The Making of White American Identity

Craig Calhoun, Arizona State University and LSE Ron Eyerman's account of whiteness is inevitably personal and necessarily informed by theory and history. His focus is not on the whiteness always already present since Europeans arrived, but on whiteness made and remade, especially in relation to cultural traumas like the Civil War. From the colonies through the KKK, race in the media, response to the Obama presidency, confrontation over Confederate statues in Charlottesville and the storming of the Capitol, Eyerman insightfully shows the centrality of whiteness to both meaning making and political mobilization. He concludes where we must begin, with the dangers posed by threatened, injured whiteness today.

Jeffrey Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University Ron Eyerman gives us a new and vitally significant understanding of 'whiteness'that it is not born but made. Always a latent identity, whiteness becomes a manifest one in response to the traumatic fearbaseless in objective termsthat people who share nothing but light skin tone are somehow being threatened with extinction. Eyerman is a brilliant intellectual and this book is a tour de force.

Choice The Making of White American Identity offers a thought-provoking analysis of the development of white racial identity in the US... the author's effort to unmask the roots of white supremacy in the US merits everyone's attention. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Social Forces Eyerman masterfully brings together analyses of how different forms of media and technologies, organizations, and subcultures, have undergirded the promotion and coordination of white nationalism across historical and contemporary moments... The Making of White American Identity is a must for scholars of race and culture. It is essential reading for anyone studying historical or modern white nationalist movements but is also valuable in a broader context... At its core, this book presents a strong case for seeing and intervening in the reality that whiteness has, again, and again, become a mobilizing resource for collective action-social action that reproduces and solidifies white supremacy in the United States.

Ron Eyerman is Professor of Sociology at Yale University.

Introduction Chapter One: On Trauma and Trauma Narratives Chapter Two: White Consciousness from Colonization to the Civil War Chapter Three: Representing and Organizing Whiteness Chapter Four: Racializing the Nation: Popular Culture and Whiteness Chapter Five: Voicing and Visualizing Whiteness Chapter Six: Whiteness in the Digital Age Chapter Seven: The Future of Whiteness in the United States Notes Index