“Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity”
“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.”
But national and racial identity were often conflated for the white majority…
That feeling of success may have provided a sort of identity in itself.
But as Western manufacturing and industry have declined, taking many working-class towns with them, parents and grandparents have found that the opportunities they once had are unavailable to the next generation.
That creates an identity vacuum to be filled.
“For someone who is lower income or lower class,” Professor Kaufmann explained, “you’re going to get more self-esteem out of a communal identity such as ethnicity or the nation than you would out of any sort of achieved identity.””
I clicked on this because of the line “ White anxiety has fueled this year’s political tumult in the West”.
It stopped me because I am so used to that sentence being used to describe brown people, full of mass irrationalities that create seething violence while the rational individual white people look on in astonishment and pity.
White people are so rarely Gazed at.
