Abstract:
The civil rights movements of the 60s and 70s succeeded in shifting the politics of race in the United States, making it easier to publicly challenge white hegemony than ever before in America’s history. However, public challenges to white dominance helped catalyze the formation of newly assorted white identity movements, such as the Alt-Right, to mobilize against so-called white genocide, against political correctness, policies of affirmative action, and the proliferation of multiculturalism in ‘post-racial’ America and in support of white nationalism. Presidential-candidate, Donald J. Trump ran his 2016 campaign on these same tenets of white victimhood, which attracted both educated and uneducated whites. His campaign helped move an otherwise questionable discourse of white victimhood into the acceptable mainstream. Why a narrative of white victimhood has resonated with so many educated whites needs investigating. This thesis capitalizes on the mixed-race interview encounter to display whiteness and investigate how college-educated white people frame their racial reality in the Trump era.
