In ancient Greece, a man with pale skin was not considered noble but weak and effeminate, a stark reversal of modern associations between light skin and status. Aristotle and Plato argued that the skin color typical of the courageous should be halfway between the two extremes, viewing those with skin too dark as cowardly and those with skin too light as equally cowardly. Herodotus described the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair, while the Egyptians were depicted as dark-skinned and curly-haired, yet these societies possessed no notion of whiteness as a race. The Greeks did not describe themselves as White people because they had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves, instead defining identity through religion, ancestry, or nationality. Ancient Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks, and Minoans generally depicted women as having pale or white skin while men were depicted as dark brown or tanned, suggesting that in the ancient world, physical complexion carried meaning but racial hierarchy did not exist. The assignment of positive and negative connotations of White and Black to certain persons dates to the very old age in a number of Indo-European languages, but these differences were not necessarily used in respect to skin colors. Religious conversion was sometimes described figuratively as a change in skin color, and the Rigveda uses black skin as a metaphor for irreligiosity, where black always signifies evil and any other meaning is secondary in these contexts.
The Colonial Invention
The term White race entered major European languages in the later seventeenth century, originating with the racialization of slavery at the time, in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Spanish Empire. Before this period, no European peoples regarded themselves as White, and instead defined their identity in terms of their religion, ancestry, ethnicity, or nationality. In the Spanish colonies, a three-part racial scheme in color terms was used, where White, black, and brown were abridged, abstracted versions of colonizer, slave, and colonized. By the mid-seventeenth century, the novel term Spaniard was being equated in written documents with White, and Black African, Indigenous, Jewish, or morisco ancestry formally excluded individuals from the purity of blood requirements for holding any public office under the Royal Pragmatic of 1501. In the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, the designation English or Christian was initially used in contrast to Native Americans or Africans, and throughout the thirteen colonies the terms Christian, free, English, and white were employed indiscriminately in the seventeenth century as proxies for one another. A shift towards greater use of White as a legal category alongside a hardening of restrictions on free or Christian blacks occurred around 1680, when Morgan Godwyn found it necessary to explain to English readers that in Barbados, white was the general name for Europeans. White remained a more familiar term in the American colonies than in Britain well into the 18th century, according to historian Theodore W. Allen, as the concept of a unified White people achieved greater acceptance in Europe, particularly in the context of race-based slavery and social status in the world's European colonies.The Science of Skin
In 1758, Carl Linnaeus proposed what he considered to be natural taxonomic categories of the human species, distinguishing between Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens europaeus, and later adding four geographical subdivisions of humans: white Europeans, red Americans, yellow Asians and black Africans. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach discovered in 1795 a Georgian female skull which he used to hypothesize the origination of Europeans from the Caucasus, and in the third edition of his text, he narrowed his Caucasian variety to include the inhabitants of Europe, Eastern Asia as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges, and lastly, those of Northern Africa. Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., depended on environmental factors, such as solarization and diet, and held to the degenerative hypothesis of racial origins, claiming that Adam and Eve were Caucasian inhabitants of Asia and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, race scientists, including most physical anthropologists classified the world's populations into three, four, or five races, which, depending on the authority consulted, were further divided into various sub-races. During this period the Caucasian race, named after people of the Caucasus Mountains but extending to all Europeans, figured as one of these races and was incorporated as a formal category of both pseudoscientific research and, in countries including the United States, social classification. There was never any scholarly consensus on the delineation between the Caucasian race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid one, including the populations of East Asia, with Carleton S. Coon including the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasian label, while Thomas Henry Huxley classified the same populations as Mongoloid, and Lothrop Stoddard classified as brown most of the populations of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, and counted as White only the European peoples and their descendants.The Legal Color Line
In the United States, the Immigration Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to any alien, being a free white person, and 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, and 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. In United States v. Cartozian in 1925, an Armenian immigrant successfully argued that his nationality was White in contradistinction to other people of the Near East on the basis of their Christian religious traditions, while conflicting rulings in In re Hassan and Ex parte Mohriez found that Arabs did not, and did qualify as White, respectively, under immigration law. The one-drop rule, that a person with any amount of known black African ancestry is considered black, is a classification that was used in parts of the United States, and such laws were declared unconstitutional in 1967 when the Supreme Court ruled on anti-miscegenation laws while hearing Loving v. Virginia. The one-drop rule attempted to create a binary system, classifying all persons as either Black or White regardless of a person's physical appearance, and previously persons had sometimes been classified as mulatto or mixed-race, including on censuses up to 1930. Some people with a high proportion of European ancestry could pass as White, as noted above, and this binary approach contrasts with the more flexible social structures present in Latin America, where there were less clear-cut divisions between various ethnicities. People are often classified not only by their appearance but by their class, and as a result of centuries of having children with White people, the majority of African Americans have some European admixture, and many people long accepted as White also have some African ancestry.The Global Migrations
