White (people)

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Template:This White (also White people, White race or Whites) is a term used for a certain ethnic group or racial classification of people. Though literally implying light-skinned, "White" has been used in different ways at different times and places. Like other common words for the human ethnicities, its precise definition is somewhat unclear.

A common connotation to the various definitions of "White" is that the term refers to people of European descent. Also generally associated with it are European culture or "Western culture" and "Western civilization". In this sense, regions and countries that are today predominantly light skinned include all the countries of Europe, North America, Western Russia, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, and Uruguay. In many of these countries, "White" in common parlance refers to the endogamous group with the lightest skin.

Across the globe and especially throughout the Western Hemisphere, a person's inclusion in or exclusion from the the "White" group has varied somewhat. The term has had many legal definitions and been used by governments at various times for such purposes as censuses, anti-miscegenation laws, affirmative action, and racial quotas. The term's specificity varies with the type of usage: colloquial, legal, or scientific.

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The need for operational definitions

Like aesthetic terms such as beauty and balance, religious terms such as sin and grace, and political terms such as liberal and conservative, the terms White and Black reflect something important in the minds of those who use them, even if they cannot be defined objectively so that their application can be independently tested. The claim that any specific individual is Black or White cannot be falsified, so the concept can have no scientific value unless some operational definition of how one determines that a person is White is given. In scientific studies, more precise definitions than "White" or "Black" are usually provided. For example, in the large collaborative study of the HapMap which includes Whites and Blacks among four populations being examined, the terms used are "whites of Western and Northern European descent residing in Utah", and "Yoruba people, residing in Ibadan, Nigeria"[1].

There is no single universally accepted biological character than gives a yes/no determination of whether a person is white or not. The operational definitions used in scientific work are not "absolute" either, but rather vary in specificity according to the purposes of the study, or of the hypotheses being tested, and are chosen partly as a matter of convenience and cost. The operations, for example, could range from how the subject answers questions about himself on a survey, to the response of a light meter held against the skin with a cut-off meter-reading specified, to which of several ancestry-informative markers are present in the genes of the individual. These may, of course, be used alone, or in combination.

A problem with the appearance definition alone is that, as routinely demonstrated in college cultural anthropology classes, "racial" appearance is partly in the eye of the beholder. The same individual seen as White by a Cuban can be seen as Black by an American. Furthermore, such perceptions change over time. Appearance alone is not easy to quantify or judge with complete precision, and can, of course, be deceiving.

A problem with the self-identity definition alone is that there are often advantages and privileges among racial categories, so an individual will sometimes choose one or another as a way to improve her or his social, political or personal status. Many individuals around the world choose to self-identify as "White" in accordance with local political considerations, some even in defiance of it.

Another problem of definition is that racial terms such as White are not always applied equally: components of a definition, such as ancestry, appearance, and self-identity sometimes operate in an exclusionary manner for Whites (all must match to be a member), but in an inclusionary manner for other groups such as Black or Asian (one component suffices).

For the purposes of this article a rather loose definition of the term "Whites" will be taken, which may even vary a bit in different sections of the article. They are people with European ancestry, have light skin, and predominantly speak one of the Indo-European languages.

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Genetic History of Europe

The prehistory of the European peoples can be traced by the examination of archaeological sites, linguistic studies, and by the examination of the sequence of bases of DNA of the people who live in Europe now, or from recovered Ancient DNA. Much of this research is ongoing, with discoveries still being continually made, and theories rise and fall. Even the broad consensus, based initially upon the analysis of mitochondrial DNA but confirmed by Y-chromosome lineages and most recently by autosomal polymorphisms (indels, Alu sequences, SNPs, etc.), that early man migrated out of Africa 65-85,000 years ago has its little band of critics. ' Our species (H. sapiens) began to colonize Europe from Asia about 35 millennia ago, arriving along two major channels on either side of the Black Sea. Very quickly--by about 25 millenia ago--the prior inhabitants (our sister species H. neanderthalensis) became extinct. About 22 millennia ago, glaciers began to cover Europe, rendering much of the region uninhabitable. The inhabitants fled to refugia along the northern Mediterranean coastline. When the glaciers receded about 16 millennia ago, the populations that had taken refuge were joined by many other waves of peoples from Asia and Africa to re-colonize the newly inhabitable region. Their descendants became the hunter-gatherers who occupied Europe until the invention of agriculture. Then, about eight millennia ago, farming spread from Asia throughout Europe, bringing the Indo-European family of languages along with the new technology.

