We would like to thank Christopher Stout for his thoughtful review of our book and for raising important questions about its claims. It gives us a chance to reflect on questions we may not have explored deeply enough, while allowing us to elaborate more fully the animating arguments of the book itself. Stout’s review also affords us the opportunity to draw out the implications of our different approaches to the study of politics. We address his chief criticisms in turn.

Stout’s first point of contention is that we have not shown that there is anything historically distinct about the shifts in racial identification and framing that we analyze. He uses our chapter on the white poor as an example, arguing that “there is a longer history of poorer whites being looked down on.” We both theorize and historically specify the changing relationship between race and class in US political development and, in this case, the different ways that whiteness as a form of political standing was recast in the context of particular economic, institutional, and cultural conditions. This allows us to analyze race and class in what we argue is a new conjuncture: the rise of the second Gilded Age in the post–civil rights era. There are certainly antecedents to the racialization of poor whites, but our method is to find what is distinct in the current moment by embedding our account in historical context.

Stout’s second critique stems from a misconstrual. He states that we “argue that cultural attacks by conservative pundits on poor whites diminishes the value of whiteness,” creating “a sense of panic among whites that makes them more supportive of extreme policies.” We make no such claim. Indeed, we would be quite surprised if a large percentage of impoverished whites concerned themselves with the content of the National Review. He thus conflates two aims in the chapter. The first was to explore what happens to contemporary white political identity in the United States under conditions of crisis and abandonment. Here we argue that the conditions that created greater material vulnerability for whites left many open to the Trumpite discourse that defends them against what are framed as racial threats: nonwhite immigrants, Muslims, Black protestors, and foreign powers, among others. Our second aim was to analyze how political elites who came to historical dominance via racial conservatism now seek to explain the perceived failure and dependency of a growing segment of white America.

Stout’s third criticism is that Black and brown conservatism is not motivated by genuine political appeals but rather “by the attention and economic benefits that come along with supporting racially conservative movements.” Would that we could simply ascribe such crude motivations to all political actors whose actions appear confusing. Alas, however, we find political identification and interest to be far more complex and subject to historically distinct political conditions.

Ultimately Stout’s review reveals that we approach the study of racial politics very differently. His approach is based on established group identities and interests, clear causal claims, and demographic measurement. Ours is based on institutional analysis, cultural interpretation, historical contextualization, and political contingency where politics precedes interest, not the other way around. Each has something to learn from the other.