White people

This article is about racial classification of people. For White (disambiguation), see White people (disambiguation).

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.

Today, a common connotation to the various definitions of "White" is that the term refers to people descended from European backgrounds. In this sense, regions and countries that are today predominantly "white" include all the countries of Europe, Argentina, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Russian Siberia, the United States of America, and Uruguay.

The term has always had various definitions and interpretations at different times and places. Across the globe, and especially throughout the Western Hemisphere, a person's inclusion or exclusion from the the "White" group has been affected by past or present colloquial, scientific and legal understandings, including definitions based for such purposes as censuses, anti-miscegenation laws, affirmative action, racial quotas. All these, and the groups they involve, are explored throughout the article.

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 trait that allows 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-level 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 people will sometimes choose one or another as a way to improve their 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.

Genetic History of Europe

This section describes demographic and genetic flow into Europe. For a broader, more detailed view of Human migrations, see that article.

Pre-Neolithic

If one assumes that all of the pre-neolithic inhabitants of Europe could be viewed as "White" today, then the origins of white people would come from this period in this region. 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 Africa 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 areas 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 advent 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.

Indo-Europeans

Theories about the origins of the Indo-European language center around a hypothetical Proto-Indo-European people, who are traced in the Kurgan hypothesis to somewhere north of the Black Sea or possibly Armenia around 10,000 BCE. 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.

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 which have distinctive pre-Indo-European genetic markers and speak pre-Indo-European languages.

Asiatic tribes

Over the next six millennia, Europe was repeatedly swept by successive waves of settlers and invaders from central and eastern Asia, 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 to between 7 and 13% in Finland, Russia and Hungary, with a steady decline southward and westward. Huns, Mongols, Tatars and earlier Uralic-speaking migrants are possible sources of this admixture.

Muslim conquerors

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.

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Historic use of the term in the United States

Race in the US Federal Census
The 7th federal census, in 1850, asked for Color:[2] white black mulatto
The 10th federal census, in 1880, asked for Color:[3] white black mulatto Chinese Indian
The 22nd federal census, in 2000, had a "short form"[4] 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:[5] 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

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.

German Americans

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." 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."

Italian Americans

Race has long been a factor in Italian identity. After national unification in 1861, northern Italians racialized the South as a land of lazy, violent people. "Africa begins at Rome," is an old adage still heard today in Italy.

Immigrating to the United States, Italians, like all others arriving on America's shores, were made to fill out a standardized immigration form. In the box for race, they faced two choices: North Italian or South Italian. Italian immigrants encountered a racist system based on socially marked categories of "white" and "black." Italians often found themselves in an in-between position of not quite black and not quite white, while always receiving the benefits of whiteness from the federal government. In wasn't until the 1930s and 1940s that Italian Americans began to assert a "white" identity.

Irish Americans

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. Irish immigrants were so harshly discriminated against due to their Catholic religion that they kept their children from attending public schools, preferring that they remain illiterate rather than be subjected to what they saw as Protestant indoctrination. 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." As recently as 1920, Irish-American exogamy was 20 percent--less than half the outmarriage rate of today's Puerto Ricans. As recently as thirty years ago, some people sincerely believed that they could spot an Irishman trying to pass for White. 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’."

Chinese Americans

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. 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. Nevertheless, Chinese-Americans were eventually accepted as White in Jim Crow Mississippi. Chinese-American children were allowed to attend Whites-only schools and universities, rather than to attend segregated Black schools, and their parents became members of the infamous Mississippi "White Citizens' Councils" who enforced Black segregation.

Eastern European and Slavic Americans

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."

Jewish Americans

European Jews in America did not become accepted as White until the 1940s. 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." 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."

Arab Americans, and Berber Americans

As with European Jews, and Eastern Europeans described in the prior paragraph, who were not accepted as White in some instances in the past but are considered White by the U.S. government today, U.S. federal agencies 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.

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 [6] - 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.

Indian Americans

In the early 20th Century, Indians were classified as racially Hindu. Between 1950 to 1970, they were classified as White, until an Indian-American group protested to the Office of Management and Budget to remove Indians from the White category, thus making Indian-Americans identify as racially Asian Indian in the U.S. Census. 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. law, 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. law, physical appearance overruled mere anthropology.

Hispanic Americans

Main article: Hispanic

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...." 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.

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." 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.

West Indian Americans

Some members of British West Indians living in the United States distance 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!" 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. 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;

African Americans

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.

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 23% African admixture. And Black Americans have some European admixture, averaging about 17 percent.

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 and Middle Easterners/North Africans.

Use of the term outside the United States

In Europe

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.

In Latin America

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, Brazil, and the US territory of Puerto Rico, even those of clearly visible partial African ancestry may be considered white, though they (the person) has to decide what (if any) race he/she wants to be acknowledged by.

Unlike in the United States, race in Latin America "refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry," whereas "American orthodoxy is that a single drop of African blood inevitably darkens its host." 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." Upward mobility, physical appearance and lighter skin colour allow for choice of an array of intermediate "categories". 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.

Whiteness and White nationalism

Main article: White nationalism

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 [7], 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.

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, a large proportion of residents in the Arab world are dark-skinned enough to be classified as non-White by the standards of most Americans, especially those originating from the Gulf states, North Africa, and above all Sudan. On the other hand, some individuals of the same region may "look White", especially those originating from the Levant and parts of the Atlas Mountains. Historic black African genetic contribution in the peoples of the Middle East, however small or large, is also often cited as to their exclusion. Finally, many people of other cultures, including Britons, Spaniards, Latin Americans, who also see specific Middle Eastern individuals as clearly White 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 part of the East-Asian race. Still, in Jim Crow Mississippi, Chinese-American children were allowed to attend Whites-only schools and universities, rather than to attend segregated Black schools, and their parents became members of the infamous Mississippi "White Citizens' Councils" who enforced Black segregation.

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.

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, to recognize this as being similar to the "one drop rule".

Social vs. official perceptions of White

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, Turks [8] 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 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.

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".

"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 other racially mixed individuals (like Keanu Reeves, who if half White and half Chinese) have been accepted as White by some Americans. In non-western countries, the terms white and light-skinned are sometimes 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).

World distribution

Ever since the era of European expansion, and especially since the 19th century, most Europeans have come to see most other Europeans as White. 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, Russian Siberia, 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 European majority population are Argentina and Uruguay. The southern region of Brazil also has a large White majority (85%), and in the entire country Whites are estimated to make up 53.7%; though this figure could be considered inflated due to the above discussed Brazilian understandings and concept of race and racial identity. Additionally, Chile and Costa Rica are also quite European, and possess mestizo majorities (mixed European and Amerindian) where it is not uncommon for the admixture to lean more towards the European element (castizo), of these, many would simply identify as White. Various other Latin American countries posess small to large white minorities, typically amidst mestizo or mulatto majorities.

There are significant minorities of European-descended populations in 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.

There are also a lot of people who are of partly white ancestry all over the world, especially in Latin America and the United States, where many people who identify as Native American and African American are in part of European descend, and in the case of Hispanics, in some instances of full European ancestry

See also

• Caucasoid
• Caucasian race
• Caucasian-American
• Human skin color
• Race and Intelligence
• Whiteness studies

External links

• Legally white Precedents of legal opinions and judgments authored by US courts in whiteness cases filed by non-Europeans
• Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience, by the Arab American Institute
• Scientists Find DNA Change That Accounts for White Skin

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. 1984