• Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity - The New York Times
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/world/americas/brexit-donald-trump-whites.html

    Whiteness, in this context, is more than just skin color. You could define it as membership in the “ethno-national majority,” but that’s a mouthful. What it really means is the privilege of not being defined as “other.”

    Whiteness means being part of the group whose appearance, traditions, religion and even food are the default norm. It’s being a person who, by unspoken rules, was long entitled as part of “us” instead of “them.”

    Whiteness is becoming less valuable

    Michael Ignatieff, a historian and former Liberal Party leader in Canada, said that in much of the West, “what defined the political community” for many years “was the unstated premise that it was white.”

    The formal rejection of racial discrimination in those societies has, by extension, constructed a new, broader national identity. The United States has a black president; London has a Muslim mayor of Pakistani descent.

    But that broadening can, to some, feel like a painful loss, articulated in the demand voiced over and over at Trump rallies, pro-Brexit events and gatherings for populist parties throughout Europe: “I want my country back.”

    The mantra is not all about bigotry. Rather, being part of a culture designed around people’s own community and customs is a constant background hum of reassurance, of belonging.

    The loss of that comforting hum has accelerated a phenomenon that Robin DiAngelo, a lecturer and author, calls “white fragility” — the stress white people feel when they confront the knowledge that they are neither special nor the default; that whiteness is just a race like any other.

    Fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. And it can trigger a backlash against those who are perceived as outsiders.

    Even some conservative analysts who support a multiethnic “melting pot” national identity, such as the editor of National Review, Reihan Salam, worry that unassimilated immigrants could threaten core national values and cultural cohesion.

    The whiteness taboo

    For decades, the language of white identity has only existed in the context of white supremacy. When that became taboo, it left white identity politics without a vocabulary.

    If you are a working-class white person and you fear that the new, cosmopolitan world will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis.

    Some of these people have instead reached for issues that feel close to their concerns: trade, crime, the war on drugs, controlling the borders, fear of Islamist terrorism. All are significant in their own right, and create very real fears for many people, but they have also become a means to have a public conversation about what society’s changes mean for white majorities.

    #White_Fragility #whiteness #White_Identity #Malaise_blanc