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I've been doing some research into in-group bias and race and have been finding some fairly interesting results.
Let's start with a well known piece of evidence which is often used in the culture war. This article uses ANES 2018 Pilot Survey data regarding racial in-group and out-group biases, and shows the average differences in feelings of warmth (measured along a 0-100 scale) toward whites vs. nonwhites (i.e., Asians, Hispanics, and blacks) across different subgroups.
Here is the first relevant graph from the article. According to the article, the only subgroup that has an outgroup bias is white liberals (having an outgroup bias of 13 points). Even among white non-liberals, their in-group bias (11.62) is less than that of your average black person (15.58), Hispanic (12.83), or Asian person (13.84). Granted, the differences there can be argued to be pretty marginal in size, but if you take into account the outgroup bias of white liberals it would almost certainly make it so that whites' in-group biases are quite a bit lower than that of other races, and it flies in the face of the idea that whites are any more tribal than other races.
Here is the second relevant graph showing the biases of all the subgroups of whites. Those who are "very liberal" have an outgroup bias of a whopping 19.45 points, while liberals have an outgroup bias of 8.56 points. Moderates have an in-group bias of 9.42 points, conservatives have an in-group bias of 11.51 points, and very conservative whites have an in-group bias of 15.62 points. Very conservative whites have an in-group bias that's only as strong as that of your average black person.
This finding of an average lower in-group bias among whites isn't just an isolated anomaly. On L.J Zigerell's blog, he presents data reporting the mean ratings of races from Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians of Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, using data from the preliminary release of the 2020 ANES Time Series Study.
You can easily see from the graph in the blog post that whites' mean ratings of whites are not much different from their ratings of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. For all the other racial groups, their mean ratings of their own races are far higher than any other race. Every racial group other than whites also all rank whites the lowest out of the four racial groups.
Additionally, in another blog post he presents data from the 2020 ANES Social Media Study detailing racial feeling thermometer responses. Respondents ranked each race based on how warm, cold or neutral they were towards them, and the findings are in line with the previous results.
In the blog post, this graph compares the race evaluations of white respondents with black respondents. Among whites, the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards whites is only very slightly higher than the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards blacks and Asians. Among blacks, the percentage of those who give warm ratings towards whites (and Asians) is markedly lower than the percentage of those giving warm ratings towards blacks. This graph compares the race evaluations of white born again Trump voters with black respondents, and surprisingly, the pattern of whites being less biased in favour of their own race than blacks still holds (albeit less strongly).
The relative lack of white in-group bias found might seem surprising, but it is not only found in ANES - it is also in line with some other work. This study "reports results from a new analysis of 17 survey experiment studies that permitted assessment of racial discrimination, drawn from the archives of the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences. For White participants (n=10 435), pooled results did not detect a net discrimination for or against White targets, but, for Black participants (n=2781), pooled results indicated the presence of a small-to-moderate net discrimination in favor of Black targets; inferences were the same for the subset of studies that had a political candidate target and the subset of studies that had a worker or job applicant target."
Anecdotally, I can say that these results do jive very well with my own experience - whites are as a group less likely to place primacy on race and are also less likely to classify themselves as a group with united interests.
Whites aren't really a coherent in-group for a lot of white people. Because whites are the majority, it largely doesn't make sense in my day to day life to treat whites as a unitary group with united interests, to see another white person and say "Oh, we'll have much more in common." My actual in-group may contain a different racial mix than the overall population, and inasmuch as it does my biases will be different.
Personal example, my very large high school was 90% white; but because I was an AP kid the small classes I was in were basically 60% white and 40% Asian/Indian. So if the only thing you tell me about someone is their race, telling me they are white doesn't really indicate that we'll have more in common than the average student and we probably had no classes together (the white kid might be my best friend, or he might be a votech kid or a burnout stoner kid or a football player); telling me they are Indian meant there was a better than 75% chance we had a class together and mutual friends.
So imagine I'm a white liberal who considers their ingroup "Democratic Voters." In most states the majority of Dem voters are white; at the same time minority voters are much more likely to be Democrats while whites are more evenly split. So even though the majority of my in-group is white, if I see a white person it's a coinflip if they are in my in group; meanwhile if I see a Black person they are 87%, overwhelmingly likely, to be in my in group.
Interesting. But it seems clear that any such reasoning based on group differences could be applied both ways regardless of numerical majority/minority status. Even if whites are a numerical majority and see their own race as being the norm, when they see a non-white person their reaction could be "We'll have much less in common" due to a lack of shared background. The same cultural differences that could be the driver of a strong in-group bias among non-whites also has the potential to create a strong in-group bias among whites, however, in practice it doesn't seem to occur to the same extent considering whites' lower in-group biases.
Then there's also the fact that there's plenty of countries where the racial and ethnic majority seems (at least on a surface level) to be quite a good bit more tribal than those in the West (e.g. Japan), so clearly being a numerical majority doesn't preclude a group from having a strong sense of unity.
The explanation I'm leaning towards at the moment is that there's some external factor tempering the in-group biases of whites and/or exacerbating the in-group biases of non-whites, and people being raised with woke ideology does seem to be a plausible candidate. I think it's beyond the realm of possibility that being repeatedly exposed to these types of ideas doesn't end up affecting real-world perception and behaviour.
We don't get the chance to because the graph gives us "Blacks" and "Hispanics" without giving us "Conservative Blacks" and "Evangelical Hispanics" etc. Only whites are broken down by politics. A lot of commenters don't even notice the sleight of hand, because it makes intuitive sense: whites come in all kinds of varieties, while minorities are expected to meet the basic template for their group. Electioneers worry about working class whites and college educated whites and evangelical whites and urban whites, but when they talk about Blacks they just talk about Blacks. And to a certain extent that is accurate!
To my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, there are no politically important ethnic minorities in Japan, so it's not the same game. But in my town, I wouldn't see another white person and think "oh we'll have a lot in common" any more than any other person on the street, because 80% of them are white. In Japan, it would be the opposite, any white person would be likely to have much more in common with me than the average person on the street.
But a white liberal in my town, if they see a white person and a Black person, and they want to talk to the person who is likely to have voted the same way they did in the last election, they should obviously talk to the Black person. They are 87% likely to have voted for Biden. The white guy is just as likely to have voted for Trump as for Biden.
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