Jardina argues in her book that the racial resentment scale reveals a

new type of racial prejudice — one that is a subtle combination of anti-black affect and the belief that blacks do not adhere to traditional American values associated with the Protestant work ethic.

Racial resentment

predicts whites’ opinions toward a wide range of racialized political policies and has a profound impact on political candidate evaluations. It is, quite clearly, a central component to the way in which whites interpret the political and social world.

There is an ongoing dispute over the use of such questions to measure racial resentment. Jardina acknowledges that “some scholars are critical of this framework” and “argue that racial resentment entangles conservative principles, like individualism, with racial prejudice.”

Most recently, Riley Carney and Ryan Enos, political scientists at Harvard, have sought to assess the validity of racial resentment questions in their working paper, “Conservatism and Fairness in Contemporary Politics: Unpacking the Psychological Underpinnings of Modern Racism.”

In survey experiments, Carney and Enos substituted Lithuanians and other nationalities for African-Americans so that the first resentment question would ask for agreement or disagreement with the statement: “Lithuanians should work their way up without any special favors.” Their conclusion:

The results obtained using groups other than blacks are substantively indistinguishable from those measured when blacks are the target group. Decomposing this measure further, we find that political conservatives express only minor differences in resentment across target groups. Far greater differences in resentment toward blacks and other groups can be found among racially sympathetic liberals. In short, we find that modern racism questions appear to measure attitudes toward any group, rather than African-Americans alone.

Carney and Enos conclude that the “modern racism scales” fail to

capture attitudes specific to African-Americans. However, the scales do capture a form of racism, both a general resentment that applies to many groups and a specific failure to recognize the unique historical plight of African-Americans.

Jardina, whose work I have written about before, agrees that “some of this backlash” — including the election of Donald Trump and the opposition to immigration — “is rooted in prejudice, racism, and ethnocentrism.”

But, she adds,

many whites’ reactions to our country’s changing racial landscape do not simply manifest in outward hostility. Amidst these changes, many whites have described themselves as outnumbered, disadvantaged, and even oppressed. They have voiced their anxiety over America’s waning numerical majority, and have questioned what this means for the future of the nation. They have worried that soon they may face discrimination based on their own race, if they do not already.

Such fears, in Jardina’s view, drive the emergence of white identity as a political issue:

These threats, both real and perceived, have, as I will demonstrate, brought to the fore, for many whites, a sense of commonality, attachment, and solidarity with their racial group. They have led a sizable proportion of whites to believe that their racial group, and the benefits that group enjoys, are endangered.

The result?

This racial solidarity now plays a central role in the way many whites orient themselves to the political and social world.

Central to Jardina’s argument is the contention that some whites “identify with their racial group without feeling prejudice toward racial and ethnic minorities,” while others do “possess some degree of negative affect toward racial and ethnic minorities without also identifying with their racial group.”

For example, in the case of support or opposition to domestic spending programs, she writes, “Higher levels of white identity and consciousness are actually associated with greater support for spending.” By comparison, she continued, “racial resentment is associated with support for decreasing spending on all groups, including whites.”

This finding leads, in turn, to another Jardina assertion:

Many whites are not motivated to oppose immigration because they dislike Latinos. They are also not inclined to support Donald Trump because they feel negatively about people of color in the United States.

Rather, Jardina puts forward the argument that

these whites feel, to some extent, that the rug is being pulled out from under them — that the benefits they have enjoyed because of their race, their groups’ advantages, and their status atop the racial hierarchy are all in jeopardy.

Put another way, she makes the case that

white identity is not synonymous with racial prejudice. White racial solidarity provides a lens through which whites interpret the political and social world that is inward looking.

According to Jardina, whites, to a certain extent, are deliberately claiming victimhood:

White identifiers have co-opted the language of racial discrimination and oppression. Put bluntly, the politics of white identity is marked by an insidious illusion, one in which whites claim their group experiences discrimination in an effort to reinforce and maintain a system of racial inequality where whites are the dominant group with the lion’s share of power and privileges.

Because for many whites “identifying with their group and protecting its status hardly seems problematic, especially compared to racism,” it’s difficult to “convince some whites that there’s something normatively objectionable about identifying with one’s racial group and wanting to protect its interests.”

Eric Kaufmann, in his forthcoming book “Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities,” addresses similar racial and ethnic tensions. Kaufmann writes:

As the urban West gets more diverse, the finger increasingly points to the white majority as the engine of segregation. White majorities are retreating towards places where they are relatively concentrated.

Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London, argues provocatively in an email that a strategic shift to compromise on the most divisive issues, including immigration, could work to Democrats’ advantage:

The right’s problem in America is more its doctrinaire tax-cutting, suspicion of government and international institutions. If the left didn’t give it so much domestic cultural ammunition, the right would face defeat and have to adjust.

Kaufmann argues that there is a structural dilemma posed by the multiracial nature of the left coalition: he views what he calls “the institutionalization of multiculturalism/diversity/equity” and of “high immigration” as fueling the rightward direction of recent political movements in the United States and Europe. He believes that it would benefit progressive groups, “in the interests of harmony,” for liberals to “argue their case for diversity” but that they should “tolerate difference of opinion and accept compromise.”