Measuring Whiteness: A Systematic Review of Instruments and Call to Action

Abstract

The psychological study of Whiteness provides one avenue for researchers to help combat racial injustice in the United States. This article is a call to action for counseling psychologists to engage in much needed scholarship and critical examinations of Whiteness. In this systematic review and content analysis, we provide an overview of 18 quantitative measures focusing on various aspects of Whiteness published between 1967 and 2017. We summarize the constructs and psychometric properties of these measures. Our content analysis indicated that constructs assessed by Whiteness measures have shifted in focus over time across four themes: (a) Attitudes Toward Black People/Integration, (b) Modern Racism, (c) White Racial Identity, and (d) White Privilege and Antiracism. We conclude with suggestions on how advancement, development, and use of Whiteness measures could further our knowledge through research examining present-day racial justice issues. The issues highlighted include police brutality, xenophobia, immigration, White supremacy, activism, and training in the field.

Ethnic-Racial Identity in Action: Structure and Content of Friends’ Conversations about Ethnicity and Race

“…There were also few instances of White friends engaged in conversations coded as Positive Connection to Culture, which most closely reflects the focus on learning about cultural values, beliefs, and traditions captured in ERI development scales such as the widely used MEIM (e.g., Roberts et al, 1999). These findings underscore the utility of alternate tools and frameworks to examine White identity development (Helms, 1990;Schooley et al, 2019), as relying on universal survey measures may reveal little about both individually and societally relevant ERI processes among this group.…”

“…Instead, Friend 2 moves on to talk about the "ghetto neighborhood," indicating that he is aware of his ethnicity-race in that context, while also implying that ethnicity and race are something that only concern him when he chooses to enter specific spaces, which he frames in a casually pejorative light. This type of commentary was common among White participants and reflects the notion that White individuals choose whether or not they engage in meaningful ERI exploration (Helms, 1990;Schooley, Lee, & Spanierman, 2019), with most doing so at significantly lower levels than people of color (Syed & Juang, 2014), who tend to be consistently reminded of their ethnicity and race, including as a result of systemic racism.…”

Racial socialization messages in White parents' discussions of current events involving racism

“…This apparent lack of motivation to engage with the topic of race was echoed in our findings relating to parents' overall lack of socialization of Whiteness in their responses. In this study, we were hoping to capture ways that White parents use race-related current events to socialize Whiteness, given the notable dearth of work in this area and recent calls for additional research addressing ethnic socialization in White youth (Schooley et al, 2019;Seaton et al, 2018). Yet, the overwhelming majority of parents in our two samples did not discuss race-related current events in terms of their racial identity -even events involving White supremacy.…”

Black Psychology and Whiteness: Toward a Conceptual Model of Black Trauma through the Prism of Whiteness

“…With the latter, we suggest that endorsement or execution of racist acts may reflect an orientation towards cultural themes within ethnocentric monoculturalism (e.g., competition, conquest, meritocracy, paternalism, and authoritarianism) (Sue, 2015), a premium placed upon White standardization, a belief in White superiority (Saad, 2020), or a desire to maintain one’s White privilege (Kendall, 2013; Matias, 2016; McIntosh, 1988). Using structural equation modeling and given the psychometric properties of current (Schooley et al, 2019) and future instruments to assess whiteness components, Black psychologists and those in training could explore quantitative associations between whiteness—either as separate factors or a robust latent variable—and racism. In the model, we also draw a direct path between whiteness and RST, as we have critically reviewed literature both within and outside of psychology and surmise that whiteness may be a daily factor in the lives of Black people just as encounters with racism are (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; Carter, 2007; Carter & Pietrese, 2020; Williams et al, 2018).…”