White Racial Identity

White racial identity theories are an influential framework for understanding individual psychological development in a racialized society. This framework comprises White racial identity theory and White racial consciousness theory. Issues such as White privilege, social power, and racial ideation are addressed by these theories, which provide a way to understand within group variation in White racial identities and attitudes. These constructs have been used to determine how people structure racial information cognitively and behaviorally across a wide range of situations and settings, such as counseling dyads, multicultural competence, and sports consultation, and to further theory refinement with regard to the relationship with religious orientation and personality development.

To understand White racial identity theories, one must first have a brief understanding of their history and their association with Black racial identity theories. During the 1970s, to delineate within-group differences among racial groups, racial identity theories were constructed by William Cross and others, particularly those associated with Black racial identity research. Black racial identity models were initially stage models that described psychological responses to an oppressive society. These models, and others that followed, argued [Page 473]that African Americans have differing levels of commitment to the African American community and differing attitudes toward both their in-group and out-group members. These multistage models were advanced by Janet Helms and others who proposed their own racial identity models to include persons from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their importance is underscored by the fact that researchers and clinicians can assess and measure within-group racial identity and racial attitudes instead of simplistically stating, for example, “African Americans differ from Caucasians on X variable.” Thus, researchers and clinicians could begin to discuss how an individual's racial identity and attitudes differ from another individual's identity attitudes, although they are members of the same racial or ethnic group.

White racial identity models were formulated based on various Black racial identity models, with similar stages that Caucasians may progress through to achieve a nonracist identity. The Helms model is still the most widely considered White racial identity model in the literature. In essence, her model suggests that Caucasians are familiar with their Whiteness and move through a series of stages from being oblivious to racial issues to becoming comfortable with being Caucasian while simultaneously accepting other racial groups. Through the work of Wayne Rowe and colleagues, the White racial consciousness model has recently gained empirical attention as an alternative to White racial identity models. Given the prevalence of Helms's White racial identity model in the literature, an overview will be presented, followed by a description of the White racial consciousness model.

Helms argued that the primary developmental issue for Caucasians is the abandonment of entitlement, that is, understanding the benefits that are gained as a result of being Caucasian in a Caucasian-dominated society. The racial identity theory is premised on the notion that racial identity develops through a sequential process in which more mature ego differentiations occur as the individual matures. Ego status is reflected in dynamic information-processing strategies that people use to deal with racial information; it can be either dominant or nondominant. Observable manifestations of the ego status are called schemata. In other words, when racial information appears, the ego selects the dominant status in order to interpret the situation and allows certain information-processing strategies to be engaged; the person responds based on the content of the schemata.

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