Recent discourse on white racial identity centers on the contemporary ‘crisis’ of whiteness – the progressive movements and their corresponding neoconservative backlashes. Taken at face value, whites are splintering into antagonistic groups, possessive of differing worldviews, resources and ideological stances. This perspective assumes a social continuum polarized by ‘racists’ and ‘anti-racists’. Additionally, our dominant narratives frame whiteness as a uniform racial category replete with social privilege and material power. This arrangement poses a puzzle: How do we conceptualize an understanding of white identity that accounts for the long-term staying power of white privilege alongside the heterogeneity and fracturing of whiteness? Animated by this background, this chapter presents a new theory of white racial-identity formation.

In what follows, I first present an abbreviated overview of the extant debates in contemporary sociological theory concerning white racial identity. Next, I advance my theory of ‘hegemonic whiteness’: how an ideal type of whiteness is actually shared between and across white racial actors in divergent social worlds. And third, I demonstrate how members of two white organizations commonly thought to be opposed and entirely different – a white nationalist group and a white anti-racist group – attempt to embody a shared ideal of white identity formation. They pursue that ideal through an ongoing process of inter- and intra-racial boundary construction. Members of both groups (1) use racist and reactionary narratives to make inter-racial boundaries (‘whites’ from ‘non-whites’) and (2) mark certain whites’ inability to adhere to dominant white expectations to make intra-racial boundaries (‘hegemonic’ or ‘ideal’ whites from ‘lesser’ whites’).