Theories about the origins of the Indo-European language center around a hypothetical Proto-Indo-European people, which is traced in the Kurgan hypothesis to somewhere to the north of the Black Sea or possibly that they originated in Anatolia in about 10000 BC. At any rate, they domesticated the horse, and spread their culture and genes across Europe. To what extent they replaced the indigenous Mesolithic peoples is debated, but a consensus has been reached that roughly 20 percent of the Indo-European expansion into Europe was gene flow and 80 percent was technology and language transfer.<ref>See Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, 1st American ed. (New York: Norton, 2001) for an entertaining account of how this consensus was reached. For historical reasons, in the 1980s mtDNA researchers believed that the Indo-European expansion was overwhelmingly a spread of technology and language, not of genes, while the those who studied Y-chromosome lineages believed the opposite. Gradually the mtDNA guys (Sykes) admitted more physical migration into their scenarios, while the Y folks (Peter Underhill) accepted more technology-copying. Eventually, both groups independently reached a 20-80 ratio. The mtDNA vs. Y discrepancy is explained by noting that in such migrations, foreign men do the conquering and make the rules while indigenous women get raped and have the babies.</ref>

Despite the near-total replacement of paleolithic languages and the partial replacement of DNA markers during the arrival of agriculture, several small pockets remain of the pre-Indo-European paleolithic peoples. The best known examples are the Basques of the Pyrenees and the Saami of Finland, both of who have distinctive pre-Indo-European genetic markers and languages.

Over the next six millennia, Europe was repeatedly swept by successive waves of Asians and Africans who were also assimilated into the population. Asian autosomal DNA marks an important contribution to the gene pools of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, present at frequencies ranging from almost 50% in Lapland; 7-13% in Finland, Russia and Hungary;<ref>Guglielmino et al. 1990 and Rosenberg et al. 2002</ref> and much lower frequencies throughout Europe. Huns, Mongols, Tatars and earlier Uralic-speaking migrants are possible candidates for this admixture.

Low levels of mtDNA haplogroup U6 and Y-chromosome haplogroup E-M81, both specific to North African Berbers, can be found as far north as Scandinavia, but are concentrated in Iberia, Italy and France where Saracens and Moors ruled for many centuries. An isolated community of Moslem slave descendants in the Pas Valley of northern Spain has as much as 41% E-M81.<ref>Cruciani et al. 2004</ref>

Finally, approximately four million black Africans were imported into Europe during the three centuries of the slave trade (1500-1800). As a result, sub-Saharan African lineages are present there at low rates as well, mainly in western European countries like Spain, Britain, France, Italy and Germany.<ref>Pereira et al. 2005 (view the specific data here)</ref> The highest amount on record is 9% L mtDNA in southern Portugal,<ref>González et al. 2003</ref> while it has been suggested that the Netherlands and Belgium may also have elevated amounts. Recent studies (since 2000) have also found detectable sub-Saharan admixture in the middle and eastern Mediterranean, including in Italy, Sicily, and Greece.<ref>

  • C.M. Calo et al., "Genetic analysis of a Sicilian population using 15 short tandem repeats," Human Biology, Apr 2003.
  • M.E. Ghiani et al., "New data on the genetic structure of the population of Sicily: analysis of the Alia population (Palermo, Italy)," American Journal of Human Biology, 2002 May-Jun;14(3):289-99.
  • Z.H. Rosser et al., "Y-Chromosomal Diversity in Europe Is Clinal and Influenced Primarily by Geography, Rather than by Language," American Journal of Human Genetics, 67:1526-1543, 2000.
  • M.E. Ghiani et al., "Y-chromosome 10 locus short tandem repeat haplotypes in a population sample from Sicily Italy," Legal Medicine, 2004 Apr;6(2):89-96.
  • G. Lucotte et al., "Y-chromosome haplotypes in Corsica," Comptes Rendus Biologies, 2002 Mar;325(3):191-6.
  • F. Di Giacomo et al., "Clinal patterns of human Y chromosomal diversity in continental Italy and Greece are dominated by drift and founder effects," Molecular phylogenetics and evolution, 2003 Sep;28(3):387-95.
  • F. Cruciani et al., "Phylogeographic Analysis of Haplogroup E3b (E-M215) Y Chromosomes Reveals Multiple Migratory Events Within and Out Of Africa," Am J Hum Genet. May 2004; 74(5): 1014–1022; and O. Semino et al., "Origin, Diffusion, and *Differentiation of Y-Chromosome Haplogroups E and J: Inferences on the Neolithization of Europe and Later Migratory Events in the Mediterranean Area," Am J Hum Genet. May 2004; 74(5): 1023–1034.
  • A. Arnaiz-Villena et al., "HLA genes in Macedonians and the sub-Saharan origin of the Greeks," Tissue Antigens, 2001 Feb;57(2):118-27. To quote from this study:
Greeks are genetically related to sub-Saharans.

Much to our surprise, the reason why Greeks did not show a close relatedness with all the other Mediterraneans analyzed was their genetic relationship with sub-Saharan ethnic groups now residing in Ethiopia, Sudan, and West Africa (Burkino-Fasso). Although some Greek DRB1 alleles are not completely specific of the Greek/sub-Saharan sharing, the list of alleles is self-explanatory. The conclusion is that part of the Greek genetic pool may be sub-Saharan and that the admixture has occurred at an uncertain but ancient time.

The origin of the West African Black ethnic groups (Fulani, Mossi, and Rimaibe sampled in Burkina-Fasso) is probably Ethiopian. The Fulani are semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers and one of the few people in the area to use cows' milk and its by-products to feed themselves and to trade; their facial parameters show a Caucasian admixture. The Rimaibe Blacks had been slaves belonging to the Fulani and have frequently mixed with them. The Nuba people are now widespread all over Sudan, but are descendants of the ancient Nubians that ruled Egypt between 8th-7th centuries B.C. and later established their kingdom at Meroe, North Khartoum. Two kinds of Nubians were described in ancient times: Reds and Blacks, probably reflecting the degree of Caucasian admixture. Both the Oromo and Amharic peoples live in the Ethiopian mountains. They obviously have in common a genetic background with the west-African groups mentioned above. Linguistic, social, traditional, and historical evidence supports an east-to-west migration of peoples through the Sahel (southern Sahara strip), although this is still debated.

