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White people



See also: White American and Definitions of whiteness in the United States

The current U.S. Census definition includes white "people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa.[45] The U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation describes white people as "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa through racial categories used in the UCR Program adopted from the Statistical Policy Handbook (1978) and published by the Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards, U.S. Department of Commerce.[46]

The cultural boundaries separating white Americans from other racial or ethnic categories are contested and always changing. According to John Tehranian, among those not considered white at some points in American history have been: the Irish, Germans, Ashkenazi Jews, Italians, Spaniards, Slavs, and Greeks.[47] Studies have found that while current parameters officially encompassed Middle Eastern Americans as part of the White American racial category, a lot of Middle Eastern Americans from places other than Bilad al-Sham feel they are not white and are not perceived as white by American society."[48]

Professor David R. Roediger of the University of Illinois, suggests that the construction of the white race in the United States was an effort to mentally distance slave owners from slaves.[49] By the 18th century, white had become well established as a racial term. The process of officially being defined as white by law often came about in court disputes over pursuit of citizenship. The Immigration Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to "any alien, being a free white person". In at least 52 cases, people denied the status of white by immigration officials sued in court for status as white people. By 1923, courts had vindicated a "common-knowledge" standard, concluding that "scientific evidence" was incoherent. Legal scholar John Tehranian argues that in reality this was a "performance-based" standard, relating to religious practices, education, intermarriage and a community's role in the United States.[50]

In 1923, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that people of India were not "free white men" entitled to citizenship, despite anthropological evidence that they were Caucasian.[51] The 1970 US Census classified South Asians as white.

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Relations with African-Americans

The one drop rule — that a person with any trace of non-white ancestry (however small or invisible) cannot be considered white — is unique to the United States.[52] The one drop rule created a bifurcated system of either black or white regardless of a person's physical appearance. This contrasts with the more flexible social structures present in Latin America, where there are no clear-cut divisions between various ethnicities.[53]

As a result of centuries of interbreeding with white people, the majority of African Americans have white admixture, and many white people also have African ancestry. Some have suggested that the majority of the descendants of African slaves are white.[54] According to recent studies, white Americans rank non-Americans as socially closer to them than fellow Americans who are black.[55] Writer and editor Debra Dickerson questions the legitimacy of the one drop rule, stating that "easily one-third of blacks have white DNA".[56] She argues that in ignoring their white ancestry, African Americans are denying their fully articulated multi-racial identities. The peculiarity of the one drop rule may be illustrated by the case of Mariah Carey.[57] She was publicly called "another white girl trying to sing black", but in an interview with Larry King, Carey said despite her physical appearance and the fact that she was raised primarily by her white mother, she does not feel that she is white, because of the effects of the one drop rule.[58][59][60]

[

History of the term

The definition of white people has varied in different time periods and locations. Ancient Greece and Rome used the term white as one description of skin color. Its light appearance was distinguished, for example, in a comparison of white-skinned Persian soldiers from the sun-tanned skin of Greek troops in Xenophon's Agesilaus.[61] One early use of the term appears in the Amherst Papyri, which were scrolls written in ancient Ptolemaic Greek. It contained the use of black and white in reference to human skin color.[62] In an analysis of the rise of the term, classicist James Dee found that, "the Greeks and Romans do not describe themselves as "white people" —or as anything else because they had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves—and we can see that the concept of a distinct 'white race' was not present in the ancient world."[63] Assignment of positive and negative connotations of white and black date to the classical period in a number of European languages, but these differences were not applied to skin color per se. Religious conversion was described figuratively as a change in skin color.[64]

The term "white race" or "white people" entered dictionaries of the major European languages in the 1600s.[64] Winthrop Jordan, author of Black Over White, argues that race emerged with the inherited status of slavery. He says the shift from Christian, free, and English to white happened in approximately 1680.[65] Theodore W. Allen notes in The Invention of the White Race that white identity emerged in the colonies with slavery, and says that "seventeenth-century commentator, Morgan Godwyn, found it necessary to explain to the English at home that, in Barbados, 'white' was 'the general name for Europeans."[66] White quickly became a legal category, encoded in a variety of laws and conferring different status.

