In the post-civil rights era, nearly every American voices support for principles of racial equality. Yet, racial hierarchy and oppression persist. Scholars studying race and racism in the post-civil rights era have offered a number of potential explanations for this apparent contradiction. Some focus on the effects of structurally racist institutions. Others explain the persistence of racial injustice as the effect of colorblind racist ideology. Thus, in the post-civil rights era, both structural and ideological explanations have been offered for the persistence of racial inequality.

In this dissertation, I offer an alternative explanation for the persistence of racial hierarchy and injustice in the post-civil rights era. Rather than focusing on institutions or ideology, my analysis is centered on identity. Specifically, I take up the question: how do we explain the ways in which even well-meaning whites contribute to the maintenance of social hierarchies? Answering this question requires careful attention to the discourses and institutions that influence the formation of the white subject as well as an account of the way in which socially constructed subjectivity functions.

In this theory-building project, I bring together two distinct research traditions in the service of answering this question: Foucauldian social constructivism and the social cognition literature from social psychology. In the early chapters of the dissertation, I argue Foucauldian social constructivism and social cognition research are not only compatible, but may even complement one another in ways that can extend each literature's analytical domain. Next, I offer an integration of Foucauldian analysis and social cognitive theory to explain the social construction of identity and identities' effects on cognition through identity-driven motivated cognitive processes. Finally, I argue that the internalization of a white identity scheme produces sufficient motivation for whites to engage in motivated racial cognition. Since motivation affects cognition at every stage, whites perceive and interpret the social environment in ways that protect both their unearned advantages and their sense of themselves as fair and equitable actors. As a result, even well-meaning white people may replicate existing power relations without being aware of their role in the maintenance of systems of domination.