The Making of White American Identity

Product Description An account of the emergence and development of white consciousness throughout American history.In The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and under what conditions such a collective identification emerges, as well as how the mobilization of collective action around an ideology of whiteness and white superiority. Eyerman explores how the American identity was, and is still being established, through both historical and more recent events, including the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, the election of a Black president, the Charlottesville confrontation, and the violent conflict at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He further shows how each event revitalized the trauma narratives stemming from the nation's founding tensions, mobilizing social forces around the idea ofwhite superiority and white consciousness. Tracing the historical contexts and social conditions under which individuals and groups move through this process, the author also looks forward at the prospects of the ideology of white supremacy as a political force in the United States. Review "Ron Eyerman's account of whiteness is inevitably personal and necessarily informed by theory and history. His focus is not on the whiteness always already present since Europeans arrived, but on whiteness made and remade, especially in relation to cultural traumas like the Civil War. From the colonies through the KKK, race in the media, response to the Obama presidency, confrontation over Confederate statues in Charlottesville and the storming of the Capitol, Eyerman insightfully shows the centrality of whiteness to both meaning making and political mobilization. He concludes where we must begin, with the dangers posed by threatened, injured whiteness today." -- Craig Calhoun, Arizona State University and LSE"Ron Eyerman gives us a new and vitally significant understanding of 'whiteness'―that it is not born but made. Always a latent identity, whiteness becomes a manifest one in response to the traumatic fear―baseless in objective terms―that people who share nothing but light skin tone are somehow being threatened with extinction. Eyerman is a brilliant intellectual and this book is a tour de force." -- Jeffrey Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University About the Author Ron Eyerman is Professor of Sociology at Yale University.

History

Eyerman, Ron

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Oxford University Press

An account of the emergence and development of white consciousness throughout American history.\nIn The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and under what conditions such a collective identification emerges, as well as how the mobilization of collective action around an ideology of whiteness and white superiority. Eyerman explores how the American identity was, and is still being established, through both historical and more recent events, including the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, the election of a Black president, the Charlottesville confrontation, and the violent conflict at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He further shows how each event revitalized the trauma narratives stemming from the nation's founding tensions, mobilizing social forces around the idea of 
white superiority and white consciousness. Tracing the historical contexts and social conditions under which individuals and groups move through this process, the author also looks forward at the prospects of the ideology of white supremacy as a political force in the United States.

This book offers a new approach to the study of social movements. Integrating American and European approaches, Eyerman and Jamison argue that social movements are forms of activity whereby individuals create new kinds of social identities not only for themselves but for the societies of which they form a part. They examine the success and failure of social movements in comparative terms, both between historical periods and political cultures, giving special attention to the American civil rights movement, environmental movements, and recent form of collective protest in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The result is a study which develops major theoretical innovations as well as integrating a wide range of empirical material.

Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach

JAMISON, ANDREW

Americas

Penn State University Press

Intellectuals, Universities, and the State in Western Modern Societies

Politics & Social Sciences

Svensson, Lennart

Social Sciences

Univ. Of California Pr.

Seeds of the Sixties

"The Sixties." The powerful images conveyed by those two words have become an enduring part of American cultural and political history. But where did Sixties radicalism come from? Who planted the intellectual seeds that brought it into being? These questions are answered with striking clarity in Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman's book. The result is a combination of history and biography that vividly portrays an entire culture in transition. The authors focus on specific individuals, each of whom in his or her distinctive way carried the ideas of the 1930s into the decades after World War II, and each of whom shared in inventing a new kind of intellectual partisanship. They begin with C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, and Erich Fromm and show how their work linked the "old left" of the Thirties to the "new left" of the Sixties. Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, and Fairfield Osborn laid the groundwork for environmental activism; Herbert Marcuse, Margaret Mead, and Leo Szilard articulated opposition to the postwar "scientific-technological state." Alternatives to mass culture were proposed by Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy; and Saul Alinsky, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr., made politics personal. This is an unusual book, written with an intimacy that brings to life both intellect and emotion. The portraits featured here clearly demonstrate that the transforming radicalism of the Sixties grew from the legacy of an earlier generation of thinkers. With a deep awareness of the historical trends in American culture, the authors show us the continuing relevance these partisan intellectuals have for our own age. "In a time colored by 'political correctness' and the ascendancy of market liberalism, it is well to remember the partisan intellectuals of the 1950s. They took sides and dissented without becoming dogmatic. May we be able to say the same about ourselves."—from Chapter 7

University of California Press

"The Sixties." The powerful images conveyed by those two words have become an enduring part of American cultural and political history. But where did Sixties radicalism come from? Who planted the intellectual seeds that brought it into being? These questions are answered with striking clarity in Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman's book. The result is a combination of history and biography that vividly portrays an entire culture in transition. The authors focus on specific individuals, each of whom in his or her distinctive way carried the ideas of the 1930s into the decades after World War II, and each of whom shared in inventing a new kind of intellectual partisanship. They begin with C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, and Erich Fromm and show how their work linked the "old left" of the Thirties to the "new left" of the Sixties. Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, and Fairfield Osborn laid the groundwork for environmental activism; Herbert Marcuse, Margaret Mead, and Leo Szilard articulated opposition to the postwar "scientific-technological state." Alternatives to mass culture were proposed by Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy; and Saul Alinsky, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr., made politics personal. This is an unusual book, written with an intimacy that brings to life both intellect and emotion. The portraits featured here clearly demonstrate that the transforming radicalism of the Sixties grew from the legacy of an earlier generation of thinkers. With a deep awareness of the historical trends in American culture, the authors show us the continuing relevance these partisan intellectuals have for our own age. "In a time colored by 'political correctness' and the ascendancy of market liberalism, it is well to remember the partisan intellectuals of the 1950s. They took sides and dissented without becoming dogmatic. May we be able to say the same about ourselves."―from Chapter 7

In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of "cultural trauma"—and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the "meaning making process" as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, 2001.

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity

Smelser, Neil J.

Sztompka, Piotr

Alexander, Jeffrey C.

Giesen, Bernard

In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of "cultural trauma"―and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the "meaning making process" as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, 2001.

Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)

This book explores the formation of the African-American identity through the theory of cultural trauma. The trauma in question is slavery, not as an institution or as personal experience, but as collective memory--a pervasive remembrance that grounded a people's sense of itself. Ron Eyerman offers insights into the intellectual and generational conflicts of identity-formation which have a truly universal significance, and provides a new and compelling account of the birth of African-American identity.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Cambridge University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Eyerman, Ron. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Eyerman, Ron

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Eyerman, Ron. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Making of White American Identity

The Making of White American Identity

Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach

Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach

Intellectuals, Universities, and the State in Western Modern Societies

Seeds of the Sixties

Seeds of the Sixties

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity

Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)