How Whiteness Works: White Americans increasingly see themselves as a threatened ethnic group--and vote accordingly.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.
• Position: White Identity Politics - Book review

White Identity Politics

by Ashley Jardina

Cambridge University Press, 368 pp.

Conservatives and moderates are often dismissive of "identity politics," by which they mean liberal efforts to motivate voter turnout by raising issues of particular concern to women, people of color, and other marginalized groups in American politics. But it is important to remember that the original identity politics play was for whites. Long before women or people of color won the right to vote, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, a white supremacist, urged whites to rally around their racial identity. "With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black," he declared in an 1848 speech; "and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals."

Calhoun was far from the last American conservative to encourage white working-class people to vote their race rather than their class. But no successful modern candidate has done so as blatantly as Donald Trump did in 2016. The timing thus could not be better for Duke University political scientist Ashley Jardinas eye-opening book White Identity Politics, which uses extensive survey research to explore the meaning of white identity today.

Trump's election sparked a furious debate on the left: Was his popularity among white voters due more to racism, or to so-called economic anxiety? Extensive polling showed that racial resentment correlated much more strongly with support for Trump than did economic factors. But could tens of millions of Trump voters really be out-and-out racists?

Jardina helps make sense of these questions, in part by revealing that white voters can be motivated by favoritism toward their own group rather than hostility to others. Her central finding, based on polling, is that while 9 percent of whites are unabashed racists who hold favorable views of the Ku Klux Klan, a much larger group--between 30 and 40 percent of whites--feel a strong attachment to their whiteness. Whites who have high levels of white identity are not confined to the working class; they make up a "much wider swath of whites," and, perhaps surprisingly, are more likely to be women than men.

The distinction between in-group love and out-group hate is helpful. One can strongly identify as Muslim or Christian, or Irish or Greek, without being hostile to people who practice a different faith or whose ancestors come from a different...