Whites at the boundaries of white normativity-such as poor whites-are unable to fully lay claim to what David Roediger, after W.E.B Du Bois, calls the "wages" of whiteness, the tacit "status and privileges" of their racial identity. They regard themselves as a neutral or standard, without race or ethnicity, or as a member of the 'human race.'" "Moreover," Moya and Markus continue, "when experimental social psychologists ask people to describe themselves on open-ended questionnaires, white people tend not to mention the racial or ethnic aspects of their identity." 1 White racial identity, or "whiteness," is not always so invisible to white people, however. Moya and Hazel Rose Markus write in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21 st Century (2010), "Many whites are quite comfortable with the idea that race (especially) and ethnicity are things that Asians, Latina/os, and blacks have to contend with, but that white people do not. Most white Americans tend not to distinguish race as an important or even identifiable part of their identity.
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