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98 Foreign Aff. 177 (2019)
What Is White America

handle is hein.journals/fora98 and id is 1279 raw text is: What Is White America? The Identity Politics of the Majority Nell Irvin Painter White Shift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities BY ERIC KAUFMANN. Abrams Press, 2019, 624 pp. White Identity Politics BY ASHLEY JARDINA. Cambridge University Press, 2019, 384 pp. Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland BY JONATHAN M. METZL. Basic Books, 2019, 352 pp. he U.S. presidential election of 2016 altered the prevailing American ideology of race. Donald Trump's coy, borderline white nationalism helped turn people who previously happened to be white into white people-coded as white in an essential way, just as, for instance, black people are coded as black in an essen- tial way. Many observers were slow to grasp the political ramifications of NELL IRVIN PAINTER is Edwards Professor of American History Emerita at Princeton University and the author of The History of White People. citizens who happen to be white voting first and foremost as white people. In the immediate aftermath of the election, commentators rushed to ascribe Trump's victory to economic disarray in the heartland and to a subset of voters lamenting their loss of jobs and stability. It took a couple of years for journalists, pollsters, and scholars to find a sounder explanation: by and large, most white Trump supporters were not voting out of economic self-interest; rather, they were resentful of social changes that threatened their taken-for-granted position atop a social hierarchy-despite the fact that the vast majority of those who held political power were white (and male), white families' wealth was still six and a half times as great as black families' wealth, and black families headed by college graduates had about 33 percent less wealth than white families headed by high school dropouts. Three new books seek to validate this explanation and to answer a few crucial questions. What do these white people want? According to these authors, they want Trump, Brexit, guns, tax cuts, Republicans, Social Security, and Medicare. More than anything else, they want to protect their place atop society. And what don't these white people want? Immigrants, Obamacare, and money for public schools. And above all, they don't want to be called bigots by multiculturalists; that kind of talk threatens them and encourages them to embrace white nationalism. They cannot imagine a multiracial society in which white people-however defined- peaceably take their place among others who are not white. And who are these white people? That's what these books are about, and November/December 2019 177

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