In 1758, Carolus Linnaeus proposed what he considered to be natural taxonomic categories of the human species. He distinguished between Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens europaeus, and he later added four geographical subdivisions of humans: white Europeans, red Americans, yellow Asians and black Africans. Although Linnaeus intended them as objective classifications, he used both taxonomical and cultural data in his subdivision descriptions.[67]

In 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach described the white race as "the white color holds the first place, such as it is that most Europeans. The redness of cheeks in this variety is almost peculiar to it: at all events it is but seldom seen in the rest... Color white, Cheeks rosy".[68] He categorized humans into five races, which largely corresponded with Linnaeus' classifications, except for the addition of Oceanians (whom he called Malay).[67] He characterized the racial classification scheme of Metzger as making "two principal varieties as extremes:(1) the white man native of Europe, of the northern parts of Asia, America and Africa.."[69], and the racial classification scheme of John Hunter as having, "seven varieties:... (6) brownish as the southern Europeans, Spaniards &e., Turks, Abyssinians, Samoiedes and Lapps; (7) white, as the remaining Europeans, the Georgians, Mingrelians and Kabardinski"[69]. Blumebach is known for arguing that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., were correlated with group character and aptitude. Craniometry and phrenology would attempt to make physical appearance correspond with racial categories. The fairness and relatively high brows of Caucasians were held to be apt physical expressions of a loftier mentality and a more generous spirit. The epicanthic folds around the eyes of Mongolians and their slightly sallow outer epidermal layer bespoke their supposedly crafty, literal-minded nature.

Later in life, Blumenbach encountered in Switzerland "eine zum Verlieben schönen Négresse" ("a negro woman so beautiful to fall in love with"). Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other individual Africans as Europeans differ from Europeans'. Furthermore he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind 'concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities'.[70] These later ideas were far less influential than his earlier assertions with regard to the perceived relative qualities of the different races, which opened the way to secular and scientific racism.[71]

Immanuel Kant used the term weiß (white) in Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen (Of [About] The Different Races of Humans - 1775) to refer to the "the white one [race] of northern Europe" [69] .

According to Gregory Jay, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,

Before the age of exploration, group differences were largely based on language, religion, and geography. ...the European had always reacted a bit hysterically to the differences of skin color and facial structure between themselves and the populations encountered in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (see, for example, Shakespeare's dramatization of racial conflict in Othello and The Tempest). Beginning in the 1500s, Europeans began to develop what became known as "scientific racism," the attempt to construct a biological rather than cultural definition of race ... Whiteness, then, emerged as what we now call a "pan-ethnic" category, as a way of merging a variety of European ethnic populations into a single "race"...[6]

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See also

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v • d • e
Shades of white
Cosmic latte Cream Ivory Magnolia Old lace Seashell White
             