Thus, it is hypothesized that there could have been a migration from southern Sahara which mixed with ancient Greeks to give rise to a part of the present day Greek genetic background. The admixture must have occurred in the Aegean Islands and Athens area at least. The reason why this admixture is not seen in Crete is unclear but may be related to the influential and strong Minoan empire which hindered foreigners' establishment. Also, the time when admixture occurred could be after the overthrow of some of the Negroid Egyptian dynasties (Nubian or from other periods) or after undetermined natural catastrophes (i.e.: dryness). Indeed, ancient Greeks believed that their religion and culture came from Egypt.
</ref>

For the global genetic make-up of the Europeans and other peoples, see also: [2] and [3]

In short, indigenous Europeans are and always have been a rich genetic mixture of immigrants from Asia and Africa.

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Historic use of the term in the United States

Pre-modern usage of White may not correspond to recent concepts; for example, Europeans who traveled to Northeast Asia in the 17th century applied White to the people they encountered (see suggested readings below) —the term having then no other connotations—and indeed, even today the name of the Bai people of Yunnan, China translates as "white".

As European colonization of the Americas and eventually other parts of the world brought Europeans into close contact with other peoples, the term White and other contrasting racial colour terms, such as black, brown, yellow (Far East Asian or Oriental), and red (Amerindian), etc, came into wide use as a quick shorthand to refer to race.

By the 18th century, "White" had begun shifting in meaning and started showing signs of becoming an exclusive label. European people, including European colonists in the New World, defined the other people with reference to "White." "Black" or "brown" people came to be defined by having darker skin than a "White" person, and the same "color" came to be applied to all non-white people.

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Early immigrants: Germans, Irish

In the United States, the term became more exclusive, coming to refer only to those of Anglo-Saxon heritage. Benjamin Franklin's essay "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc." narrowly defined White to include only the English (Anglo-Saxons) and North Germans—Anglo-Saxons also originally North Germans, from Angeln and Lower Saxony—even then excluding nationalities such as the French and Swedes. In 1751, he wrote, "[The Germans] will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. … The Germans are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion. … The English make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth."<ref>As quoted in Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 102, 143. See also Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc..</ref> Despite their early perception as non-White, German immigrants came to be accepted as White in the 1820s, when they received the nickname "Pennsylvania Dutch." <ref>See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991) p. 32 for their earlier status. See op. cit. p. 142 for Stephen O. Douglas's acceptance, in his debates against Lincoln, that Germans are a "branch of the Caucasian race." See op. cit. p. 155 for anti-abolitionist tracts of 1864 accusing abolitionist German-Americans of having "broken their ties with the white race" by opposing slavery. Finally, see Frank W. Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule (Palm Coast FL: Backintyme, 2005) p. 332 and Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: the Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1961) p. 75 for the legislated disfranchisement of Pennsylvanians of African ancestry by the first state legislature controlled by German-Americans.</ref>

The Irish took over half a century to become accepted as members of the U.S. White endogamous group. According to the 1860 edition of American Encyclopedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, "[The Irish race shares] inherited features such as “low-browed and savage, groveling and bestial, lazy and wild, simian [ape-like] and sensual...." Scholars of the time described such uniquely Irish race-distinguishing features as eye and skin color, facial configuration, and physique.<ref>Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America, 1st ed. (Middletown CT, 1986), 88. As quoted in Jonathan W. Warren and France Winddance Twine, "White Americans, the New Minority?," Journal of Black Studies, 28 (no. 2, 1997), 200-18, 203; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991), 133.</ref> Irish immigrants were so harshly discriminated against due to their religion that they kept their children from attending public schools, prefering that they remain illiterate rather than be subjected to what they saw as Protestant indoctrination.<ref>Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1880, Rev. and enl. ed. (Cambridge MA, 1959), Chapter 5. This fear of Protestant indoctrination in public schools is what led to the drive to open U.S. Catholic parrochial schools, and eventually to the founding of Notre Dame University.</ref> As late as 1881, English historian Edward A. Freeman (1823-1892) opined that the United States "would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it."<ref>As quoted in Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London, 1994), 1:29.</ref> As recently as 1920, Irish-American exogamy was 20 percent--less than half the outmarriage rate of today's Puerto Ricans.<ref>Patrick J. Blessing, "The Irish," in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom and Oscar Handlin (Cambridge MA, 1980), 524-45, 541.</ref> As recently as thirty years ago, some people sincerely believed that they could spot an Irishman trying to pass for White.<ref>H.L Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York, 1992), 49.</ref> Indeed, to this day scientific papers occasionally include "Irish" in lists of non-White ethnicities. See, for example, "the Parekh Report’s use of the term ‘black, Asian and Irish’."<ref>As quoted in P.J. Aspinall, "Collective Terminology to Describe the Minority Ethnic Population: The Persistence of Confusion and Ambiguity in Usage," Sociology, Volume 36(4): 806.</ref>

Nineteenth-century Asian-American men were not considered White, either. Those who dated women of the White group provoked mass lynchings. Twenty were hanged in 1871 in Los Angeles, twenty-eight were killed in 1885 in Rock Springs, and thirty-one in 1887 in Hell's Canyon.<ref>Harry H. L. Kitano and Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1995), 24.</ref> Their voting rights were similarly restricted. The 1875 and 1880 modifications of the federal Naturalization Act of 1790 were meant to bar citizenship even from Asian Americans born in the U.S.—ironic, considering that the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution granted citizenship-by-birth to former slaves.

