An identity politics has emerged in which whiteness spells dispossession. Illustration by Matt Chase

On the morning of September 4, 1957, a fifteen-year-old girl named Elizabeth Eckford walked toward the entrance of Little Rock Central High School. It was among the first high schools in a major Southern city to admit a class of black students, in partial accommodation of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision calling for the desegregation of all public classrooms across the country. As a crowd formed around her, Eckford followed her mother’s advice: that the best way to deal with the spiteful people she would encounter that day was to ignore them. The most famous image of this moment was captured by Will Counts, a photographer for the Arkansas Democrat. One figure in the crowd stands out: a teen-age girl, trailing behind and heckling. She later identified herself to reporters as Hazel Bryan. Bryan, who was also fifteen, simply believed that “whites should have rights, too.”

Within a couple of days, Counts’s photograph was everywhere, and inspired letters from around the country castigating the unidentified white girl. In “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” (Viking), the historian Nancy Isenberg describes Bryan in this photograph as “the face of white trash,” a ready-made contrast to Eckford’s calmness and sense of purpose. In Isenberg’s telling, Bryan was the latest in a long line of poor whites who believed that black advancement would come at their expense. Bryan didn’t have much. But she wanted at least to maintain her status somewhere between the upper-crust white and largely disadvantaged black worlds. One of the defining features of living in a putatively classless democracy, as has often been observed, is a constant feeling of status anxiety. In the absence of a clearly delineated hierarchy, we determine where we belong by looking above, at those we resent, and below, at those we find contemptible.

By the early nineteen-sixties, Bryan had come to see the error of her ways. She looked up Eckford in the phone book and called her to apologize. The conversation was awkward and brief—maybe both women assumed this would be their last encounter. But Bryan continued her efforts to make amends, immersing herself in community work and learning about black history. She hoped for a chance to tell the story of her transformation, and to replace the image of the petulant, hateful teen-age Bryan with a mature, enlightened one. The opportunity to share this story with Eckford finally arrived in 1997, as part of a series of events commemorating the bravery of Eckford and other black students, who had collectively been dubbed the Little Rock Nine. Counts returned to Central High School to document the changes that had taken place during the previous forty years, and Bryan and Eckford agreed to reunite as part of a new photograph. It didn’t take very long for Bryan and Eckford to realize that they had a lot in common, and they became good friends. They participated in a local seminar on racial healing. They shopped for fabrics, gardened, and attended poetry readings together. They were inseparable.

Those who witnessed Bryan and Eckford’s reunion at first hand described it as authentic, uncannily beautiful. Such stories model behavior for us, conveying a sense of what remains possible. People can change: they can forgive, or let go of their anger; they can realize that they have been walking the world with blinders on, and turn their guilt into something positive. Counts’s new photograph was made into a poster titled “Reconciliation.”

Over time, however, Eckford grew tired of life as a symbol. She had misgivings about the “reconciliation” concept: after all, she had just been trying to go to school. By the time the journalist David Margolick sat down with the two women in 1999, Eckford had begun to withdraw from the friendship, wondering if it hadn’t merely been a one-sided exercise in unburdening. Bryan, for her part, thought that their friendship had been undone by Eckford’s unwillingness to move on from the past. It was a reminder that we don’t all experience history the same way. A few years ago, when Margolick interviewed the current principal of Central High School as part of a book he was writing on Bryan and Eckford’s legacy, she pointed to a copy of the “Reconciliation” poster hanging in her office. “I’d like a happy ending,” she told Margolick, “and we don’t have that.”

For many, the 2008 election of Barack Obama seemed as if it might be an “ending” of sorts. But of what? On a purely demographic level, Obama’s rise embodied an inevitable future: by 2055, the majority of Americans would be nonwhite. He had merely arrived ahead of schedule. Still, one election wouldn’t erase the structures and ideologies that had kept the country’s wealth in white hands. Maybe what was ending was a bit more abstract. There was, in Obama’s manner of carrying himself, something that upended traditional status relations. An early sign of this came while Obama was on the campaign trail. At a meeting with wealthy Democratic donors, he described the plight of the white working class in Midwestern small towns, where “the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” and remarked, “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” This certainly wasn’t the first time an authority figure had spoken patronizingly of the white working class. But now the authority figure was black, and had spoken with the confidence that the future belonged to people like him.

Obama, in essence, had given poor and working-class white people the language to think of themselves as outsiders. After all, they weren’t the kind of people who would have been in the room with him that day. Within the more responsive spheres of media and entertainment, of course, Obama’s rise has helped us imagine how America will see itself once “white” and mainstream are no longer synonymous. One might point to cultural touchstones like Beyoncé, “Hamilton,” and “Scandal” as a preview of what this future will look like. In these somewhat rarefied realms, whiteness is, in ways big and small, constantly being treated as a problem, from this year’s #OscarsSoWhite outrage to calls to strip university buildings of the names of their more vexing white forefathers. Whiteness, among those with a title to it, is invoked only in a dance of disavowal.

Away from these predominantly liberal arenas, however, white identity has found a more potent form of salience. For poor and working-class whites, skin color no longer feels like an implicit guarantor of privilege. There is a sense that others, thanks to affirmative action or lax immigration policies, have nudged ahead of them on the ladder of social ascent. Their whiteness is, in fact, the very reason they suspect that they are under siege. Marginalized by a black President, as they imagine, and alienated by urbane élites of every hue, they have begun to understand themselves in terms of identity politics. It almost doesn’t matter whether their suspicions are true in a strictly material sense. The accident of white skin still brings with it economic and social advantages, but resentment is a powerful engine, particularly when the view from below feels unprecedented.