The color white represents base on the color scale. This symbolic meaning has often been presupposed when white, or whiteness, represents racial identity. When white represents racial identity it often represents normalcy naturalness or homogeneity. It is this type of affiliation that often leads white identity to be unexamined by cultural or social studies.

Yet, this lack of critical engagement solidifies a conundmm where various racial identities are constantly discussed, but whiteness is left simply to exist. Thus, white becomes a substitute for power and stands atop a supposed racial hierarchy that represents a natural order. A critical understanding of white identity is found when various histories, affiliations and representations are critiqued for their attachment to whiteness over time (see Frankenberg 1997).

White identity has historical roots in a worldview generated in Enlightenment Europe and a Victorian ideal of beauty and civility The historical attachment of white identity to normalcy and power can be found in many scientific and social proclamations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Gould 1991). These historical accounts often skewed scientific methodology and fact to assert that white identity had a natural position atop a racial order, especially in the United States. This coincided with slavery colonialism and an influx of immigration that brought various others into contact with a white AngloSaxon Protestant social order that was dominant at the time. Therefore, the attempts to assert white identity as a natural occurrence became a defense mechanism and fed a Eurocentric worldview. White has also been affiliated with national and ethnic identity. The idea and conception of national identity, especially in England and the United States, has been synonymous with whiteness historically. This has had a number of consequences for cultural representations of the United States where model citizenship becomes synonymous with being white and, usually male.

The affiliation of white identity to class status is prevalent as well. The notion of white privilege has come to symbolize this affiliation due to the fact that people socially defined as white often possess greater opportunity and rapid class mobility The relationship of whiteness to class status is often found in the built environment. The segregation of public facilities, social services and neighborhoods as “white only” throughout the United States in the beginning of the twentieth century demarcated white identity Upper-middle-class neighborhoods became a code word for white neighborhoods in a process known as “white flight” after the Second World War. This movement to the suburbs essentially “whitened” an entire generation of people previously considered to be ethnic others, but now possessing new racial identities because of their class mobility Solidification of this new white identity was found in television shows of the time like Leave it to Beaver. This entire process was dependent on the consistent racial segregation of African Americans and other people socially constructed as “others” in the United States.