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Abstract
This review examines research on white racial and ethnic identity, paying special attention to developments in whiteness studies during the past decade. Although sociologists have long focused on white ethnic identity, considerations of white racial identity are more recent. White racial identity is commonly portrayed as a default racial category, an invisible yet privileged identity formed by centuries of oppression of nonwhite groups. Whiteness has become synonymous with privilege in much scholarly writing, although recent empirical work strives to consider white racial identity as a complex, situated identity rather than a monolithic one. The study of white racial identity can greatly benefit from moving away from simply naming whiteness as an overlooked, privileged identity and by paying closer attention to empirical studies of racial and ethnic identity by those studying social movements, ethnic identity, and social psychology.
Key Words race awareness, whiteness, racism
INTRODUCTION
Within the past decade, the study of whiteness has attracted a great deal of attention from scholars of such disciplines as history, cultural studies, and communications. Although the impact of this new intellectual movement has been less considerable among sociologists, there has nonetheless been a resurgence of interest in the study of whites as a racial group. This renewed interest reflects demographic changes in the racial makeup of the U.S. population, with increasing numbers of Asians and Hispanics resulting in a corresponding shrinking of the relative size of the white population, highlighting the existence of whites as a racial category rather than as a default identity. At the same time, sociologists of race and ethnicity have rightfully criticized the almost exclusive focus on nonwhites in studies of racial identity, implying that whites have no racial identity but are instead treated as the base group to which others are compared. It would be difficult to sustain such a critique today, as there has been a recent profusion of articles, monographs, and edited volumes on whiteness produced by sociologists.
In many respects, the relative drought of sociological research on white racial identity, per se, is ironic, as the study of European ethnicity among whites had been a bedrock of sociological research throughout much of the twentieth century, as evidenced by such classics as Thomas & Znaniecki (1927), Whyte (1943), and Gans...