Italians, European Jews, and Eastern Europeans were also considered ineligible for membership in the White endogamous group until the twentieth century. According to Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, "Many Italians arriving in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (when the largest numbers of Italian immigrants came to the U.S.) were not even considered white, but were labeled "dark" or "dark/white."<ref>Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003)</ref> Eleven Italian-Americans who tried to pass as members of the White group were lynched in 1891 New Orleans and five more were lynched for the same reason outside the Madison Parish, Louisiana, courthouse in 1899.<ref>Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens GA, 1995), 6.</ref> Before World War II, some Italian-American children in the South were forced to attend segregated schools for children of the Black endogamous group.<ref>Maria Laurino, Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 2000), 125.</ref>

Regarding eastern Europeans, a nineteenth-century physician wrote, "The Slavs are immune to certain kinds of dirt. They can stand what would kill a White man."<ref>As quoted in Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley, 1990).</ref> European Jews in America did not become accepted as White until the 1940s.<ref>Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick NJ, 1998).</ref> Again, as with the Germans, Irish, and Italians, Americans rationalized rejection as based on hereditary appearance. In 1911, Franz Boas (1858-1952) concluded in his groundbreaking The Mind of Primitive Man, "No real biological chasm separated recent immigrants from Mayflower descendants."<ref>Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York, 1911).</ref> In reply, the New York Times book review told readers that this book was "the desperate attempt of a Jew to pass himself off as white."<ref>Lothrop Stoddard, as quoted in Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, 1998), 184.</ref>

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Early twentieth-century immigrants: Arabs, Berbers

Like the Italians, European Jews, and Eastern Europeans described in the prior paragraph, who have not been accepted as White in some instances but are considered White by the U.S. government, U.S. federal agencies unanimously agree that Middle Easterners are White. EEOC regulations explicitly define White as "peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East," and the Census Bureau's decennial form offers no check-box for such a self-identity under the "race" question. See Haney-Lopez (1996) for a comprehensive list of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that repeatedly reversed prior U.S. Supreme Court decisions (back and forth many times) regarding whether or not Afganis, Syrians, Asian Indians, and Arabians are White.<ref> Ian F. Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University, 1996), Appendix "A".</ref>

In the American context, where Middle Easterners and North Africans are grouped as White by government agencies, the popular contention of excluding these caucasoid groups of North Africa and the Middle East from the White label has sometimes been based on the argument that there is a significant sub-Saharan component in their populations [4] - a long-spanning presence throughout the history of that largely contiguous region - but even more on their disparate cultural, religious, linguistic heritage and ancestral origins. While it is undeniable that many Arabs in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, etc) and the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, etc.) have enough black African ancestry or are dark enough—at times being as dark-complexioned as some African Americans—to be considered black by popular U.S. standards, some may also be lighter-complexioned by comparison, comparable to Southern Europeans. And although some Arabs of the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, etc.) may also be as dark as those found in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, here, many more are lighter-complexioned. A tiny percentage throughout the entire region (North Africa, Arabian Peninsula and the Levant) may even resemble Northern Europeans.

For an example of legal contradictions in United States Supreme Court rulings of "white" vs "caucasian", see Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). In the first case, the court ruled that Ozawa was not White, despite the fact that he looked White. The court said that in U.S. jurisprudence, the science of anthropology overruled mere physical appearance. In the second case, one year later, the court ruled that Thind was not White, despite the fact that he was anthropologically "Causasian." The court said that in U.S. jurisprudence, physical appearance overruled the mere science of anthropology.

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Hispanics

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Despite differences in ancestry from one Latin American to another, Americans and Canadians tend to label all such people — from the Southwestern United States and Mexico to Central America, South America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean — as well as Spaniards, as Hispanic, often erroneously giving it a "racial" value. The term "non-Hispanic White" is used for clarity to designate members of the dominant cultures of the US. The question, however, is whether some, all, or no Hispanics are seen as White by non-Hispanic Whites.

