White Racial Identity Research Articles

“I Never Think about My Race”: Psychological Features of White Racial Identities

This study examines the ways that middle-aged white adults in a midwestern city talk about their own racial identity. Because race is a social identity that is so often viewed as “belonging” to people of color, this study assesses the ways that white participants responded to interview questions that asked specifically about racial identity. Twenty-three interviews were conducted with white graduates of the same high school in the Midwest when they were in their 50s. Qualitative analyses yielded codes that indicated denying any white racial identity or not understanding the question, experiencing white privilege, witnessing white privilege, and white guilt. Many expressions of white privilege were accompanied by ambivalence and anxiety.

The End of an Idyllic World: Nostalgia Narratives, Race, and the Construction of White Powerlessness

We examine the experiences of whites displaced by racial change by focusing on the ways in which nostalgia narratives are used to construct and maintain white racial identity in an era of color-blind discourse. Expanding on the analysis of nostalgia as a tool to create identity in response to a loss in one’s place attachment, we explore how nostalgia is used in constructing and maintaining contemporary forms of whiteness. Based on data from in-depth qualitative interviews, we find that nostalgia narratives are useful in framing white racial identity along the themes of innocence and virtuousness as well as powerless and victimhood. In the shared storytelling of this nostalgic past, whites create a present that plays by color-blind rules, while reproducing, reiterating, and strengthening whiteness.

Student Teaching Experience in Diverse Settings, White Racial Identity Development and Teacher Efficacy

This study examined how diversity of field placement affected White student teachers’ White racial identity(WRI) development, and the relationship between WRI and teacher efficacy. There was no change in WRIdevelopment regardless of placement; however, as the percentage of students of color in the placement increased,two subscales (instructional strategies, classroom management) of the Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES)decreased. A negative correlation existed between WRI (Pseudo-Independence and Contact subscales of theWhite Racial Consciousness Development Scale-Revised) and subscales of the TSES. Results indicate thatteacher preparation programs critically examine Whiteness and WRI as a construct.

“I Don’t See Color”: The Impact of Field Placements on Preservice Teachers’ White Racial Identity Development

The purpose of this mixed-method study was to examine the influence of diverse field placements on the Whiteracial identity development of White preservice teachers (n = 92) placed in schools where the student body waseither predominantly White or students of color. Using Helms’s theory (1995) of White racial identitydevelopment, we selected instruments that measured participants’ awareness of racism, as well as theirconsciousness about being White (e.g., Color-Blind Racial Attitude Scale and Psychosocial Costs of Racism toWhites Scale). Preservice teachers in nondiverse settings became less aware of racial issues at the end of thefield experience. Using pretest scores as covariates, an analysis of covariance indicated that those in morediverse settings had higher levels of White guilt at the end of their field experience. The qualitative results alsoshowed differences in perceptions based on field placements, thus supporting the quantitative findings.Participants were asked how the diversity in their fieldwork placement affected their thoughts about their ownethnic background and social status. For those placed in diverse settings, the most common theme that emergedwas the contrast between the characteristics of the students and one’s own family and personal characteristics(e.g., wealth, ethnicity). The results suggest that more than exposure to diverse students is needed to evokechanges in White racial identity in order to prepare preservice teachers to effectively teach students of color.

The short-term effect of a race-related course on racial identity of White students

This study examined the short-term impact of taking a race-related course on white teacher education students' racial identity attitudes. The study compared a sample of preservice and inservice teachers in the United States taking a race-related course to a comparison group of students taking a non-race-related course. Students completed Helms' White Racial Identity Attitude Scale as a pre- and posttest. Findings indicated that the course had a positive effect on student understanding of racial issues.

Constructing critical autoethnographic self-studies with white educators

Autoethnography was used as a tool for white in‐service elementary teachers to examine their racial identity from a Critical White Studies (CWS) perspective. Two white in‐service teachers participated in two yearlong university courses focused on teaching linguistically and culturally diverse students. Each teacher collected their own data at their school site and used autoethnographic methods to critically analyze their own teaching experiences and personal reflections. Results from the study illustrate the ways in which autoethnographic study can be used as an instrument for white teachers to frame their own critique of their white racial identity, as it relates to their classroom instruction.

