Tag: Ashley Jardina

Chronicle File Photo Research on white Americans in political science has historically concentrated on racial prejudice, but a Duke professor is shifting the focus to white racial identity. Ashley Jardina, assistant professor of political science, provides a new perspective on race and racial attitudes in American politics in her book "White Identity Politics." "One is in fact racial prejudice; we know that racial prejudice still really informs a lot of white people's political preferences. But the second is also, independently, this desire that whites have to try to preserve their group's privileged status." To examine these trends, she analyzed survey data from the American National Election Studies and from her own research. She pointed to a couple of factors that have made white identity salient in recent years. One factor motivating the trend Jardina found in white identity is immigration and the consequent demographic shifts in the United States, she explained. "Subsequently, some whites are now much more aware of the importance of their racial identity.” Although racial prejudice is an out-group sentiment—when one group dislikes another group—white identity is an in-group sentiment about favoring your own group. It's motivated by wanting to just keep the power, the status, the privileges that you have and the things you benefit from as a member of your own group,” Jardina said. “Then this research became even more relevant in 2016 when Donald Trump entered the scene and was clearly actively appealing to whites and to their sense of identity," she said.

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. 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. There were people—mainly people who were interested in racial prejudice and racial resentment, some of whom were actually my advisers—who looked to see if white identity mattered in the mid-nineteen-nineties and in the early two-thousands, and this is a period in time in which the country was really different. How much of a connection is there between strongly identifying with whiteness and racist attitudes? It’s certainly the case that there are some people who identify as white and who are also racist. One is that there are a lot of white people who are more racially prejudiced who do not identify as being white, and the converse is true. One reason that we haven’t talked a lot about whiteness in the past is because whites don’t have to confront their racial identity the way that people of color in the United States traditionally have. I think we have an image in our minds of who this person who scores high on white identity probably is, like, a man from the South in a working-class job, and that’s not actually true. It’s not, “I dislike Latino people.” It’s, “I don’t like the idea that the country that I envision, the country that I grew up in, the place that is defined by this Anglo-Saxon culture, is somehow threatened by this new group. Even though some people might feel some attachment to a European heritage that at one point wasn’t considered white, the Anglo-Protestant sense of whiteness has been broadly painted as a “European” heritage.