Wikipedia

White backlash

"White rage" redirects here. For the book, see White Rage.

White backlash, white rage, whitelash and white grievance are terms used by some scholars and commentators to describe reactions by certain white individuals or groups to social, economic, or political changes related to race. It is often discussed in connection with perceptions of declining relative status, changes in cultural influence, or shifts in political power following efforts to expand civil rights and economic opportunities for other racial or ethnic groups.[1][2][3][4]

George Yancy, Robin DiAngelo and other writers have used the term to characterize strong negative reactions to discussions of racial inequality or the concept of white privilege. In this framing, such reactions may include hostility, resistance to critique, or, in more extreme cases, racist rhetoric or threats of violence. These interpretations are sometimes contrasted with concepts such as white fragility, which focuses more narrowly on defensive responses rather than overt hostility.[5][6][7]

Discussions of white backlash most commonly focus on the United States, particularly in relation to the social, economic and political status of African Americans. However, similar dynamics have also been examined in other national contexts, including the United Kingdom and South Africa, especially in analyses of racial politics during and after apartheid, the system of legally enforced racial segregation and discrimination against black South Africans by the minority Afrikaner herrenvolk government.[8][9]

Sociology

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Concerns among some whites about immigration and demographic change have been identified by researchers as factors associated with political and social opposition to these trends. Political scientist Ashley E. Jardina spoke about how perceptions of shifting social structures influence attitudes, noting that some white Americans perceive changes in the country’s demographic composition as altering long-standing cultural and political arrangements, including the historical prominence of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) norms.[10][11][12]

A 2018 study conducted at the University of California, Riverside found that awareness of the growth of Hispanic and Latino populations can lead some non-Hispanic white Americans to perceive existing racial hierarchies as being challenged, which may affect political attitudes and behavior.[13] Similarly, research published in the European Journal of Social Psychology reported that informing white British participants about rising immigration levels increased their likelihood of supporting political candidates with restrictive immigration policies.[14]

Commentator Kevin Drum has observed that as the proportion of residents in the United States who are not non-Hispanic white increased from 25 percent in 1990 to 40 percent in 2019, this demographic change may have produced a "short-term white backlash in recent years.".[15]

Historian Lawrence Glickman, writing in The Atlantic in 2020, situates such political responses within a broader historical context. He argues that political reactions labeled as “backlashes” became more prominent in the 1960s but reflect earlier patterns in American political history, including those following Reconstruction. Glickman suggests that these responses often emerge in anticipation of social change and that narratives emphasizing perceived disadvantage have played a role in shaping various political movements over time.[16]

Regions

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United States

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One early example of this concept occurred when Hiram R. Revels became the first African-American to serve in the United States Senate in 1870 after he was selected by a vote of 81 to 15 in the Mississippi legislature to finish the term of one of the state's two seats in the U.S. Senate, which had been left vacant since the Civil War.[17] This was before the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the constitution of the United States in 1913, which introduced direct elections for the office of senator. The backlash to this event ultimately helped to derail Reconstruction, which ended after the contested presidential election in 1876. The Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the American South, effectively leaving the region to the hands of Jim Crow racial segregation policies and the effective disenfranchisement of black Americans in the region.[18]

Similarly, the 1898 massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina occurred as a backlash by white Democrats to significant political changes in the city at the time, when the city was governed by a legally elected, biracial coalition supported by blacks and white Republicans. This arrangement was strongly opposed by the white Democratic leadership and their supporters, who viewed the existing government as illegitimate and destabilizing to the political and social order they favored. This ultimately contributed to the backlash that ultimately led to the forced removal of elected officials. The events that followed involved violence, the suppression of black political influence, and the imposition of a new municipal leadership aligned with the insurrection’s leaders, contributing to the broader pattern of disfranchisement of black Americans in the South.[19][20][21]

Another backlash happened after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many Democrats in Congress, as well as President Lyndon B. Johnson himself, feared that such a backlash could develop in response to the legislation, and Martin Luther King Jr. popularized the "white backlash" phrase and concept to warn of that possibility.[22] The backlash that they had warned about occurred and was based on the argument that whites of immigrant descent did not receive the benefits that were given to African Americans in the Civil Rights Act.[23] After signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson grew concerned that the white backlash would cost him the 1964 presidential election later that year. Specifically, Johnson feared that his opponent, Barry Goldwater, would harness the backlash by highlighting the black riots that were engulfing the country.[24] Despite the fears, Johnson won the election by a landslide, only losing South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Goldwater's home state of Arizona. Eventually, white southerners switched to the Republican Party.