Judging by census [intermarriage] statistics, U.S. Hispanics are in the process of becoming accepted as White. The census takers' instruction book said: "The term 'white person' shall include only persons... who have no trace of... West Indian.... 'West Indian' shall include anyone with a West Indies background, regardless of whether his antecedents were... Spanish or French Caucasians...."<ref>Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide: The Way it Was (Boca Raton FL, 1990), 47-49.</ref> Yet, ever since the 1960 census instructions allowed self-labeling, ninety percent of Puerto Ricans have chosen to be census-White, and the Hispanic/non-Hispanic-White intermarriage rate in the U.S. is now comparable to the out-marriage rates of Irish Americans or Jewish Americans.<ref>Clara E. Rodriguez, "Challenging Racial Hegemony: Puerto Ricans in the United States," in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick NJ, 1994), 131-45.</ref>

Still, despite such signs of acceptance, the U.S. popular definition of "White" nearly always excludes Hispanics, especially those who are discernably of mixed racial descent (mestizos and mulattos). Federal agencies differ in this regard. The EEOC explicitly defines Hispanics as a separate and distinct "ethnicity."<ref>Employer Information Report EEO-1 and Standard Form 100, Appendix § 4, Race/Ethnic Identification, 1 Empl. Prac. Guide (CCH) § 1881, (1981), 1625. Oddly (in a linguistic sense), the regulation states that the distinct Hispanic "race" comprises, "All persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race". [Underline is the author's.]</ref> On the other hand, the Census Bureau separates Hispanic self-identity from "racial" self-identity on the decennial census form. A respondent who checks the Hispanic/Latino box can, in a following question, also check any of the race categories such as White, black, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American/Alaskan Native. Supporters of this policy claim that statistics on Hispanics as a group must be collected in order to track discrimination, for affirmative action purposes, etc., in the same way that they are for non-White racial groups, and for women. The Bureau, in contrast, simply says that they are mandated to ask such questions by the U.S. Congress.

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Late twentieth-century immigrants: West Indians

Growing numbers of British West Indians living in the United States also apparently seek mainstream acceptance by deliberately distancing themselves from American models of Black identity. Actress Gloria Reuben once said to an interviewer who failed to notice several hints: "Stop calling me African-American! I am not African-American; I am Jamaican-Canadian!"<ref>One might ask whether Ms. Reuben's scolding does not reflect a desire to deconstruct the U.S. color line, rather than to distance herself from the Black community. It is, of course, impossible to know Ms. Reuben's innermost motives. But the literature of West Indian resistance to being involuntarily assigned to the Black endogamous group by American society (especially by members of the U.S. Black endogamous group) is vast. See, for example, Stephen A. Woodbury, Culture, Human Capital, and the Earnings of West Indian Blacks, (1993); Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (New York, 1999); Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York, 1981), 219; or Malcolm Gladwell, "Black Like Them," The New Yorker, April 29 1996. The interpretation presented above makes Ms. Reuben's statement unexceptional. The alternative (that she wants to defy the U.S. social system, rather than position herself advantageously within it) would be anomalous. There is also the issue of whether there is an objection by a Canadian being lumped in with "Americans." </ref> Here providing the correct national affiliation is presented as more important than references back to African origins. In Britain the phrase "African-British" is virtually unknown, along with any other "hyphenated" identity. West Indians' ongoing acculturation and minimisation of racial difference may be compared with Puerto Ricans' a generation ago.<ref>One might also wonder whether this suggests or implies that West Indians are currently following the same trajectory as the earlier Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Jews, and so forth, who achieved acceptance into the U.S. White endogamous group. That is precisely what the evidence study suggests. Finally, one might ask: "Why have other ethnic groups (Germans, Irish, Italians, Slavs, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, and Puerto Ricans) achieved or begun to achieve acceptance as White, but native-born members of the Black endogamous group have not achieved acceptance into the White endogamous group?" This is a mystery. There is, of course, no physical trait that would prevent it. After all, it is a cliché among forensic anthropologists that the only way to tell if an unidentified corpse is Hispanic, rather than Black with lots of European genetic admixture, is to search the pockets for a shopping list written in Spanish.</ref> Like Puerto Ricans then, many British West Indians now are comfortable with their African heritage and enjoy tracing names, music, or folklore back to Wolof, Fulani, or Yoruba customs; while they simultaneously resent being mistaken for members of the U.S. Black endogamous group. Though they still highly respect their African ancestry.<ref>See Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York, 1981), 219. Incidentally, not all those of B.W.I. lineage reject the Black label. Jamaican-descended General Colin Powell, for example, identifies himself as Black.</ref>

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African Americans

Many authors have explained how each immigrant group became accepted into mainstream American society and thereby redefined as "White."<ref>See, for example: Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick NJ, 1998); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, 1998); Ian F. Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York, 1996). </ref> To become accepted as White, immigrants had to learn a few vital American attitudes: tolerance of the religion and customs of others who have already been accepted as White, respect for education, acceptance of class mobility (the idea of the self-made man), and finally—like the Mississippi Chinese Americans of the Jim Crow era—they had to learn to display open contempt towards African Americans. The third item is unfortunate, but the evidence is incontrovertible.<ref>The best overall survey of such evidence is Jonathan W. Warren and France Winddance Twine, "White Americans, the New Minority?," Journal of Black Studies, 28 (no. 2, 1997), 200-18.</ref> In short, the U.S. endogamous color line is the lever by which immigrant groups continue to wrench themselves into the White mainstream using Black Americans as the fulcrum.