Identity Form Matters: White Racial Identity and Attitudes Toward Diversity

Previous research has drawn mixed conclusions regarding the relationship between White racial identity and attitudes toward diversity. We propose that identity form may help to disambiguate this relationship. In the present study, White participants wrote brief essays and were grouped based on their exhibition of one of three White identity forms: power-cognizant, prideful, or weakly identified. These groups were then compared on measures of White identification and attitudes toward diversity. A power-cognizant identity was associated with more pro-diversity attitudes than a prideful identity, despite equivalently high identification. A weakly identified form was associated with low identification and relatively neutral attitudes toward diversity. The findings suggest that, when predicting Whites' attitudes toward diversity, identity form matters.

Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies: A.K. Chesterton and The New Unhappy Lords

The internationalization of political antisemitism in the postwar period has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Studies of organized political antisemtism and far right extremism in postwar Britain has similarly suffered from a lack of focus on the increasingly transatlantic nature of the phenomenon. American scholars meanwhile have determined that the impetus for the ideological transmission of repackaged antisemitic tropes shifted from the Old World to the New after 1945. This article seeks to redress the balance by presenting a detailed case study of the Anglo–American activities of Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, the doyen of conspiratorial antisemitism in postwar Britain. Chesterton was the author of The New Unhappy Lords, which provided the far right on both sides of the Atlantic with a cogent and coherent antisemitic critique of the forces perceived to be driving globalization and which he believed threatened white racial and cultural identity. This article explores the importance of The New Unhappy Lords on a national and international level, assessing its impact on the far right in the United States before moving to locate its importance in terms of the contemporary debate within the transatlantic far right as to who or what constitutes the greatest threat to white racial survival, Islam or Judaism.

Show Me Your Papers! Obama’s Birth and the Whiteness of Belonging

In the wake of Barack Obama's 2009 ascension to the White House, stories questioning his citizenship slowly trickled into the mainstream. By 2011, “Birtherism”—the belief that Obama is constitutionally disqualified from holding Presidential office—was a principle aspect of public discourse. Through an analysis of online comments in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I analyze how dominant understandings of citizenship, race, class, and civil rights structure public navigation of “Birther” claims. I find the presence of several “narratives of belonging”—shared stories that people socially construct to account for who they are, how the world works, and where different people belong. These narratives reveal the sustained conflation of citizenship with an ideal or “hegemonic” form of white racial identity.

Phenomenal Woman

Janet E. Helms has been nominated by her peers as influential in the field of counseling psychology and beyond. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors based on her contributions to multicultural issues, specifically race and culture. She is well known for her exceptional mentoring to next generation of counseling psychologists. Helms’ People of Color and White Racial Identity Theories continue to inspire and influence generations of researchers. Helms’ scholarship has encouraged investigation of the impact of race and racial identity on a variety of areas such as assessment, counseling, career, teaching and training, education, health, trauma, gender, and legal issues.

Making Huckleberries: Reforming Science and Whiteness in Science in the Capital

In the novels of his Science in the Capital series, Kim Stanley Robinson explores how a United States experiencing radical climate change could produce a reform of white racial identity. This project is accomplished within a fiction dramatizing the relationship between the ordinary practice of science and its institutional position in American politics. The narrative prompts a single white-male scientist to reexamine his intellectual and social investments, allowing the author to recast the kind of social and political work that science can do. The potential for a post-capitalist subject who is differently raced in relation to the land and to others is proposed.

The Two Different Worlds of Black and White Fraternity Men

There has been limited empirical research on how individuals “do privilege.” As a result, our understandings are incomplete about how high-status groups continue reaping the benefits of privilege. Using data from fifty-two men in three white and four black fraternities at a predominately white institution, this paper demonstrates that visibility and accountability function as mechanisms of privilege. Because of a large community size, central fraternity house, and influential alumni, white fraternity men are afforded a hyper level of invisibility and unaccountability. Because of the small black community and the obligation black fraternity men perceive having to be the ideal black student, they reap a hyper level of visibility and accountability based on expectations from and interactions with a host of others (e.g., university officials, white students, black community, women). By showing how high-status whites epitomize an ideal white racial identity and preserve inter- and intraracial boundaries, we advance theoretical discussions on hegemonic whiteness.

Relationship between Knowledge, Stereotyping, and Prejudice in Interethnic Communication

This study describes, analyzes, critiques, and synthesizes four theories pertaining to inte- rethnic communication: the contact hypothesis, Anxiety/Uncertainty Management Theory, Cultural Theory, and the White Racial Identity Development Model. All center on the relationship between knowledge, stereotyping, and prejudice. What is valuable about those theories is that they attempt to integrate communication into a perspective on cultural, behavioral, social, interactional, and de- velopmental transformations. What the four theories have in common is that the understanding and development of healthy interethnic relations and fl exible interactions require a high degree of in- group communication and, at the same time, an equally high degree of out-group communication. To corroborate the major arguments put forward in this study, relevant research studies (and the methodological underpinnings thereof) are analyzed. Three levels of knowledge (highest level of knowledge, middle level of knowledge, and lowest level of knowledge) are also compared in an attempt to confi rm, or disconfi rm, the idea that increased knowledge of minority groups increases liking of such groups..