A significant backlash also resulted from the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States in 2008,[25][22] with many seeing the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 as an example of "whitelash".[22][26] The term is a portmanteau of "white" and "backlash" and was coined by the CNN contributor Van Jones during the election coverage of that year's presidential election to describe one of the reasons he thought Trump won the election.[27] He said: "This was a whitelash. This was a whitelash against a changing country. It was a whitelash against a black president in part. And that's the part where the pain comes.".[28][29][30]

The Stop the Steal movement and the United States Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, occurring in the wake of the 2020 US presidential election and the attempts by Trump to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden, have been interpreted by some as a reemergence of the Lost Cause myth and a manifestation of white backlash. The historian Joseph Ellis has suggested (in his words) that many who ignore the role that race played in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory (and later his 2024 re-election) are following an example set by Lost Cause propagandists, who attributed the American Civil War to a clash over constitutional issues while downplaying the role of slavery.[31][32][33]

South Africa

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In 1975, it was reported that the government was being slow to approve desegregating communities out of fears of an Afrikaner backlash.[34] In 1981, The New York Times reported that P. W. Botha's cabinet colleagues, "sensitive to the danger of a white backlash," was publicly listing statistics that proved it was spending far more money per capita on education for white children than for black children.[35]

During the 1980s the Apartheid government saw its white Afrikaner vote during elections decrease while the Conservative Party opposition saw its support grow.

In 1990, as apartheid was being phased out, Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote that President F. W. de Klerk "knows full well that several opinion polls show a strong white backlash against his policies.".[36] Apartheid eventually ended in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa in the first multiracial election in South African history.

By the late 1990s, there were fears of a white Afrikaner backlash unless Mandela's ANC government permitted Orania to become an independent Volkstaat.[37] By then, former president Botha warned of an Afrikaner backlash to threats against the Afrikaans language.[38]

In 2017, John Campbell proposed that "perhaps inevitably, there is a white, especially Afrikaner, backlash" at the removal of Afrikaner or Dutch placenames or colonial statues and the replacement of the Afrikaans language by English at historically white universities.[39]

