I love your deep thinking about this as it stimulates my own thinking about identity and culture. As a psychologist, I distinguish between racial identity and cultural identity and I think that in people’s lived experience these identites are the same and that causes confusion and creates the dilemma. Racial identity is the psychological connection one has with their race. Cultural identity is the expression of race by a critical mass of those who share that cultural background (in this case, race; think anthropology). So, it is possible for someone to be white and culturally black or Asian or Latin in their expression of their identity. Or for someone who is black to be white in their cultural expression. This is where the terms Oreo (black on outside, white on inside), Banana (Asian on outside, white on inside), Coconut (Latina/o acting white), Wigger (white acting black) and a host of other monikers come from. Until the 1980’s racial identity development process was excluded from textbooks and courses in developmental psychology. There’s a lot of research on racial identity development and I have a chapter on it in my book, Some of My Friends Are….

For me, I can only tell you about the positive white identity that I have experienced from family members and friends (this is not to say that I haven’t experienced my heavy share of white identity as supremacist and privileged, but just as blacks are not a monolithic race, neither are whites). I experience whites in their fullest and optimal positive white identity as a race characterized by intellectual rigor, productivity, creative agility, deep resolution, fortitude, an experimental stance toward life that leads to innovation, and a people of pure goodness. Given that the majority of us do not have friends and family members across racial lines (my research area) and we use a dominance model of managing differences (a dominant group or whites with privilege who victimize and oppress people of color) as our framework, it makes it challenging for whites to come to understand and reach a positive racial identity resolution. Challenging, but not impossible. I strongly believe that whites working toward achieving a positive racial identity and feeling racially secure enough not to exhibit racial superiority would be far more effective than just working to be a good ally. Thanks for the discussion.