White Identity Politics
by Ashley Jardina
(Cambridge University Press, £18.99)

STUDIES of the far right and white identity politics have much relevance in the contemporary political context, as the debates around the European elections have so powerfully illustrated.

White Identity Politics focuses on the US, which has its own particular history of racial injustices. But there are potential implications for Europe, including Britain in the context of Brexit, as Ashley Jardina suggests in the concluding chapter of this book.

Jardina’s argument centres on the inadequacies of mainstream explanations for the rise of white identity politics in the US in recent years, which cannot simply be explained in economic terms and the frustrations of a white working class, who’ve been dispossessed, marginalised and alienated in areas blighted by wholescale deindustrialisation. Wider sections of the population turn to white identity politics too.

Nor can the phenomenon be explained simply in terms of “out-group” hostility — resentments against those who are different.

Such factors have relevance but Jardina’s analysis identifies other additional factors in focusing on white group identity.

Those who identify with white group identity are not necessarily hostile towards other groups, she argues. They are certainly not all violent supporters of the Klu Klux Klan and they may even support social programmes that benefit blacks as well as whites, such as pensions programmes.

While recognising the privileges that being white has conferred on them, they are, though, far less likely to support welfare programmes that are perceived to benefit poor blacks disproportionately.

Jardina quotes African-American writer WEB Du Bois, who described the psychological wage paid to the white working class relative to their black counterparts in the inter-war period.

This was manifested in public deference and titles of courtesy and whites’ relatively more favourable treatment by the police and access to education.

In the media, the news flattered poor whites and almost utterly ignored black people except when it came to crime and as objects of ridicule. But this recognition of privilege doesn’t necessarily make whites particularly hostile per se.

The problems come, Jardina argues, when whites feel that their privileges are under threat and those threats may be real  or perceived.

This is more about how whites worry about their situations, whether in economic, political, social and/or cultural terms.

It is their subjective anxieties and insecurities that lead to their feelings of grievance and alienation and a sense of resentment that can so easily be mobilised by politicians from the far right including, of course,  Donald Trump, who’s skilled at playing on white fears of being outnumbered and displaced by immigrants, especially those aiming to cross the US border from the south.

Jardina estimates that between 30 and 40 per cent of white Americans share a strong sense of their identity as whites. Only a small minority of these support the far right, at least at present.

But this could change and the dangers are all too evident. The people who seem most likely to be persuaded by politicians from the far right include those with the least education, along with older people and those with authoritarian personalities, who tend to be supportive of existing social arrangements and hierarchies and  those with the least interest in looking outwards for social change.

Readers may not necessarily want to engage with all the evidence in detail — the book is based on academic research for a PhD thesis — but the overall arguments seem only too relevant in the current climate.