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AbstractFrom the nation's first non‐white President, to prevalent narratives of demographic change, a surging reactionary Right and emerging social awareness of white identity, the social context in which white Americans relate to whiteness and white privilege has changed since the early 1990s foundations of whiteness studies. In this article we review work on white Americans and whiteness generally to grapple with their (dis)positions within, and provide a roadmap for sense‐making through, recent cultural and racial‐political developments. We begin with an overview of now canonical critical‐theoretical scholarship, set in the context of other (more limited) empirical work about specific white American subgroups. We highlight how these related, frequently overlapping, though certainly non‐synonymous tracks of inquiry into whiteness and white Americans have since evolved, emphasizing that iterative exchange between them may best situate potentially different, cross‐cutting orientations toward whiteness and privilege held by various contemporary American whites. We then focus our discussion on several socio‐historical developments that will have significant, if somewhat uncertain implications for the reproduction, possible transformation, and study of white America in coming years. Specifically, we detail literatures surrounding recent questions upon the shapes of the white color line, contemporary white nationalisms, and prospects for white antiracism.

This article discusses continuities between the discourse of caste in ancient India, the racialization constitutive of the Enlightenment, and a similarly exclusionary, overdetermined conception of worthlessness—the lazy, immoral, deviant minorities—evident in contemporary racism as much as in the abandonment of a global underclass. We argue that the negative marking of a social condition or group as inferior and subhuman (on all kinds of grounds, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual) has been constitutive of the paradigms in which these societies subsist. The practices and project of all that is good is shadowed by this negative, its infectious, abominable presence. Analytically bringing together the politics of the homo sacer with the social psychology of abjection, we argue that such exclusion is as vested in politics and economic interests as in their psychic correspondences.

In his landmark work, Richard Alba predicted that white ethnicity would fade into its twilight in the twenty-first century. Where direct inquiries into American white ethnicity have been scant since the millennium's turn, the authors use recently collected (2014), nationally representative survey data to systematically assess "postmillennial" white ethnic identification. In particular, the authors explore the prevalence of whites identifying with ethnicity today, how this compares with other groups, and how drivers of white ethnic affiliation may have shifted in recent years. The data show that all ethnic claims have declined in the twenty-first-century United States, but the retreat from ethnicity has been accelerated among whites. By the authors' estimates, only 8.4 percent of whites still claim ethnicity. The authors also find that white ethnic affiliation is now most substantively driven by racial ideology, experience, and perceived victimhood, though some demographic markers remain important. Further analyses show that remaining American white ethnic claimants now perceive white cultural advantages while simultaneously seeing themselves as victims of racial discrimination at rates that rival reports of nonwhites. In sum, these data suggest that white ethnicity has declined but not disappeared as a socially intelligible boundary claim in the postmillennial era and that it has developed as a racialized expression that holds implications for understandings of contemporary white identities, racisms, and resentments.