White identity is the objective or subjective state of perceiving oneself as a white person and as relating to being white. White identity has been researched in data and polling, historically and in social sciences. There are however polarized positions in media and academia as to whether a positive white racial identity which does not diminish other racial groups is plausible or achievable in the Western world's political climate.
A 2016 New York Times piece, describing "a crisis of white identity", analyzed some of the complex political, economic and cultural interconnected factors involved with it:
The struggle for white identity is not just a political problem; it is about the "deep story" of feeling stuck while others move forward. There will not likely be a return to the whiteness of social dominance and exclusive national identity. Immigration cannot be halted without damaging Western nations' economies; immigrants who have already arrived cannot be expelled en masse without causing social and moral damage. And the other groups who seem to be "cutting in line" are in fact getting a chance at progress that was long denied them.
In April 2019, Associated Press covered activist Rashad Robinson's suggestion that 2020's Democratic Party candidates needed to do more than address white identity, by transforming privilege into action that tackled inequality. Defensiveness, or white fragility, have been described as a way of constructing a "blameless white identity".
In 2020, Julia Ebner, a terrorism and extremism researcher, outlined how the subsiding of alternative identities in individuals can cause white identity to become an "all-embracing" centralized medium for interaction in the world.
In a party-specific analysis, Jamil Smith, writing in Rolling Stone, has suggested that under Trump's leadership, "Republicanism is now inseparable from this corrosive notion of white identity." In 2019, historian Nell Painter stated that the Republican Party had been committed to white identity for decades, and since its Southern strategy.
In June 2019, CNN reported how calls by the identitarian movement to celebrate white identity were often accompanied by the incitement of violence against non-white peoples. Brian Levin, professor at California State University, San Bernardino, has described the promotion of white identity and anti-immigration stance as a repackaging of white supremacy. Academic Eddie Glaude has similarly proposed that any expression of white identity is a form of racial supremacism.
In 1990, the White Racial Identity Development by Janet E. Helms explored the perceptions and self-identification of white people.
Polling conducted by Democracy Fund in 2016, 2017 and 2018 found that 9 percent of church-attending Donald Trump voters described their white identity as "extremely important to them", whereas up to 26 percent, who did not attend church at all, reported the same. Political scientist Ashley Jardina's research has disclosed that around 40 percent of whites in America acknowledge some degree of white identity.
Indiana University's political scientist Christopher D. DeSante in 2019 developed How Racial Empathy Moderates White Identity and Racial Resentment. The model, which was analyzed by Thomas B. Edsall, is designed to gauge white identity in the contexts of resentment and empathy for non-whites.
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