The Racial Identity Development of Male Student-Athletes When Blacks Are the Majority and Whites Are the Minority

Focus groups were used in the present study to explore the racial identity development of Black male and White male student-athletes on a predominantly Black, Division IA football team at a predominantly White institution (PWI). Findings indicate that the Black male football players demonstrated positive indicators of Black racial identity. The White male football players were at various stages of White racial identity development, but in general their experiences were positive as well.

The Men and Women We Want: Gender, Race, and the Progressive Era Literacy Test Debate

Jeanne D. Petit's new monograph on Progressive Era debates over immigration restriction through the lens of the literary test is a well-researched, thoughtful, and provocative addition to the historiography. Petit is one of the first historians of this subject to focus on the intersection of gender and race as central, intertwined elements in the arguments for and against immigrant restriction. She is also one of the first historians to de-center the forces that promoted immigration restriction—namely the Immigration Restriction League (IRL)—and to highlight instead the groups that fought exclusion. In her monograph both the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers (AAFLN) and the Immigrants’ Protective League (IPL) take center stage in the literacy test debate, and the interplay among the three groups helps Petit tease out the ways racial thinking, gender constructs, sexual ideologies, and visions of an activist state intertwined in this discourse. Petit grounds her work in the “racial nativism” analysis pioneered by John Higham and utilizes “whiteness studies” to discuss the shifting meaning of white racial identity, but she points out that “most historians of immigration restriction … have not systematically considered” how much the discourse in immigration restriction utilized ideas about gender and sexuality (pp. 9–10). One of her central arguments is that those involved in the literacy test debates “used ideologies of manhood, womanhood, and sexuality to infuse their arguments about race with greater power,” and they deployed these to “either amplify or diminish the racial threat that southeastern European immigrants were believed to pose” (p. 11).

COLOR CAPITAL, WHITE DEBT, AND THE PARADOX OF STRONG WHITE RACIAL IDENTITIES

AbstractThis article examines how meaning is made of White racial identity by comparing two White racial projects assumed antithetical—White nationalists and White antiracists. While clear differences abound, they make meaning of Whiteness and racial “others” in surprisingly similar ways. Racial identity formation is structured by understandings of Whiteness as dull, empty, lacking, and incomplete (“White debt”) coupled with a search to alleviate those feelings through the appropriation of objects, discourses, and people coded as non-White (“Color capital”). Drawing from in-depth semi-structured interviews, fourteen months of ethnographic observations, and content analysis, this article demonstrates how the prevailing meanings of Whiteness, not their antithetical political projects or material resources, enable racial identity management. By examining seemingly antithetical White formations, the article illuminates not only striking differences but how divergent White actors similarly negotiate the dominant expectations of Whiteness.

Predictors of White Adoptive Parents’ Cultural and Racial Socialization Behaviors With Their Asian Adopted Children

This study investigated the role of White racial identity statuses, cultural and racial socialization beliefs, cultural socialization self-efficacy, and racial socialization self-efficacy in predicting White adoptive parents’ (N = 200) cultural and racial socialization behaviors with their Asian adopted children. Only cultural and racial socialization beliefs contributed to the prediction of socialization practices. In addition, we examined whether cultural and racial socialization self-efficacy would moderate the relationship between parents’ cultural socialization and racial socialization beliefs and behaviors; there was no support for cultural or racial socialization self-efficacy as moderators in the beliefs–behaviors relationships. Finally, findings revealed that parents were more involved in cultural socialization than racial socialization behaviors, although they did not engage frequently in either type of socialization behavior, particularly racial socialization.

Inward, Outward, Onward

This article presents the connection of a personal dissertation process to the wider world of qualitative research. Using the concept of transitional space as a metaphor, the author chronicles her theoretical transition from critical race theory to poststructural theory to emerging questions about material feminism. This transition is mapped to three major qualitative research moments within the field: modernist, crisis of representation, and the future. Autoethnography and found text are used to present the micro- and macro-telling of the dissertation process. White racial identity development among Christian teacher educators at a religious university was the original dissertation focus. Ethical dilemmas that emerged during the data collection process, presenting the researcher with a theoretical crisis, needed to be addressed.

