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Strategic Social Identities and Judgments: A Murder in Appalachia

ABSTRACT This essay extends the work on Whiteness by using the tension between strategic and tactical rhetoric to demonstrate how social identities are reconfigured in the face of challenges to those identities. Through an examination of the media coverage of a murder in West Virginia, the authors argue that the tactical rhetoric from the African American and gay communities forced a reconfiguration of and distancing from the perpetrators by the White and heterosexual community. It extends the focus on Whiteness to include heterosexuality as privileged forms of social identity that function in strategic ways and use strategic discourses in the media.