The Politics of Whiteness presents the first sustained analysis of white racial identity among workers in what was the South's largest industry--the textile industry--for much of the twentieth century. Grounding her work in a study of Rome, Georgia, and surrounding Floyd County from the Great Depression to the 1970s, Michelle Brattain paints a richly textured local portrait of how the varied social benefits of whiteness shaped the experience of textile millhands and, as a result, Southern politics. In doing so, she challenges traditional views of Southern politics as dominated by elites and marked by passivity among Southern workers. Brattain uncovers considerable white working-class political influence and activism for decades starting in the 1930s--which, by re-creating and defending Southern institutions grounded in the idea of racial difference, helped pave the way for resistance to the civil rights movement. Structured chronologically, this book revises the current understanding, in the Southern working-class context, of paternalism, the New Deal, the 1934 General Textile Strike, the Second World War, and the Fair Employment Practices Commission. It addresses the vast influence of Eugene Talmadge and his son in twentieth-century Georgia politics, and the emergence of Republican influence in the South. Finally there came the moment when formerly explicit defenses of white supremacy were transformed into an intangible, but still powerful, politics of whiteness. The Politics of Whiteness will interest anyone concerned with the history of American politics, the labor movement, or race in America.

In The Politics of White Rights, Joseph Bagley recounts the history of school desegregation litigation in Alabama, focusing on the malleability and durability of white resistance. He argues that the litigious battles of 1954-73 taught Alabama's segregationists how to fashion a more subtle defense of white privilege, placing them in the vanguard of a new conservatism oriented toward the Sunbelt, not the South. Scholars have recently begun uncovering the ways in which segregationists abandoned violent backlash and overt economic reprisal and learned how to rearticulate their resistance and blind others to their racial motivations. Bagley is most interested in a creedal commitment to maintaining "law and order," which lay at the heart of this transition. Before it was a buzz phrase meant to conjure up fears of urban black violence, "law and order" represented a politics that allowed self-styled white moderates to begrudgingly accept token desegregation and to begin to stake their own claims to constitutional rights without forcing them to repudiate segregation or white supremacy. Federal courts have, as recently as 2014, agreed that Alabama's property tax system is crippling black education. Bagley argues that this is because, in the late 1960s, the politics of law and order became a politics of white rights, which supported not only white flight to suburbs and private schools but also nominally color-blind changes in the state's tax code. These changes were designed to shield white money from the needs of increasingly black public education. Activists and courts have been powerless to do anything about them, because twenty years of desperate litigious combat finally taught Alabama lawmakers how to erect constitutional bulwarks that could withstand a legal assault.

Immigration has been at the heart of US politics for centuries. In Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics, Yalidy Matos examines the inherent moral, value-based, nature of white Americans' immigration attitudes, including preferences on local immigration enforcement programs, federal immigration policy, and levels of legal immigration allowed. Does identifying as white always signify a commitment to maintain the racial status quo or can it result in commitments to racial justice? How do we understand the passage of state-level sanctuary and anti-sanctuary immigration legislation through a white identity political lens? Thinking about whiteness as a moral choice complicates the idea that immigration policy preferences are mostly about demographic shifts. To examine the centrality of morality in white Americans' immigration attitudes, Matos looks at public opinion survey data as well as the roll call votes of elected officials. She examines the conditions under which white Americans choose to reproduce a system structured on white supremacy or repudiate it, as well as the role of socialization in their choices and immigration attitudes. As immigration continues to be weaponized to divide, Matos highlights the importance of understanding the roots of immigration attitudes in the United States and the ways in which whiteness structures these attitudes.

The murder of Stephen Lawrence led to the widest review of institutional racism seen in the UK. Sections of the white working-class communities in south London near to the scene of the murder, however, displayed deep hostility to the equalities and multiculturalist practice of the local state and other agencies. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, this book relates these phenomena to the 'backlash' to multiculturalism evident during the 1990s in the USA, Australia, Canada, the UK and other European countries. It examines these within the unfolding social and political responses to race equalities in the UK and the USA from the 1960s to the present in the context of changes in social class and national political agendas. This book is unique in linking a detailed study of a community at a time of its critical importance to national debates over racism and multiculturalism, to historically wider international economic and social trends.

Amidst discontent over diversity, racial identity is a lens through which many US white Americans now view the political world.

In Trump, White Evangelical Christians, and American Politics, political scientists Anand Edward Sokhey and Paul A. Djupe bring together a wide range of scholars and writers to examine the relationship between former President Donald Trump and white American evangelical Christians. They argue that, while this relationship—which saw evangelicals supporting a famously unfaithful, materialistic, and irreligious candidate despite self-defining in opposition to these characteristics—prompted many to wonder if Trump himself transformed American evangelical religion in politics, this alliance reflected both change and the outcome of dynamics that were in place or building for decades. Contributors contextualize the Trump presidency within the story of religious demographic change, the growth of politicized religion, nationalistic religious expression, and the ways religion and politics in the United States are enmeshed in the politics of race. These investigations find that the idea of religious “transformation” is not accurate. Instead, the years 2015 to 2022 saw mainly minor changes to the ways religion appeared in public life—but these changes ultimately complemented and advanced an existing white evangelical strategy to increase political and social power as they became a demographic minority in the United States. Taken together, this collection reveals new insights for readers seeking to understand the religious dimensions of Trump’s rise, the reasons evangelicals become political activists, and the multifaceted alliances between secular politicians and conservative religious subcultures. Contributors: Abraham Barranca, Ruth Braunstein, Ryan P. Burge, David E. Campbell, Jeremiah J. Castle, Paul A. Djupe, John C. Green, Sarah Heise, Geoffrey C. Layman, Andrew R. Lewis, Gerardo Martí, Eric L. McDaniel, Napp Nazworth, Shayla F. Olson, Enrique Quezada-Llanes, Kaylynn Sims, Anand Edward Sokhey, Hilde Løvdal Stephens, Kyla K. Stepp, Allan Tellis.

"Dismantling White Privilege critically interrogates whiteness across contexts, from the experiential level to the different ways in which whiteness is deployed in contemporary cultural politics. The editors and contributors contend that "marking" whiteness is an important step in dismantling white privilege within the context of concerns for equity and social justice. Significant to this anthology is linking analyses of whiteness to the discourse of critical pedagogy, especially around constructing "pedagogies of whiteness." Investigating whiteness in its many manifestations, Dismantling White Privilege represents a necessary advance concerning the intersection among race, culture, and pedagogy."--Page 4 of cover.