Conrad's Creole Family Romance and "A Smile of Fortune"

Conrad's Creole Family Romance and "A Smile of Fortune" Christopher Gogwilt (bio) "A Smile of Fortune," critics generally agree, "has something to hide."1 Indeed, it seems to have many things to hide, and it seems to be hiding them ostentatiously behind the "smile" of the title. There are the biographical facts of Conrad's seven-week visit to Mauritius that involve at least one romantic entanglement (with Eugénie Renouf), possibly another (with Alice Shaw).2 There is the social and economic significance of the Indian Ocean setting itself: the "Pearl of the Ocean" as "the more enthusiastic of its inhabitants" are said to call it (Twixt, 8). This ironic gesture, like the "smile" of the title, becomes all the more difficult to place the clearer its Mauritius setting becomes. There are then also the strangely distorted allusions to fairytale, fable, and romance patterns: what Cedric Watts calls the "protean, shifting complex of magic-invoking narratives;" what Jeremy Hawthorn succinctly diagnoses as "an anti-Cinderella" narrative; and what Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan calls "an anti-romance" (Watts, 132; Hawthorn, 105; Erdinast-Vulcan, 143). The biographical facts of Conrad's romantic affair(s), the sociology of the Mauritius setting, and the story's twisting of romance patterns all conspire to form a revealing family romance. Loosely adapting Freud's use of the term, "family romance" might apply all at once to Conrad's biography, to his fictional family romances, and also—above all—to the economy of reading romance at work in biography and fiction alike. It is the specifically Mauritian economy of the family romance of reading in "A Smile of Fortune" that interests me most here. Unique in Conrad's work, the Mauritius setting nonetheless reveals a racial economy of identity and identification in Conrad's work as a whole—from the interracial economy of the earlier Malay family romances (in Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands) to the white racial economy of the later European family romances in Malay settings (in Victory, "Because of the Dollars," and The Rescue). Constituting a [End Page 67] turning-point from the earlier mixed racial romances to the later white racial romances—and linked to the homosocial economy of white racial identity that structures the first-person autobiographical narrators of "The Secret Sharer" and The Shadow-Line—"A Smile of Fortune" reveals a unique, if also highly unstable Creole identification at the heart of all Conrad's family romances. By "Creole" I mean here, all at once, a specifically Mauritius sense of Creole identity (as discussed by Megan Vaughan) and also the historically ambiguous and changing senses of racial identity attached to the term's use with reference to the Americas. As an ethnographic designation, "Creole" may refer to the landholding European élite born in the Americas. This is how Conrad uses the term in Nostromo, referring to the "pure Creole families" (like the Goulds) and "the very type of the fair Spanish creole" (to which Decoud is compared)—where "pure" and "fair" connote a white racial identity, and specifically, in the second example, "that warm, healthy creole white which is never tanned by its native sunshine" (Nostromo, 64, 151). "Creole" may also, however, refer to those of mixed European, African, or other backgrounds not native to the Americas. Alongside these conflicting, indeed contradictory racial designations ("Creole" could designate a white racial identity, a mixed racial identity, or a black racial identity), there is also the linguistic sense of "Creole," referring to the various kinds of patois languages developed from the interaction of African, European, and native languages. It is with an emphasis on the cultural significance of the linguistic process of creolization that Caribbean writers (notably Kamau Brathwaite and Édouard Glissant) have transformed in turn theories of race and culture, fundamentally shaping postcolonial theories of creolization and hybridity.3 The Creole family romance of A Smile of Fortune brings together all of these different, conflicting, and contested senses of Creole.4 This makes the story all the more interesting, as perhaps the most tangible, if also least examined, historical link between Conrad's fiction and the Creole coordinates of postcolonial theory. There are a number of reasons...

Teacher educators under surveillance at a religious university

The purpose of this paper is to examine how institutional norms are enforced through surveillance and self-discipline among teacher educators at a religious university. The study builds on prior research regarding university norms and surveillance, as well as religious orientation and prejudice. Eight teacher educators met as part of a larger study on white racial identity and praxis. Focus groups and personal interviews were transcribed and analyzed using situational mapping, a postmodern form of grounded theory. Participants discussed four themes that illustrate surveillance and self-discipline: the university, academic culture, religion and whiteness, and sexism. The data reveal participant responses as highly structured by university norms about what one can and cannot say about particular topics. The results confirm the function of surveillance and norms in a university setting and illuminate the process in a religious context. Data reveal how fear played a part of the process, as participants disciplined themselves to fit university norms and censored themselves when they began to exercise agency.