White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America

Abstract

Since the groundbreaking work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists, and its unveiling of the white racial ideology of color-blindness, the study of whiteness has expanded. Yet in the decade following his work, inequality, disparities in schooling access, and residential segregation has widened. While many, if not most, sociologists would agree that US society is not “post-racial,” few have integrated the concept of a white racial identity into their analyses of inequality. Enter Margaret Hagerman’s White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America, which dives into the reality of color blind ideology and asks, how does this ideology persist? How do white kids develop racial identities? Hagerman boldly unearths the development of racial identities among white children, and the choices and justifications white families make that perpetuate inequality and entitlement. While Hagerman finds slight divergences around the choices parent’s make and the extent to which privilege and race are acknowledged, the vast majority of her sample believe they are not culpable for racial inequities. Hagerman uses two years of ethnographic study and interviews with upper-class white families in three southern neighborhoods (Sheridan, Wheaton Hills, and Evergreen) to illustrate identity making and the structure of whiteness.