White people in Argentina are mainly descendants of immigrants who came from Europe and the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with major contributors including Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Slavic groups, Britons, Irish, and Scandinavians. By the 1910s, after immigration rates peaked, over 30 percent of the country's population was from outside Argentina, and over half of Buenos Aires' population was foreign-born, and it is estimated that Argentina received over 6 million European immigrants during the period 1857 to 1940. In Chile, an important flux of emigrants from Spain populated the country in the eighteenth century, mostly Basques, who vitalized the Chilean economy and rose rapidly in the social hierarchy and became the political elite that still dominates the country. An estimated 1.6 million to 3.2 million Chileans have a surname of Basque origin, and the Basques liked Chile because of its great similarity to their native land, with similar geography, cool climate, and the presence of fruits, seafood, and wine. In the Philippines, a genetic study by the National Geographic shows 5% of the ancestry of Filipinos can be traced to Southern Europeans that had arrived due to the Spanish colonization of the archipelago, and there is also the presence of about 300,000 mostly White American citizens in the country, with the number of Americans living in the Philippines increasing to at least 750,000 as of year 2025. In Australia, from 1788, when the first British colony was founded, until the early nineteenth century, most immigrants were English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish convicts, and the vast majority was still White, and the gold rushes inspired the first racist activism and policy, directed mainly at Chinese immigrants.The Census Paradox
In the 2021 census of Hong Kong, 61,582 people identified as white representing 0.8% of the resident population, while 70,124 people were listed as other, which includes people who identify as more than one ethnic group. In France, the government banned the collection of racial or ethnic information in 1978, and the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies does not provide census data on White residents or citizens, and French courts have, however, made cases, and issued rulings, which have identified White people as a demographic group within the country. In the United States, the White population stood at 85.5% in England, at 96% in Scotland, at 95.6% in Wales, while in Northern Ireland 98.28% identified themselves as White, amounting to a total of 87.2% White population. In Brazil, recent censuses are conducted on the basis of self-identification, and according to the 2022 Census, White people totaled 88,252,121 and made up 43.5% of the Brazilian population, and the census shows a trend of fewer Brazilians of a different descent identifying as White people as their social status increases. In Argentina, the 1887 national census was the final year where blacks were included as a separate category before it was eliminated by the government, and the 1914 National Census revealed that around 80% of the national population were either European immigrants, their children or grandchildren. In South Africa, there were 4.6 million Whites in 2011, down from an all-time high of 5.2 million in 1995 following a wave of emigration commencing in the late twentieth century, and many returned over time.The Modern Identity
Contemporary anthropologists and other scientists, while recognizing the reality of biological variation between different human populations, regard the concept of a unified and distinguishable White race as a social construct with no scientific basis. The cultural boundaries separating White Americans from other racial or ethnic categories are contested and always changing, and 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. In the early twenty-first century, the relationship between some ethnic groups and whiteness remains complex, and some Jewish and Arab individuals both self-identify and are considered as part of the White American racial category, but others with the same ancestry feel they are not White and may not always be perceived as White by American society. The United States Census Bureau proposed but withdrew plans to add a new category for Middle Eastern and North African peoples in the U.S. Census 2020, and specialists disputed whether this classification should be considered a White ethnicity or a race. According to Frank Sweet, various sources agree that, on average, people with 12 percent or less admixture appear White to the average American and those with up to 25 percent look ambiguous, and the current U.S. Census definition includes as White a person having origins in any of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa. White Americans made up nearly 90% of the population in 1950, and a report from the Pew Research Center in 2008 projects that by 2050, non-Hispanic White Americans will make up 47% of the population, down from 67% projected in 2005.In ancient Greece, a man with pale skin was not considered noble but weak and effeminate, a stark reversal of modern associations between light skin and status. Aristotle and Plato argued that the skin color typical of the courageous should be halfway between the two extremes, viewing those with skin too dark as cowardly and those with skin too light as equally cowardly. Herodotus described the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair, while the Egyptians were depicted as dark-skinned and curly-haired, yet these societies possessed no notion of whiteness as a race. The Greeks did not describe themselves as White people because they had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves, instead defining identity through religion, ancestry, or nationality. Ancient Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks, and Minoans generally depicted women as having pale or white skin while men were depicted as dark brown or tanned, suggesting that in the ancient world, physical complexion carried meaning but racial hierarchy did not exist. The assignment of positive and negative connotations of White and Black to certain persons dates to the very old age in a number of Indo-European languages, but these differences were not necessarily used in respect to skin colors. Religious conversion was sometimes described figuratively as a change in skin color, and the Rigveda uses black skin as a metaphor for irreligiosity, where black always signifies evil and any other meaning is secondary in these contexts.