African Americans are apparently the exception to the U.S. process of acculturation, whereby each immigrant group is gradually embraced by the expanding definition of Whiteness, in a process that can take several generations and is still underway for many. Apparently, African Americans are the antithesis of Whiteness by definition. Due to the historic one drop rule in the United States, for the past century or so English-speaking Americans with any known African ancestry, no matter how slight or invisible, have often been categorized as Black. As suggested above, however, non-Anglophone Americans, such as those of Hispanic, Middle Eastern, or North African heritage are an exception, in that those who look utterly European, or occasionally even those appearing mixed, are not labeled Black even though they may acknowledge slight African ancestry.

The one-drop rule is historically recent. As mentioned above, before the 18th century the terms "Black" and "White" did not designate groups. Before the Civil War, someone's "racial identity" depended on the combination of their appearance, African blood fraction, and social circle.<ref>See "Chapter 9. How the Law Decided if You Were Black or White: The Early 1800s" in Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0939479230. A summary of this chapter, with endnotes, is available online at | How the Law Decided if You Were Black or White: The Early 1800s.</ref>

Nevertheless, that the endogamous isolation of the African-American community has lasted for centuries is confirmed by DNA admixture studies. Many recent studies in genetics and molecular anthropology have shown that there is a surprisingly small degree of genetic overlap between members of the U.S. Black endogamous group and the U.S. White endogamous group. About one-third of White Americans are found to have traces of African ancestry; they average about 2.3% African admixture.<ref>Although abstracts of most such peer-reviewed studies can be found in pubmed, a current index to recent admixture studies, along with full-text links, is available at: Various admixture studies.</ref> And virtually all Black Americans have some European admixture, averaging about 17 percent.<ref>Heather E. Collins-Schramm and others, "Markers that Discriminate Between European and African Ancestry Show Limited Variation Within Africa," Human Genetics 111 (2002): 566-69.</ref>

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Use of the term outside the United States

Race in the US Federal Census
The 7th federal census, in 1850, asked for Color:[5]
The 10th federal census, in 1880, asked for Color:[6]
  • white
  • black
  • mulatto
  • Chinese
  • Indian
The 22nd federal census, in 2000, had a "short form"[7] that asked two race/ancestry questions:

1.Is the person Spanish/Hispanic/Latino?

2.What is the person's race?

  • White
  • Black, African American
  • American Indian or Alaska Native
  • 10 choices for Asian and Pacific Islander
  • Other

This census acknowledged that "the race categories include both racial and national-origin groups." See also Race (U.S. Census)

Race in the UK Census
Census 2001 asked for a person's ethnic group:[8]
  • White
    • British
    • Any other White background
  • Mixed
    • White and Black Caribbean
    • White and Black African
    • White and Asian
    • Any other Mixed background
  • Asian or Asian British
    • Indian
    • Pakistani
    • Bangladeshi
    • Any other Asian background
  • Black or Black British
    • Caribbean
    • African
    • Any other Black background
  • Chinese or other ethnic group
    • Chinese
    • Any other

Eventually, in the U.S.A, "black" came to denote African ancestry and "brown" became attributed to mixed-race Hispanics and South Asians (people of the Indian subcontinent). In Australia, on the other hand, "Black" denotes Aborigines and "Brown" came to denote South Asians.

In contrast to the United States, where European Jews were at first explicitly seen as non-White (see the New York Times's review of Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man, above), Europeans often split Whites into two sub-groups. A common 19th-century European view categorized most White people as either Semitic or Aryan. The latter term was used as a synonym for Indo-Europeans, who were conceived of as racially separate from Semitic peoples on the grounds that the two groups had distinct linguistic histories. This was thought to imply separate ancestry, which was supposed to be visible in different cultural and physical traits. The term Aryan derived from Indo-European speaking peoples who occupied ancient Iran and the Indus valley, a fact that problematised its equation with the term "White". However, from c. 1880 some writers theorised that the earliest Aryans came from northern Europe. This led to the Nazi claim that Aryans were identical with Nordic peoples. Later 20th-century scholars were much more reluctant to assume coincidence between linguistic and genetic descent, since language can be easily passed to genetically unrelated populations.

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The Americas: Euro-predominant and mixed-race people

Outside of the United States, people of undiscernable African admixture are considered 'White', while those of slight African appearance are often called "coloured" or mixed race —a blanket term for people of multiple racial heritage. Meanwhile, in Latin American countries like Cuba, the Puerto Rico, or Brazil, even those of clearly visible partial African ancestry may be considered, and may consider themselves, White.

Unlike in the United States, race in Latin America "refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry,"<ref>Edward E. Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (2002), 1. ISBN 0691118663</ref> whereas "American orthodoxy is that a single drop of African blood inevitably darkens its host."<ref>Eugene Robinson, Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (1999), 26–27 ISBN 0684857227.</ref> In Latin America, "the problem is approached from the other end of the scale: A single drop of European blood is seen to inevitably whiten... A person with discernible African heritage is not necessarily immutably black."<ref>For detailed sources and citations, see "Chapter 6. Features of Today's Endogamous Color Line" in Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0939479230. A summary of this chapter, with endnotes, is available online at Features of Today's Endogamous Color Line. </ref> Upwardly mobility, physical appearance and lighter skin colour allow for choice of an array of intermediate "categories", as well as White. According to census takers' instructions in Brazil, "color" is explicitly defined as recording the subject's observed skin tone and has nothing to do with "race." Nevertheless, it has been shown that the same individual's perceived skin tone lightens and darkens on the Brazilian census depending on the rise and fall of his or her socioeconomic success. In short, it is proven statistically that money whitens, at least in Brazil.<ref>George Reid Andrews (1992). "Racial Inequality in Brazil and the United States: A Statistical Comparison". Journal of Social History 26 (2): 229-63.</ref>

