From The Conversation:

Donald Trump and the rise of white identity in politics

October 20, 2016 9.46pm EDT

Eric D. Knowles Associate Professor of Psychology, New York University

Linda R. Tropp Professor of Social Psychology, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Many political commentators credit Donald Trump’s rise to white voters’ antipathy toward racial and ethnic minorities. However, we believe this focus on racial resentment obscures another important aspect of racial thinking.

In a study of white Americans’ attitudes and candidate preferences, we found that Trump’s success reflects the rise of “white identity politics” – an attempt to protect the collective interests of white voters via the ballot box. Whereas racial prejudice refers to animosity toward other racial groups, white identity reflects a sense of connection to fellow white Americans.

We’re not the first to tie Trump’s candidacy to white identity politics. But our data provide some of the clearest evidence that ongoing demographic changes in the United States are increasing white racial identity. White identity, in turn, is pushing white Americans to support Trump.

White identity When we talk about white identity, we’re not referring to the alt-right fringe, the white nationalist movement or others who espouse racist beliefs. Rather, we’re talking about everyday white Americans who, perhaps for the first time, are racially conscious.

The concept of “garden variety” white racial identity stands in contrast to conventional wisdom. In the last three decades of scholarship on whiteness as a race, the prevailing view has been that most whites fail to notice their own whiteness. In a society dominated by white people, whiteness simply fades into the background. Just as fish fail to notice the water around them, whites are unlikely to think about how they are members of a distinct group.

Our research shows that the era of “white invisibility” is coming to a close.

Non-Hispanic whites are projected to become a minority in the year 2044. This increasing diversity across the country is making whites’ own race harder and harder to ignore. Political and social phenomena, from Barack Obama’s presidency to the Black Lives Matter movement, are making whiteness even more salient to white Americans.

Trump and white identity politics As whites increasingly sense that their status in society is falling, white racial identity is becoming politicized. …

To test our ideas about Trump and white identity politics, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of about 1,700 white Americans.

I haven’t been able to find this research.

The survey covered racial identities, attitudes and political preferences. In examining the relationship between white identity and ethnic diversity, we chose to focus on an ethnic minority of particular salience in contemporary politics: Hispanics. More than any other group, Hispanics have been in the Trump campaign’s crosshairs.

Do whites from heavily Hispanic neighborhoods show stronger white racial identity? To measure identity, we used a widely used questionnaire.On a five-point scale, participants rated their agreement with items such as “Being a white person is an important part of how I see myself” and “I feel solidarity with other white people.” As shown in the graph below, there is a positive relationship between exposure to Hispanics and white respondents’ sense of racial identity.

And does white identity lead to support for Donald Trump? We examined the relationship between white identity and respondents’ likelihood of supporting Trump for the presidency versus Hillary Clinton or several Republican primary challengers. Consistent with others’ analyses, white identity strongly predicts a preference for Trump.

Whites at the high end of the racial identity scale are more than four times as likely to support Trump than those at the low end of the scale. Perhaps that’s because whites highest in racial identity are also the ones most likely to harbor negative attitudes against Latinos. Indeed, we found white identity was significantly correlated with another characteristic – prejudice.

However, differences in prejudice don’t explain the relationship between white identity and Trump support. The pattern in the figure above was tested while statistically controlling for levels of anti-Hispanic prejudice. Because the relationship between identity and support for Trump remains strong, we are confident that white identity independently predicts greater Trump support.

We’ve seen that living close to Hispanics leads whites to develop a strong sense of racial identity and that strong racial identity is associated with support for Donald Trump. We should therefore expect whites in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods support Trump more often than those in neighborhoods with fewer Hispanics. This prediction gains credence from work by political scientist Ryan Enos, who finds that everyday exposure to Latinos can increase support for restrictive immigration policies.

Whites’ support for Donald Trump is, in fact, greatest in areas with a large Hispanic population.

We had participants rate their agreement with a series of statements. For example, “There is nothing wrong with a white person choosing to support a political candidate because that candidate is white” and “Blacks, Latinos, and Asians engage in ‘identity politics,’ and there’s nothing wrong with whites doing the same.”

Exactly the same patterns emerged for these questions as for Trump support: Endorsement of white identity politics was highest in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods and was strongly correlated with white racial identity. These results suggest that America’s growing ethnic diversity is creating a politicized form of white identity that has clear repercussions for future elections. …

There’s an Eric Knowles of virtually the same age as Professor Eric Knowles who was a utility infielder in the Yankees minor league baseball organization in the 1990s, but I think they are different individuals.

Baseball is kind of an Implicit White Identity pastime. In particular, Chicago Cubs fandom is a sort of white middle class marker: in the 1980s when most baseball teams didn’t want to be on TV for fear of hurting in-person attendance, the Cubs were owned by the Tribune Company, which pumped out 81 Cubs home games per year over cable TV superstation WGN. (The other team with a similar strategy was Ted Turner’s Atlanta Braves.)

This wound up making the friendly confines of Wrigley Field on the yuppie North Side into a national shrine of urbanism.

Personally, I lived within walking distance of Wrigley Field for 18 years. I always thought that the old Comiskey Park that the White Sox played in on the South Side was cooler looking than Wrigley, which is rather functionalist. On the other hand, the first time I went to a White Sox game on a company outing in 1983, as we were getting off the El at S. 35th St., a local welfare grandmother violently shoved our executive vice-president because he was trying to get off the train when she wanted to get on it.

So, Comiskey’s neighborhood was a little harder to deal with than Wrigley’s.

On September 30, 1990 a friend came from California to attend the last game at Comiskey. He managed to acquire two tickets for face value of $10 each. It was a fine game that included numerous agreeable features such as an all-time record and the two Ken Griffeys, father and son, playing next to each other in the outfield for the Mariners.

We ended up walking back to downtown Chicago on this perfect fall afternoon, picking our route at each street corner, deciding which way looked least ominous. That even in 1990 it was feasible to walk, gingerly, from Comiskey to the Loop should have alerted my gentrification instinct.