White Racial Identity Development

White racial identity development (WRID) theory describes how White individuals develop a sense of themselves as racial beings, acknowledge the realities of structural racism and White privilege, and come to accept race as a healthy aspect of themselves and others. Structural racism is defined here as the policies and practices in the fabric of U.S. society that disadvantage non-White individuals; White privilege refers to the rights, advantages, exemptions, and/or immunities granted to White individuals that non-Whites are not provided. WRID is a specific derivation of the more general cultural/racial identity development theory. It is consistent with cultural/racial identity development theory in that it assumes that (a) people have varying levels of awareness about their group identity, (b) the level of awareness is influenced by sociopolitical factors, and (c) the level of awareness has important implications for counseling practice and training.

Models

William Cross developed a Nigrescence model to explain the process of Black racial identity development. This Nigrescence model was later applied by Judy Katz and Allen Ivey to understand how Whites [Page 1381]deny their own race and the existence of structural racism. Cross's model, combined with these early investigations of how Whites understand their own race and racism, led to the development of the first WRID models.

There are several models that have been proposed to explicate WRID, and although these models differ in their description and sequence, they generally progress as follows: a minimization of oneself as a racial being and of racism; dissonance created by cross-racial experiences that challenge this naiveté; a recognition of oneself as a racial being and Whites' perpetuation of racism; and the internalization of an integrated White racial identity and comfort in cross-racial interactions. Historically, WRID models referred to stages of racial identity development; this term has been replaced with statuses to refer to the more fluid boundaries between different racial identity statuses and the dynamic processes by which individuals progress and regress between racial identity statuses.