The Making of White American Identity

An account of the emergence and development of white consciousness throughout American history.In The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and under what conditions such a collective identification emerges, as well as how the mobilization of collective action around an ideology of whiteness and white superiority. Eyerman explores how the American identity was, and is still being established, through both historical and more recent events, including the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, the election of a Black president, the Charlottesville confrontation, and the violent conflict at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He further shows how each event revitalized the trauma narratives stemming from the nation's founding tensions, mobilizing social forces around the idea of white superiority and white consciousness. Tracing the historical contexts and social conditions under which individuals and groups move through this process, the author also looks forward at the prospects of the ideology of white supremacy as a political force in the United States.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
Ron Eyerman is Professor of Sociology at Yale University.

Review :
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. 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 fear—baseless in objective terms—that 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. 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. 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. This ambitious book provides an invaluable analysis of white collective identity that rejects the notion that whiteness is not a dominant social, cultural, and political force.