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North Africa, Southwest Asia and South Asia

Another contemporary difficulty of the term is the difference between any given popular definition versus the parameters used for the official government definition in the same locale. In the United States for example, many view Arabs, Berbers, Persians, Mizrahi Jews, Kurds, etc. as non-White. This is despite the fact that for the purposes of statistics, all the aforementioned are always categorised as White by US government agencies and the U.S. census. Governmental categorisation does not always lead to a sense of inclusion, as these people are often excluded from the general structural concepts of White-American society, and may even experience hostile rejection, particularly Muslims in recent decades.

By contrast, in Europe and Australia those same Middle Easterners and North Africans are never regarded or categorised as White. Instead, they are regarded as racial minorities. This latter understanding of the term in Australia has little to do with White supremacist exclusionism, but rather a traditional, narrower definition of White which has never encompassed Middle Easterners or North Africans; and which, unlike the definition of "White" in the United States, has not undergone continuous alterations to include an increasing number of people.

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Whiteness and White nationalism

Template:Main

The strictest definition held by most White nationalist groups around the world - whether White separatists or White supremacists - is that anyone of total ancient ethnic indigenous European ancestry is 'White.'

White nationalists in the United States often have a definition of "Whiteness" that is much more limited than the official government definition. "Whiteness", in this case, requires not only an ancestry that is solely or overwhelmingly European, but also a psychological identification with the European ethnicity and a commitment to advance its interests. Under this definition, many peoples are excluded, such as Jews and Balkan Muslims (Albanians, Bosniaks, Macedonian Torbesh, Bulgarian Pomaks, and Serbian Goranis). Despite this "Whiteness" method used by White nationalists, as with many other racially-minded groups, the definitions still vary greatly.

Among some more exclusionist White nationalist groups, a serious ideological point is the bestowing of the "non-White" label upon ethnic European peoples of Southern European and Eastern European (Slavic) descent. Growing numbers of White nationalist groups in the United States, however, have now accepted Southern Europeans and Eastern European peoples as White. This is demonstrated in the written requirements for membership in White nationalist organizations such as the National Alliance. The requirement for membership is that an individual be of "wholly European, non-Jewish ancestry."

On the other hand, some Southern Europeans, especially in Greece, but also in Italy and Spain, consider Northern Europeans as second-class whites, or descendants of barbarians, based on the perception that most civilizations associated with the white peoples were actually Mediterranean.

There are also those who push the idea of a White Proto-European race, and use the Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b as a guide to their ancestry. This genetic marker is associated with the earliest settlers of Europe who took refuge in Iberia during the Ice Age. Today, it's predominant in Western European populations, particularly in Celtic areas of Britain and in the Iberian peninsula, especially in the Basque country.

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Social vs. physical perceptions of White

Ultimately, whether any individual considers any other individual as White (or not) often comes down to whether the person "looks White." As mentioned above (in The Epistemological Challenge), physical appearance (whether someone "looks White") is subjective. Physical appearance is often cited as the reason for categorizing entire nations as non-White. For instance, many residents of Arab countries are dark-skinned enough to "look non-White" to most Americans, especially in the Eastern Province and Tihamah of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, southern Iraq, southern Egypt, and above all Sudan. On the other hand, some individuals of these same populations may "look White", especially in the northern Levant, northern Iraq, and some parts of the Atlas Mountains. Finally, many people of other cultures (Britons, Spaniards, Latin Americans) who also see specific Middle Eastern individuals as clearly White (or not) often disagree with the U.S. perception in any particular case.

It is hard to disentangle "social" from "physical" perceptions because the latter depends upon the former. How American attitudes changed over the centuries exemplifies this. German-Americans were not seen as physically White until the late 1700s. As mentioned above, today most Americans see German-Americans and Irish-Americans as physically White—otherwise they would be listed as "races" on the federal census. Jews are an in-between category but leaning towards "White". Many Americans today see Jews as physically non-White; although again judging by the census, most do not. Complicating this is that most Ashkenazi Jews more closely physically resemble other Europeans than they do other peoples of the Middle East, while the reverse tends to be true regarding Sephardic Jews (however, over 90% of the US Jewish population is Ashkenazi). Finally, Chinese Americans are listed as non-White on the census given that they are Asians. Still, in Jim Crow Mississippi, Chinese-American children were allowed to attend Whites-only schools and universities, rather than forced to attend segregated Black schools, and their parents became members of the infamous Mississippi "White Citizens' Councils" who enforced Black segregation.<ref>James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Cambridge MA, 1971); Warren (1997), 200-18, 209-11.</ref>

The differences between social and physical definitions of White can be explained as identification of White with the dominant community or in-group, as opposed to the Other. In medieval Europe, Christendom was the community, and pagans, heretics, Jews, and Muslims the outsiders, regardless of skin color. When the primacy of religion was eroded by the Protestant Reformation and Renaissance and Enlightenment secularism, and Europeans started to colonize lands outside Europe, the in-group signifiers shifted to concepts like White and civilized, but much of the earlier attitude remained, such as exclusion of the religiously different. In the US, White consciousness was first encouraged to help maintain a caste system and control of labor; then when expansion of the in-group became politically desirable in the early 20th century as a result of mass politics, the definition of White was widened to include Southern and Eastern Europeans. Still later, when inclusion of some sections of other groups became useful, the term White has been played down as divisive, and emphasis has shifted to other signifiers like educated, professional, and modern.