The Colonial Invention
The term White race entered major European languages in the later seventeenth century, originating with the racialization of slavery at the time, in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Spanish Empire. Before this period, no European peoples regarded themselves as White, and instead defined their identity in terms of their religion, ancestry, ethnicity, or nationality. In the Spanish colonies, a three-part racial scheme in color terms was used, where White, black, and brown were abridged, abstracted versions of colonizer, slave, and colonized. By the mid-seventeenth century, the novel term Spaniard was being equated in written documents with White, and Black African, Indigenous, Jewish, or morisco ancestry formally excluded individuals from the purity of blood requirements for holding any public office under the Royal Pragmatic of 1501. In the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, the designation English or Christian was initially used in contrast to Native Americans or Africans, and throughout the thirteen colonies the terms Christian, free, English, and white were employed indiscriminately in the seventeenth century as proxies for one another. A shift towards greater use of White as a legal category alongside a hardening of restrictions on free or Christian blacks occurred around 1680, when Morgan Godwyn found it necessary to explain to English readers that in Barbados, white was the general name for Europeans. White remained a more familiar term in the American colonies than in Britain well into the 18th century, according to historian Theodore W. Allen, as the concept of a unified White people achieved greater acceptance in Europe, particularly in the context of race-based slavery and social status in the world's European colonies.
The Science of Skin
In 1758, Carl Linnaeus proposed what he considered to be natural taxonomic categories of the human species, distinguishing between Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens europaeus, and later adding four geographical subdivisions of humans: white Europeans, red Americans, yellow Asians and black Africans. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach discovered in 1795 a Georgian female skull which he used to hypothesize the origination of Europeans from the Caucasus, and in the third edition of his text, he narrowed his Caucasian variety to include the inhabitants of Europe, Eastern Asia as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges, and lastly, those of Northern Africa. Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., depended on environmental factors, such as solarization and diet, and held to the degenerative hypothesis of racial origins, claiming that Adam and Eve were Caucasian inhabitants of Asia and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, race scientists, including most physical anthropologists classified the world's populations into three, four, or five races, which, depending on the authority consulted, were further divided into various sub-races. During this period the Caucasian race, named after people of the Caucasus Mountains but extending to all Europeans, figured as one of these races and was incorporated as a formal category of both pseudoscientific research and, in countries including the United States, social classification. There was never any scholarly consensus on the delineation between the Caucasian race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid one, including the populations of East Asia, with Carleton S. Coon including the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasian label, while Thomas Henry Huxley classified the same populations as Mongoloid, and Lothrop Stoddard classified as brown most of the populations of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, and counted as White only the European peoples and their descendants.
