WHITE RACIAL IDENTITIES, RACIAL IDEOLOGIES, AND NEIGHBORHOOD BELONGING IN A CHANGING SOUTHERN CITY

Persistent racial inequality structures all facets of social life in the United States, including healthcare, education, the criminal legal system, employment, wealth accumulation, housing, and neighborhoods. Researchers seeking to theorize structural racial inequality must understand how White people operate, as they are the primary creators and beneficiaries of this inequality. Much scholarly attention has been devoted to this subject; however, gaps remain in our knowledge of how White people experience their own racial identities, explain racial inequality, and feel they belong in differently racialized spaces. Gentrification, or the racialized process of class change, represents an understudied way to examine these topics, because its racial inequality can heighten White adults’ racial salience. This project draws on analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 98 Durham, North Carolina residents–with a focus on 69 White residents of Durham’s gentrifying neighborhoods–as well as on 67 observation hours in these neighborhoods. It investigates three interrelated topics: how White adults not involved in formal race-related organizing construct their racial identities, how politically left-of-center White adults explain racial inequality post 2020, and how White gentrifiers feel they belong in differently racialized neighborhoods. In so doing, it documents the divergent frameworks of White racial identity work undertaken by White adults not involved in formal race-related organizing, how color-evasive and color-conscious racial ideologies can coexist with politically left-of-center White adults’ acceptance of structural racism, and how both neighborhood racialization and racial composition influence White gentrifiers’ neighborhood belonging. This research thus improves academic knowledge of how racially privileged adults experience and understand the racial and socioeconomic changes that largely benefit them.