The current social climate in the West (primarily in the United States) seeks to be nearly all-inclusive, which is an about-face from the social considerations of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This has prompted other groups, especially black people, to recognize this as being similar to the "one drop rule", except it causes large numbers of mixed race people to be labeled as White instead of Black.

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Criticisms of the term

The broad usage of "White" is sometimes criticized by those who argue that it de-ethnicizes various groups, although the same charge is not leveled at the question of ethnic diversity within blacks. During the era of Jim Crow Laws in the Southern United States, facilities were commonly divided into separate sections for White and "Colored" people. These terms were defined by White people, with White people classifying themselves as White and non-White people being classified as "colored".

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"White" as opposed to "Light Skinned"

There is considerable controversy as to the difference between "light skinned" as opposed to "White". The term "White" is a misnomer, as almost all people (regardless of race) have a skin color which is some shade of brown. It has been noted that the mixed descendants of light-skinned Arabs (like Ralph Nader) and certain racially mixed individuals (like Keanu Reeves) have been fully accepted as White by most Americans. Although acceptance as White by fair-skinned individuals with slight African ancestry (like Carol Channing) is less common, about 35,000 Americans per year re-define themselves from Black to White. In non-western countries, the terms white and light-skinned are often used interchangeably.

The uniquely pale complexion and melanin-deficient hair common to Nordic adults is often considered the hallmark of those seen as White. This phenomenon's cline is densest within a few hundred miles of the Baltic Sea and, unlike other European skin-tone distributions, is independent of latitude (the natives of lands at higher latitudes than the Baltic are invariably darker than Nordics). See Human skin color for an overall explanation of skin-tone distribution. See The Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Tone for an explanation of the near-albino paleness of Nordics and the lack of variation in Native Americans.

On the other hand, genetic research shows that important areas around the Baltic and Scandinavia indicate a high genetic flow stemming from Asia. See Haplogroup_N_(Y-DNA).

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Areas of habitation

Ever since the era of European expansion, and especially since the 19th century, most Europeans have come to see most other Europeans as White (although certain Southern and Eastern groups are sometimes considered non-White by other Europeans). Hence, one could say that the indigenous habitat of White people is Europe. Nowadays, countries with a majority of ethnic Europeans include all the nations of Europe, as well as some of the countries colonized by them through the 15th century to 19th century, such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, Asiatic Russia, and Oceanic Australia and New Zealand. In those nations, the relatively small indigenous populations were overwhelmed by White colonists from one or more European "mother countries".

Of the countries of Latin America, those that it can be said are composed of an overwhelmingly European population are Argentina and Uruguay. Chile and Costa Rica are also quite "European", and possess mestizo majorities (mixed European and Amerindian) where it is not uncommon for the European element to predominate heavily over the Amerindian one (See also: Castizo); of those, many would simply identify as White. The Southern region of Brazil has a large White majority (85%), and in the entire country, Whites make up 53.7%. Countries such as Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, on the other hand, possess Amerindian majorities, and although they also harbour large mestizo minorities, on average the Amerindian element predominates over the European one. Also, the Dominican Republic and Cuba are composed of mulatto majorities (mixed European and African), though both with Black and White minorities, which in Cuba is a relatively large White minority. Furthermore, South Asians and blacks each are about half the population of Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname, while Haiti, Jamaica, and most small English-speaking Caribbean island nations are almost exclusively black African.

There are significant minorities of European-descended populations in the various mestizo-majority Latin American countries, South Africa, Namibia as well as other former European possessions. Many of these nations have experienced considerable political conflict between the White minority (those who self-identify as being descendants of settlers from the former colonial power) and those who see themselves as mixed, or in the case of South Africa those who are seen as non-European unmixed majorities.

As to the pre-colonial areas of habitation see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cavalli-SforzaMap.jpg

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See also

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Footnotes

<references/>

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External links

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Further reading

  • Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945, 2003, ISBN 0195155432
  • Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Harvard, 1999, ISBN 0674951913.
  • Frank W. Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule, Backintyme, 2005, ISBN 0939479230.
  • Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, Routledge, 1996, ISBN 0415918251.
  • Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America, Rutgers, 1999, ISBN 081352590X.
  • Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
  • Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 1994)
  • Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, New ed. (New York: Oxford University, 1997)
  • Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1996)
  • Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1999).
  • "The United Independent Compensatory Code/System/Concept" A textbook/workbook for thought, speech and/or action for victims of racism (White supremacy) Neely Fuller Jr. 1984es:Caucásico

he:האדם הלבן ko:백인 pt:Branco (raça)</ref>

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