The contributors to this volume demonstrate a wide range of interpretive lenses for understanding social identities. We find the breadth of these lenses exciting and productive for advancing the sociological study of identities. In this afterword, we reflect on the perspectives and approaches offered and what they mean for the future study of social identities.

Thomas, Burdine, and Oakes (Chapter 2) explore intersectionality through examining white Southern identities as distinctly regional racial identities. Their approach is innovative within intersectionality studies for two reasons. First, they center white racial identity as their unit of analysis. Second, they tie whiteness specifically to its regional salience. While intersectionality theory has developed a very advanced understanding of how multiply marginalized members such as Black poor women negotiate their marked identities, its analytic potential is further developed by exploring how individuals navigate socially advantageous identities (Nash, 2008, pp 9–10; Brekhus, 2024, p 345). Rather than examine the socially oppressed side of the color line, Thomas, Burdine, and Oakes explore how white people (the socially advantaged category) make sense of their identities and a ‘system that confers unearned advantages upon them on account of their racial status’. Moreover, they do so in the context of recognizing that race and region have interaction effects.

As a methodological intervention, they connect the general elevated social status of whiteness to place and its specific regional context and salience. Place, they argue, is a critical context that enables and constrains how white identities and white advantage operate.