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Footnotes

  1. ^ White, from the Compact Oxford English Dictionary.
  2. ^ "Referring to races by colors, such as White, Black, and Brown, tends to obscure the fact that skin color and racial group are not the same." Frank F. Montalvo, "Surviving Race: Skin Color and the Socialization and Acculturation of Latinas," Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 13:3, 2004.
  3. ^ Rotem Kowner, "Skin as a Metaphor: Early European Racial Views on Japan, 1548–1853," Ethnohistory 51.4 (2004) 751-778.
  4. ^ Christine Ward Gailey Politics, Colonialism and the Mutable Color of South Pacific Peoples," Transforming Anthropology 5.1&2 (1994). On historical antecedents during the European medieval period
  5. ^ James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White,'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Dec., 2003 - Jan., 2004), p. 162ff.
  6. ^ a b Gregory Jay, [Who Invented White People? http://www.uwm.edu/~gjay/Whiteness/Whitenesstalk.html], 1998.
  7. ^ http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1509085&blobtype=pdf
  8. ^ The concept and measurement of race and their relationship to public health: a review focused on Brazil and the United States by Claudia Travassos and David R. Williams. Cad. Saúde Pública (2004) v.20 n.3.
  9. ^ The Perception of “Racial” Traits by Frank W Sweet. Essays on the Color Line and the One-Drop Rule (2004).Backintyme Essays.
  10. ^ a b c d e NG, Chaplin G. 2000 The evolution of skin coloration, p. 19.
  11. ^ American Anthropological Association, "The Human Spectrum", Race: Are we so different? website.
  12. ^ John Tehranian, "Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America," The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 109, No. 4. (Jan., 2000), p. 827.
  13. ^ Introduction to Skin Histology
  14. ^ Skin Color Adaptation
  15. ^ Light and the 4 skin color components
  16. ^ The 3 skin layers: epidermis, dermis, subcutaneous fat
  17. ^ a b c d Why humans and their fur parted ways
  18. ^ [1] Skin Care: How to Save Your Skin page 13 ISBN 0766838188
  19. ^ The skin we're in
  20. ^ What controls variation in human skin color? PubMed.com
  21. ^ Albinism
  22. ^ Rana et al (2000). "High Polymorphism at the Human Melanocortin 1 Receptor Locus". Pigment Cell Research 13: 135. doi:10.1034/j.1600-0749.2000.130303.x. 
  23. ^ Human skin color diversity is highest in sub-Saharan African populations
  24. ^ a b Heather L. Norton, Rick A. Kittles, Esteban Parra, Paul McKeigue, Xianyun Mao, Keith Cheng, Victor A. Canfield, Daniel G. Bradley, Brian McEvoy and Mark D. Shriver (December 11, 2006) Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians Oxford Journals [2]
  25. ^ Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages p75, Penguin, 2001, ISBN 0140296026
  26. ^ Heather L. Norton, Rick A. Kittles, Esteban Parra, Paul McKeigue, Xianyun Mao, Keith Cheng, Victor A. Canfield, Daniel G. Bradley, Brian McEvoy and Mark D. Shriver (December 11, 2006) Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians Oxford Journals [3]
  27. ^ Gibbons A (2007). "American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting. European skin turned pale only recently, gene suggests". Science 316 (5823): 364. doi:10.1126/science.316.5823.364a. PMID 17446367. 
  28. ^ SLC24A5, a Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans
  29. ^ Lamason RL, Mohideen MA, Mest JR, Wong AC, Norton HL, Aros MC, Jurynec MJ, Mao X, Humphreville VR, Humbert JE, Sinha S, Moore JL, Jagadeeswaran P, Zhao W, Ning G, Makalowska I, McKeigue PM, O'donnell D, Kittles R, Parra EJ, Mangini NJ, Grunwald DJ, Shriver MD, Canfield VA, Cheng KC (2005). "SLC24A5, a putative cation exchanger, affects pigmentation in zebrafish and humans". Science 310 (5755): 1782-6. doi:10.1126/science.1116238. PMID 16357253. 
  30. ^ Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin, Washington Post
  31. ^ Adams, J.Q.; Pearlie Strother-Adams (2001). Dealing with Diversity. Chicago, IL: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. 0-7872-8145-X. 
  32. ^ Immigration Restriction Act 1901 [4]
  33. ^ Stephen Castles, "The Australian Model of Immigration and Multiculturalism: Is It Applicable to Europe?," International Migration Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, Special Issue: The New Europe and International Migration. (Summer, 1992), pp. 549-567.
  34. ^ CIA World Factbook - Argentina
  35. ^ 2001 Argentine National Census
  36. ^ Argentine Demographics
  37. ^ Gregory Rodriguez, "Brazil Separates Into Black and White," LA Times, September 3, 2006. Note that the figures belie the title.
  38. ^ "Groups" in Statistics Canada, Sample 20001 Census form. Statistics Canada, 2001 Census Visible Minority and Population Group User Guide
  39. ^ Human Resources and Social Development Canada, 2001 Employment Equity Data Report
  40. ^ Census 2001: 2B (Long Form)
  41. ^ Immigrant population
  42. ^ Identity, Ethnicity and Identity, National Statistics online. Retrieved 3 November 2006.
  43. ^ Census 2001 - Ethnicity and religion in England and Wales, Ethnicity and religion. Retrieved 3 November 2001.
  44. ^ Kissoon, Priya. King's College of London. Asylum Seekers: National Problem or National Solution. 2005. November 7, 2006.
  45. ^ The White Population: 2000, Census 2000 Brief C2KBR/01-4, U.S. Census Bureau, August 2001.
  46. ^ Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook, U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. P. 97 (2004)
  47. ^ John Tehranian, "Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America," The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 109, No. 4. (Jan., 2000), pp. 825-827.
  48. ^ Caliber - Sociological Perspectives - 47(4):371 - Abstract
  49. ^ Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 186; Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York, 1998).
  50. ^ John Tehranian, "Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America," The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 109, No. 4. (Jan., 2000), pp. 817-848.
  51. ^ Not All Caucasians Are White: The Supreme Court Rejects Citizenship for Asian Indians
  52. ^ One drop of blood
  53. ^ The triumph of the one drop rule
  54. ^ The African ancestry of the white American population
  55. ^ The race myth page 90ISBN 0452286581 American blacks were ranked number 21 in social distance from white Americans out of 30 ethnicities. et
  56. ^ The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson.
  57. ^ Carey Cites Bi-Racial Family for Insecurities American Renaissance News
  58. ^ Yahoo questions/answers/ Is Mariah Carey white?
  59. ^ Mariah Carey: 'Not another White girl trying to sing Black.'
  60. ^ Larry King interview with Mariah Carey
  61. ^ James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White,'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Dec., 2003 - Jan., 2004), p. 162.
  62. ^ Alan Cameron, Black and White: A Note on Ancient Nicknames, The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 119, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 113-117
  63. ^ James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White,'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Dec., 2003 - Jan., 2004), p. 163.
  64. ^ a b James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White,'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Dec., 2003 - Jan., 2004), p. 164.
  65. ^ Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man's Burden, (condensed version of Black Over White), 1974, p. 52.
  66. ^ James Allen (1994). The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control. Verso. ISBN 086091660X. 
  67. ^ a b Sarah A Tishkoff & Kenneth K Kidd (2004) Implications of biography of human populations for 'race' and medicine Nature Genetics
  68. ^ Painter, Nell Irvin. Yale University. "Why White People are Called Caucasian?" 2003. September 27, 2007. [5]
  69. ^ a b c Blumenbach, Johann. The Anthropological Treatise of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. London: Longman Green, 1865.
  70. ^ Jack Hitt, “Mighty White of You: Racial Preferences Color America’s Oldest Skulls and Bones,” Harper’s, July 2005, pp. 39-55
  71. ^ Fredrickson, George M. Racism: A Short History, p.57, Princeton University Press (2002), ISBN 0-691-00899-X

