voting behavior. It shows that over the four presidential elections from 2004 to 2016, white hostility toward African Americans, Latinx immigrants, and Muslims became increasingly intertwined and formed the basis for what is defined here as a contemporary form of ethnocentrism as expressed in white outgroup hostility. The chapter confirms the results of other studies that have shown that while the effect of outgroup hostility on vote choice greatly increased in 2016, the level of outgroup hostility actually declined between 2012 and 2016. Therefore, to properly understand the political mainstreaming of racism over the 2010s, the chapter argues that one must not only consider the evolution of whites’ racial attitudes but also examine the processes by which outgroup hostility is translated into political participation. Chapter 2 introduces a theoretical framework that combines insights from social identity theory to understand changes in whites’ racial attitudes with theories of political participation originating from the social movement literature. The framework thus emphasizes the highly contingent nature of the relationship between white racial consciousness, outgroup hostility, and political mobilization. Specifically, the chapter outlines a model of the process by which racialized political narratives help activate a politicized white consciousness that leads to anger, expressed though outgroup hostility, and thus serves as the catalyst for political mobilization.

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.

Chapter 8 offers a thorough analysis of survey research data from the American National Election Study (ANES), the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), and the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group (DFVSG) to show that white outgroup hostility had a uniquely strong effect on vote choice in 2016. It provides evidence that outgroup hostility was as important in predicting vote choice as party identification. Although many people have argued that a major factor in Trump’s victory was increasing economic anxiety within the white working class, the findings presented offer evidence that economic anxiety had a relatively small direct effect on support for Trump. Rather, its effect was largely exerted indirectly, filtered through the primary effects of outgroup hostility toward blacks, Latinx immigrants, and Muslims. The influence of outgroup hostility is even more compelling when we consider its indirect effect on vote choice through its effects on party identification and ideology. This chapter most significantly (1) specifies the causal pathways that are suggestive of a process by which white identity gets politicized as what has been called white racial consciousness; (2) discusses how white racial consciousness is the result of the dissemination of racialized political narratives as propagated by race-baiting elites; (3) examines how this dissemination of racialized political narratives agitates attitudes of outgroup hostility; and (4) explores how that outgroup hostility was a critical factor in producing a winning Trump coalition that furthered the mainstreaming of racism right into the White House.

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.

During and after the Civil Rights Movement, GOP leaders capitalized on white racial angst to attract southern white voters. However, in order to do so without alienating Republicans nationwide, the GOP utilized coded language as an end-around of public displays of prejudice and championed an “us vs. them” cosmology. The decline of overt, Old-Fashioned Racism seemed positive, but the decline masked the persistence of white supremacist attitudes so dominant in the South. Since whiteness functions as a vantage point, supremacy can be maintained as long as the gap between whites and an “other” is also maintained. When denigrating minorities publicly was no longer socially acceptable, the GOP manufactured a host of increasingly threatening “others.” These common enemies catalyzed both an elevation of and a clinging to whiteness, which, in turn, preserved the “not-so-new” racial hierarchy key to southern white voters that only relative measures of racial animus can expose.

The GOP’s Southern Strategy initiated the realignment of the South with the Republican Party by exploiting white racial anxiety about social changes to the southern racial hierarchy. However, the GOP’s success was not solely the result of its policy position on civil rights. Rather, that decision was part of a series of decisions the party made on feminism and religion as well, in what is called here the “Long Southern Strategy.” White resentment toward a more level racial playing field, for example, was intensified by the threat of a level gender playing field, and the promotion of “family values” by anti-feminists paved the way for the Christian Right. Moreover, Republican candidates did not just campaign down South, they became “southern.” Throughout realignment, the power of southern identity was rarely taken into consideration, but for whites who proclaim themselves to be southern, that has been the only party that really mattered.

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.

The Long Southern Strategy was “long” because all three components of the strategy—choosing to exploit white racial angst, fear of feminism, and evangelical righteousness—were necessary to build a solid red base in the states of the old Confederacy. The stark polarization that resulted from these partisan choices unraveled the New Deal coalition. It also redivided white Americans not just along the Mason-Dixon line, but across the imagined fault line of southern identity. Thus, conservatism was redefined on the basis of white southern identity, and that definition became the baseline ideology of the Republican brand nationwide. A partisan sorting and realignment followed. As a result, the distribution of white Americans who harbor Racial Resentment or Modern Sexist attitudes or who identify as Christian fundamentalists is no longer even across the parties, and now, within the GOP, there is not enough opposition to fully suppress such prejudice or religiosity.

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.