See also

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References

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Notes

  1. ^ Anderson, Carol (16 November 2016). "Donald Trump Is the Result of White Rage, Not Economic Anxiety". TIME. White rage got us here ... Barack Obama's election — and its powerful symbolism of black advancement — was the major trigger for the policy backlash that led to Donald Trump
  2. ^ Trethewey, Natasha (8 November 2018). "Natasha Trethewey: By the Book". The New York Times. Carol Anderson's "White Rage" takes what many of us have known, perhaps existentially or intuitively, and puts it in a new framework, adding a synthesis of thoroughly researched archival evidence that documents the deeply entrenched and ubiquitous nature of white rage — white backlash, across time and space — as response to black advancement.
  3. ^ Filindra, Alexandra; Kaplan, Noah J.; Manning, Andrea (March 2024). "Who Buys the "Big Lie"? White Racial Grievance and Confidence in the Fairness of American Elections". Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. 9 (1): 182–203. doi:10.1017/rep.2023.33. ISSN 2056-6085.
  4. ^ "White backlash Definition - Intro to Ethnic Studies Key Term | Fiveable". fiveable.me. Retrieved 28 December 2025.
  5. ^ Blasdel, Alex (24 April 2018). "Is white America ready to confront its racism? Philosopher George Yancy says we need a 'crisis'". The Guardian.
  6. ^ Jaschik, Scott (24 April 2018). "Backlash". Inside Higher Ed.
  7. ^ George Yancy (2018). Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 50. ISBN 978-1538104057. The responses that I received, however, speak to something more extreme than just reactionary or unreceptive responses. Rather than "white fragility", these responses are ones that speak to deep forms of white world-making
  8. ^ Hughey, Matthew W. (2014). "White backlash in the 'post-racial' United States". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 37 (5): 721–730. doi:10.1080/01419870.2014.886710. S2CID 144964391.
  9. ^ Rhodes, James (9 February 2010). "White Backlash, 'Unfairness' and Justifications of British National Party (BNP) Support". Ethnicities. 10 (1): 77–99. doi:10.1177/1468796809353392. S2CID 144343983.
  10. ^ Eric Levitz (2 July 2018). "For Democrats, Immigration Is a Political Problem Without a Policy Solution". New York. Given this history, it would be astonishing if the unintended, rapid diversification of the United States over the past 50 years didn't produce a backlash rooted in white anxiety about racial demographics
  11. ^ Wabuke, Hope (8 August 2019). "'When I Was White' Centers On The Formation Of Race, Identity And Self". NPR.
  12. ^ DeVega, Chauncey (17 July 2019). ""White Identity Politics" and white backlash: How we wound up with a racist in the White House". Salon.
  13. ^ Tom Jacobs (24 January 2018). "How a Growing Latino Population Provided Fertile Ground for Exploitation by the Trump Campaign". Pacific Standard.
  14. ^ Lee Shepherd; Fabio Fasoli; Andrea Pereira; Nyla R. Branscombe (2012), The role of threat, emotions, and prejudice in promoting collective action against immigrant groups, European Journal of Social Psychology
  15. ^ Kevin Drum (10 April 2019). "America Is Not On a Path to Become Israel 2.0". Mother Jones.
  16. ^ Glickman, Lawrence (21 May 2020). "How White Backlash Controls American Progress". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 23 July 2020. Retrieved 13 September 2025. What is particularly noteworthy is that the white backlash in this case was in place before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. The pattern is this: American reactionary politics is nearly always preemptive, predicting catastrophe and highlighting potential slippery slopes. "White backlash," after all, got its name in 1963, just months after African Americans in Birmingham risked attacks from police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses in order to demand justice, and immediately after Kennedy mooted the idea of substantive legislation—both events taking place well before the Civil Rights Act became law. What one reporter called "white panic" was driven by fears of "favoritism" and "special privileges" for African Americans—that white "workers would be forced out of their jobs to make way for Negroes," as one article put it that year, when Jim Crow still prevailed. "Many of my people think the Negroes want to take over the country," a midwestern Republican politician said in a Wall Street Journal article published on April 10 of the following year, still months before the Act's passage. "They think there are things in the bill that just aren't there, like forced sales of housing to Negroes and stuff like that." White backlashers imagined coercion where it did not exist. They embraced a lexicon and posture of victimization that hearkened back to the era of Reconstruction and anticipated the deceiving, self-pitying MAGA discourse that drives reactionary politics in Donald Trump's America.
  17. ^ Blake, John (11 November 2016). "This is what 'whitelash' looks like". CNN. Retrieved 16 February 2018.
  18. ^ Jones, Stephen A.; Freedman, Eric (2011). Presidents and Black America. CQ Press. p. 218. ISBN 9781608710089. In an eleventh-hour compromise between party leaders – considered the "Great Betrayal" by many blacks and southern Republicans ...
  19. ^ Randle, Aaron (7 October 2020). "America's Only Successful Coup d'Etat Overthrew a Biracial Government in 1898". HISTORY. Retrieved 28 December 2025.
  20. ^ "Wilmington, 1898: The Unsupressed History of a Massacre". National Endowment for the Humanities. 16 January 2025. Retrieved 28 December 2025.
  21. ^ "When White Supremacists Overthrew a Government | American Experience | PBS". www.pbs.org. Retrieved 28 December 2025.
  22. ^ a b c II, Vann R. Newkirk (15 January 2018). "Five Decades of White Backlash". The Atlantic. Retrieved 16 February 2018.
  23. ^ Miller, William Lee (23 August 1964). "Analysis of the 'White Backlash'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 16 February 2018.
  24. ^ "LBJ Fights the White Backlash". Prologue Magazine. Spring 2001. Retrieved 16 February 2018.
  25. ^ Smith, Terry (2015). "White Backlash in a Brown Country". Valparaiso University Law Review. 50 (1).
  26. ^ Blake, John (8 January 2018). "How Trump became 'the white affirmative action president'". CNN. Video by Tawanda Scott Sambou. Retrieved 16 February 2018.
  27. ^ Blake, John (11 November 2016). "This is what 'whitelash' looks like". CNN. Retrieved 16 February 2018.
  28. ^ Ryan, Josiah (9 November 2016). "'This was a whitelash': Van Jones' take on the election results | CNN Politics". CNN. Retrieved 28 December 2025.
  29. ^ "Van Jones: Election was a 'Whitelash'". CNN.
  30. ^ CNN (9 November 2016). Van Jones on a Trump win: This was a white lash. Retrieved 28 December 2025 – via YouTube.
  31. ^ John Blake (28 December 2016). "How Trump's win becomes another 'Lost Cause'". CNN.
  32. ^ "Donald Trump, Confederates and the GOP — brethren in the new Lost Cause". Roll Call. 3 December 2020.
  33. ^ "Why Donald Trump's 'Lost Cause' can never stop winning". Why Donald Trump’s ‘Lost Cause’ can never stop winning.
  34. ^ Anthony Lewis (9 June 1975). "Light Breeze Of Change". The New York Times. Perhaps because of the symbolism, or concern over right‐wing Afrikaner backlash, the Government has been slow to approve desegregation
  35. ^ "Anxiety Over Apartheid". The New York Times. 19 April 1981. Sensitive to the danger of a white back- lash, Mr. Botha's Cabinet colleagues have spent much of this raucous political season advertising statistics they normally gloss over.
  36. ^ Jeane Kirkpatrick (11 June 1990). "Exit Apartheid". The Washington Post.
  37. ^ Mary Braid (3 August 1997). "Laager lovers tough it out". The Independent.
  38. ^ Dean E. Murphy (24 January 1998). "Hearing for Apartheid-Era Leader Put Off". The Los Angeles Times.
  39. ^ John Campbell (24 January 2017). "Identity Politics in South Africa". Council on Foreign Relations.

Further reading