[

Bibliography

  • Allen, Theodore, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 1994)
  • Brodkin, Karen, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America, Rutgers, 1999, ISBN 0-8135-2590-X.
  • Foley, Neil, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
  • Gossett, Thomas F. , Race: The History of an Idea in America, New ed. (New York: Oxford University, 1997)
  • Guglielmo, Thomas A. , White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945, 2003, ISBN 0-19-515543-2
  • Hannaford, Ivan, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1996)
  • Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White, Routledge, 1996, ISBN 0-415-91825-1.
  • Jackson, F. L. C. (2004). Book chapter: Human genetic variation and health: new assessment approaches based on ethnogenetic layering British Medical Bulletin 2004; 69: 215–235 DOI: 10.1093/bmb/ldh012. Retrieved 29 December 2006.
  • Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Harvard, 1999, ISBN 0-674-95191-3.
  • Oppenheimer, Stephen (2006). The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story. Constable and Robinson Ltd., London. ISBN 978-1-84529-185-7.
  • Rosenberg NA, Mahajan S, Ramachandran S, Zhao C, Pritchard JK, et al. (2005) Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure. PLoS Genet 1(6): e70 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070
  • Rosenberg NA, Pritchard JK, Weber JL, Cann HM, Kidd KK, et al. (2002) Genetic structure of human populations. Science 298: 2381–2385.Abstract
  • Segal, Daniel A. , review of Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit American Ethnologist May 2002, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 470-473 doi:10.1525/ae.2002.29.2.470
  • Smedley, Audrey, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1999).
  • Sweet, Frank W. , Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule, Backintyme, 2005, ISBN 0-939479-23-0.
  • Tang, Hua., Tom Quertermous, Beatriz Rodriguez, Sharon L. R. Kardia, Xiaofeng Zhu, Andrew Brown,7 James S. Pankow,8 Michael A. Province,9 Steven C. Hunt, Eric Boerwinkle, Nicholas J. Schork, and Neil J. Risch (2005) Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268–275.
  • "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





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