The Legal Color Line
In the United States, the Immigration Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to any alien, being a free white person, and 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, and 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. In United States v. Cartozian in 1925, an Armenian immigrant successfully argued that his nationality was White in contradistinction to other people of the Near East on the basis of their Christian religious traditions, while conflicting rulings in In re Hassan and Ex parte Mohriez found that Arabs did not, and did qualify as White, respectively, under immigration law. The one-drop rule, that a person with any amount of known black African ancestry is considered black, is a classification that was used in parts of the United States, and such laws were declared unconstitutional in 1967 when the Supreme Court ruled on anti-miscegenation laws while hearing Loving v. Virginia. The one-drop rule attempted to create a binary system, classifying all persons as either Black or White regardless of a person's physical appearance, and previously persons had sometimes been classified as mulatto or mixed-race, including on censuses up to 1930. Some people with a high proportion of European ancestry could pass as White, as noted above, and this binary approach contrasts with the more flexible social structures present in Latin America, where there were less clear-cut divisions between various ethnicities. People are often classified not only by their appearance but by their class, and as a result of centuries of having children with White people, the majority of African Americans have some European admixture, and many people long accepted as White also have some African ancestry.
The Global Migrations
White people in Argentina are mainly descendants of immigrants who came from Europe and the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with major contributors including Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Slavic groups, Britons, Irish, and Scandinavians. By the 1910s, after immigration rates peaked, over 30 percent of the country's population was from outside Argentina, and over half of Buenos Aires' population was foreign-born, and it is estimated that Argentina received over 6 million European immigrants during the period 1857 to 1940. In Chile, an important flux of emigrants from Spain populated the country in the eighteenth century, mostly Basques, who vitalized the Chilean economy and rose rapidly in the social hierarchy and became the political elite that still dominates the country. An estimated 1.6 million to 3.2 million Chileans have a surname of Basque origin, and the Basques liked Chile because of its great similarity to their native land, with similar geography, cool climate, and the presence of fruits, seafood, and wine. In the Philippines, a genetic study by the National Geographic shows 5% of the ancestry of Filipinos can be traced to Southern Europeans that had arrived due to the Spanish colonization of the archipelago, and there is also the presence of about 300,000 mostly White American citizens in the country, with the number of Americans living in the Philippines increasing to at least 750,000 as of year 2025. In Australia, from 1788, when the first British colony was founded, until the early nineteenth century, most immigrants were English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish convicts, and the vast majority was still White, and the gold rushes inspired the first racist activism and policy, directed mainly at Chinese immigrants.
The Census Paradox
In the 2021 census of Hong Kong, 61,582 people identified as white representing 0.8% of the resident population, while 70,124 people were listed as other, which includes people who identify as more than one ethnic group. In France, the government banned the collection of racial or ethnic information in 1978, and the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies does not provide census data on White residents or citizens, and French courts have, however, made cases, and issued rulings, which have identified White people as a demographic group within the country. In the United States, the White population stood at 85.5% in England, at 96% in Scotland, at 95.6% in Wales, while in Northern Ireland 98.28% identified themselves as White, amounting to a total of 87.2% White population. In Brazil, recent censuses are conducted on the basis of self-identification, and according to the 2022 Census, White people totaled 88,252,121 and made up 43.5% of the Brazilian population, and the census shows a trend of fewer Brazilians of a different descent identifying as White people as their social status increases. In Argentina, the 1887 national census was the final year where blacks were included as a separate category before it was eliminated by the government, and the 1914 National Census revealed that around 80% of the national population were either European immigrants, their children or grandchildren. In South Africa, there were 4.6 million Whites in 2011, down from an all-time high of 5.2 million in 1995 following a wave of emigration commencing in the late twentieth century, and many returned over time.
The Modern Identity
Contemporary anthropologists and other scientists, while recognizing the reality of biological variation between different human populations, regard the concept of a unified and distinguishable White race as a social construct with no scientific basis. The cultural boundaries separating White Americans from other racial or ethnic categories are contested and always changing, and 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. In the early twenty-first century, the relationship between some ethnic groups and whiteness remains complex, and some Jewish and Arab individuals both self-identify and are considered as part of the White American racial category, but others with the same ancestry feel they are not White and may not always be perceived as White by American society. The United States Census Bureau proposed but withdrew plans to add a new category for Middle Eastern and North African peoples in the U.S. Census 2020, and specialists disputed whether this classification should be considered a White ethnicity or a race. According to Frank Sweet, various sources agree that, on average, people with 12 percent or less admixture appear White to the average American and those with up to 25 percent look ambiguous, and the current U.S. Census definition includes as White a person having origins in any of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa. White Americans made up nearly 90% of the population in 1950, and a report from the Pew Research Center in 2008 projects that by 2050, non-Hispanic White Americans will make up 47% of the population, down from 67% projected in 2005.