Reclaim Australia rally in Sydney, April 2015 (photograph by Anthony Brewster/Wikimedia Commons)

The first is that white populations in North America and Europe are heading for minority status, literally. Such is the scale of immigration and the superior birth rate of recent arrivals that white people will, in a matter of a few decades, become a minority in these societies. This is not to say that we are necessarily doomed to increased friction and volatility between ethnicities. What the evidence suggests is that what we mean by ‘white’ is not fixed. It changes over time as minorities come to identify with majority values and ideals, and thereby become ‘white’. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Irish people and Jews were not recognised as white in the United States. Now they are, not just because of their colouring, but because they have accepted the dominant values and culture of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnicity.

Colouring is important, Kaufmann argues, but it is not everything. Just as important is the interplay between the majority group and those who aspire to join it and who are willing to sublimate their own ethnic or cultural difference for the benefits of becoming part of the dominant grouping. So, rather than these fixed ethnic and racial identities confronting each other, what we witness over time is the dominant ethnicity admitting minority identities into the fold. In effect, ‘white’ means whatever the dominant ethnicity is prepared to recognise as white.

It is easy to see why this is an irritating argument for those on both sides of the political divide. For the right, Kaufmann’s argument undermines the idea that what we mean by white is primarily determined by being able to trace one’s lineage back to northern Europe, back to some pristine ethnicity that needs protecting from mixing or méttisage. As far as the left is concerned, it undermines its story about how a dominant ethnicity exercises power over minorities. In essence, we have a story of a relatively porous ethnicity that enlarges through racial intermixing and the acceptance of formerly minority ethnicities and identities into the majority.

But there is another twist in the argument to come. Such is the scale of the transformation of our societies that it is now reasonable, in Kaufmann’s view, for us to regard as legitimate the mobilisation of individuals and groups seeking to defend a white identity as a ‘minority’ voice. Instead of seeing such groups as neo-fascist or racist, as they often are by progressive opinion, we should regard their emergence as predictable and indeed legitimate. In an era of identity politics, not to recognise ‘white’ as a legitimate identity is in effect to deny voice to those who, notwithstanding membership of the dominant ethnicity, find themselves doing it tough. Both the Trump and the Brexit votes need, Kaufmann argues, to be seen in this light: as the expression of those frustrated by the lack of means to express the view that white people can be disadvantaged by multiculturalism and are just as deserving of special treatment as others. This, too, is a form of ‘Whiteshift’: the growing self-consciousness among poor whites in particular that they need to play the identity politics game on the same terms as minority groups.

Again, it is not difficult to imagine why such an argument would be irritating to those on the left. The idea that a notionally dominant identity such as ‘white’ should now be regarded as deserving special treatment runs counter to the left progressive Zeitgeist, though, surely, Kaufmann has a point. Just because one group is numerically larger than another doesn’t mean that everyone within that group feels that they are getting a fair deal, and of course they may not be. Kaufmann’s point is less about arguing in favour of the ‘left behind’, and more about signalling to them that their interests and views are legitimate, and need to be framed in terms that we would otherwise accept as a ‘minority view’. In short, we shouldn’t react negatively to the emergence of a distinctive, white, special-interest politics, but rather see it as an understandable development given the scale of immigration in societies like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

There does, however, seem to be a tension in the chain of reasoning here. If what we mean by white constantly changes in response to minority groups assimilating to the majority (with the blessing of the latter), then it’s not clear why we should need to treat white people as a special interest group. White is the identity many immigrants would like to take on, and will take on with interracial mixing. Why should we see whiteness as in some sense endangered or needing special treatment? Either we accept that white people are becoming a minority, and thus that they should be granted the same status as any other minority group, or we say that what we mean by white is elastic enough to take on board the steady influx of newcomers such that it will remain the dominant ethnicity. It’s difficult to have it both ways.

What, then, really is the takeaway of Whiteshift? Should we be examining our immigration policies and processes to ensure that the dominant ethnicity is protected? Should we be more lenient towards white-interest group politics? If the latter, what are we supposed to make of the rise of the nativist far right, which seeks the expulsion of migrants and refugees, as well as the reassertion of cultural homogeneity as a goal?

As far as this text is concerned, the emergence of powerful far-right nativist politics in Europe really is the elephant in the room. The assumption seems to be that legitimating white identity as a special interest will assimilate it to the kind of multicultural identity politics we find in North America. But multiculturalism is of course the object of the nativist critique. It is multiculturalism that such groups want to eliminate – not legitimate by framing their own needs and demands on similar terms to other minorities. Whiteshift might not have all the answers to these issues, but it certainly raises interesting questions in a way that deserves wide engagement.