White people

• 1. Introduction

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  White people is one of the most contested racial classifications in modern history, yet it took shape remarkably late. The term "White race" did not enter the major European languages until the late seventeenth century, arriving not as a neutral descriptor but as a product of race-based slavery and colonial hierarchy. Before that moment, no European peoples referred to themselves as "White." They identified instead by religion, ancestry, ethnicity, or nationality. How did a word for a skin tone become the foundation of an entire social order? That question reaches from the philosophers of ancient Greece to the census bureaus of the twenty-first century, from the silver mines of colonial South America to the courtrooms of the United States Supreme Court. The answer touches the Atlantic slave trade, the pseudoscience of natural historians, and the shifting legal definitions that have included and excluded dozens of ethnic groups over the centuries.

• 2. Ancient Skin, Ancient Meanings

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  Herodotus described the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair, and he characterized the Egyptians as melánchroes, meaning "dark-skinned." He also recorded what may be the earliest Greek reference to the peoples living south of Egypt as Aithíopes, meaning "burned-faced." For Herodotus and his contemporaries, skin descriptions were observations about where people lived, not statements about a unified race. Classicist James H. Dee put it plainly: the Greeks had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves, and skin color did not carry useful meaning in that world.

  Aristotle's comments on complexion reveal how differently ancient writers framed skin tone. In his view, skin too dark signaled cowardice, citing Egyptians and Ethiopians, while skin too light was equally suspect, citing women as his example. The courageous skin color, he argued, lay halfway between the two. Xenophon of Athens described Persian prisoners of war as "white-skinned because they were never without their clothing" and soft from riding in carriages, prompting Greek soldiers to compare the campaign to fighting women. Paleor here was a mark of weakness, not superiority.

  Ancient Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks, and Minoans followed an artistic convention of depicting women with pale or white skin and men as dark brown or tanned. Men described as leukochrōs, or "white-skinned," could be considered effeminate by writers such as Plato. The Rigveda, meanwhile, used the phrase krsna tvac, meaning "black skin," as a metaphor for irreligiosity. Across many ancient cultures, the assignment of positive and negative meanings to light and dark predates any concept of race by millennia, yet those early associations operated along entirely different axes of meaning than the racial categories that would follow.

• 3. Colonial Invention

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  By the mid-seventeenth century in Latin America under Spanish rule, a three-part racial scheme in color terms had taken hold. Historian Irene Silverblatt traced "race thinking" directly to the social categories of colonialism and state formation, summarizing it as: "White, black, and brown are abridged, abstracted versions of colonizer, slave, and colonized." The novel term español, meaning "Spaniard," was being equated in written documents with blanco, or "White," by the mid-seventeenth century.

  In Spain's American colonies, Black African, Indigenous, Jewish, or morisco ancestry formally excluded individuals from the "purity of blood" requirements for holding public office under the Royal Pragmatic of 1501. Similar restrictions applied in the military, some religious orders, colleges, and universities, producing a nearly all-White priesthood and professional class. Black and indigenous women were forbidden from wearing jewels, silk, or precious metals in early colonial Mexico and Peru. Those pardos and mulattos with resources largely sought to pass as White. A brief royal offer to purchase the privileges of Whiteness attracted fifteen applicants before pressure from White elites ended the practice.

  In the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean, the initial contrast was not White versus Black but English or Christian versus Native Americans or Africans. Historian Winthrop Jordan reported that throughout the thirteen colonies in the seventeenth century, the terms Christian, free, English, and white were employed interchangeably. In 1680, Morgan Godwyn found it necessary to explain to English readers that in Barbados, "white" was "the general name for Europeans." The word White remained more familiar in the American colonies than in Britain well into the eighteenth century, according to historian Theodore W. Allen.

• 4. Science Enlisted

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  In 1758, Carl Linnaeus proposed what he considered natural taxonomic categories of the human species. He distinguished Homo sapiens from Homo sapiens europaeus and later added four geographical subdivisions: white Europeans, red Americans, yellow Asians, and black Africans. Although Linnaeus intended these as objective classifications, his descriptions incorporated cultural patterns and derogatory stereotypes.

  In 1775, the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach asserted that "The white color holds the first place, such as is that of most European peoples." His successive editions of On the Natural Variety of Mankind shifted the boundaries of his "Caucasian variety." In a 1795 edition, he narrowed the category to include inhabitants of Europe except the Lapps and remaining Finns, Eastern Asia as far as the Obi River, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges, and Northern Africa. Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color depended on environmental factors such as sun exposure and diet. He claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian inhabitants of Asia, and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental pressures. He believed this degeneration could be reversed under proper environmental conditions.

  Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, race scientists including most physical anthropologists classified world populations into three, four, or five races, often subdivided further. Carleton S. Coon in 1939 included all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasian label, while Thomas Henry Huxley in 1870 classified the same populations as Mongoloid, and Lothrop Stoddard in 1920 counted as "White" only Europeans and their descendants, plus some populations in parts of Anatolia and the northern areas of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Nazi Germany, despite its association with White nationalism in popular imagination, actually repudiated the idea of a unified White race, promoting Nordicism instead and referring to Eastern European Slavs as Untermensch. The twentieth century saw scientists widely repudiate these pseudoscientific frameworks. Contemporary anthropologists regard the concept of a distinguishable White race as a social construct with no scientific basis.

• 5. Law and Belonging

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  The Immigration Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to "any alien, being a free white person," a phrase that generated decades of legal conflict. In at least fifty-two cases, people denied the status of White by immigration officials sued in court. By 1923, courts had abandoned scientific evidence as incoherent and adopted a "common-knowledge" standard for determining Whiteness. Legal scholar John Tehranian described this as a "performance-based" standard tied to religious practices, education, intermarriage, and community role.

  In 1923, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that people of Indian descent were not White men and thus not eligible for citizenship. The court conceded Thind was high-caste Hindu from northern Punjab and classified by some scientific authorities as Aryan, but held that the word Aryan "has to do with linguistic and not at all with physical characteristics." In 1925, an Armenian immigrant successfully argued in United States v. Cartozian that his nationality was White, distinguished from Kurds, Turks, and Arabs, on the basis of Christian religious traditions. Two conflicting 1942 and subsequent rulings reached opposite conclusions about whether Arabs qualified as White under immigration law.

  Author John Tehranian noted that at various times, Germans, Greeks, White Hispanics, Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Irish, Italians, Jews of European and Mizrahi descent, Slavs, Spaniards, and Finns were each allegedly excluded from being considered White, despite generally being legally classified as White under the census and naturalization law. On several occasions Finns were discriminated against as "Asian" due to the Finnish language belonging to the Uralic rather than the Indo-European language family. The one-drop rule, a colloquial term for laws passed by eighteen U.S. states between 1910 and 1931, attempted to create a binary system classifying all persons as either Black or White. Those laws were declared unconstitutional in 1967 when the Supreme Court ruled on anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia.

• 6. Demographic Counts

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  White Americans made up nearly 90% of the United States population in 1950. A report from the Pew Research Center in 2008 projected that by 2050, non-Hispanic White Americans would make up 47% of the population, down from 67% projected in 2005. The 2020 census recorded 204,277,273 White Americans, representing 61.6% of the population. A study on genetic ancestry found that White Americans on average are 98.6% European, 0.2% African, and 0.2% Native American. According to the 23andMe database, up to 13% of self-identified White American Southerners have greater than 1% African ancestry.

  In South Africa, White Dutch people first arrived around 1652. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, some 2,000 Europeans and their descendants were established in the region. There were 4.6 million Whites in South Africa in 2011, down from an all-time high of 5.2 million in 1995 following a wave of emigration that began in the late twentieth century. In Australia, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 consolidated what became known as the "White Australia policy," though it was never universally applied. All immigration restrictions based on race and geographic origin were officially terminated in Australia in 1973. As at the 2016 census, it was estimated by the Australian Human Rights Commission that around 58% of the Australian population were Anglo-Celtic Australians, with 18% being of other European origins.

  In France, the government banned the collection of racial or ethnic information in 1978, meaning the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies does not provide census data on White residents. In 2022, 4,444,145 people in Ireland, or 87.4% of the population, declared their race as "White Irish" and Other White, a decline from 92.4% in 2016. In Argentina, over 6 million European immigrants arrived during the period 1857-1940, and by the 1910s more than 30% of the country's population was from outside Argentina.

• 7. Identity in Flux

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  Singer Mariah Carey, who is multi-racial, told Larry King that despite her physical appearance and having been raised primarily by her White mother, she did not "feel White." Writer and editor Debra Dickerson in the twenty-first century renewed questions about the one-drop rule, noting that "easily one-third of black people have White DNA" and arguing that ignoring European ancestry meant denying full multi-racial identities. President Barack Obama is believed to have been descended from an early African enslaved in America, recorded as "John Punch," through his mother's apparently White line.

  Professor David R. Roediger of the University of Illinois has suggested that the construction of the White race in the United States was an effort to mentally distance slave owners from slaves. Alastair Bonnett argues that "White identity," as presently conceived, is an American project reflecting American interpretations of race and history. Historian Bruce David Baum, citing Ruth Frankenberg, states that "the history of modern racist domination has been bound up with the history of how European peoples defined themselves as members of a superior 'white race'."

  The current U.S. Census definition includes as White "a person having origins in any of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa." The Center for the Study of Social Policy frames the capitalization of "White" as an intentional political act, writing: "To not name 'White' as a race is, in fact, an anti-Black act which frames Whiteness as both neutral and the standard." Robert P. Stuckert, a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio State University, has said that today the majority of descendants of African slaves are White, a claim that illustrates how the one-drop rule and centuries of intermarriage have produced a population whose genetic and legal racial identities frequently diverge.