White is a historical specification of skin color and a modern classification of race. Most often, it is applied to identify people of European origin, but the definition of "White" varies depending on context and points of view. Beyond racialization, the word simply denotes any person with light skin, typically carnation colored.
Descriptions of populations as "white" in reference to their skin color is occasionally found in Greco-Roman ethnography and in other ancient and medieval sources, but these societies did not have any concept of whiteness as a race nor of a pan-European identity. The modern racialized understanding that is "White race" or "White people" entered the major European languages in the late 17th century, when 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. Scholarship on race distinguishes the modern concept from pre-modern descriptions, which focused on physical complexion rather than on the idea of race. Prior to the modern era, no European peoples regarded themselves as "White" and instead defined their identity in terms of their religion, ancestry, ethnicity, or nationality.
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.
Physical descriptions in antiquity
The assignment of positive and negative connotations of White and Black to certain persons date 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. Similarly, the Rigveda uses "black skin" as a metaphor for irreligiosity.Michael Witzel, "Rgvedic History" in: The Indo-Aryans of South Asia (1995): "while it would be easy to assume reference to skin color, this would go against the spirit of the hymns: for Vedic poets, black always signifies evil, and any other meaning would be secondary in these contexts." Ancient Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks and Minoans generally depicted women as having pale or white skin while men were depicted as dark brown or tanned. As a result, men with pale or light skin, leukochrōs (λευκόχρως, "white-skinned") could be considered weak and effeminate by Ancient Greek writers such as Plato and Aristotle. According to Aristotle "Those whose skin is too dark are cowardly: witness Egyptians and the Ethiopians. Those whose skin is too light are equally cowardly: witness women. The skin color typical of the courageous should be halfway between the two." Similarly, Xenophon of Athens describes Persian prisoners of war as "white-skinned because they were never without their clothing, and soft and unused to toil because they always rode in carriages" and states that Greek soldiers as a result believed "that the war would be in no way different from having to fight with women."
Classicist James H. Dee states "the Greeks do not describe themselves as 'White people'or as anything else because they had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves."James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (December 2003 – January 2004), pp. 162 ff. People's skin color did not carry useful meaning; what mattered is where they lived. Herodotus described the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hairHerodotus: Histories, 4.108. and the Egyptians – quite like the Colchians – as (, "dark-skinned") and curly-haired.Herodotus: Histories, 2.104.2. He also gives the possibly first reference to the common Greek name of the tribes living south of Egypt, otherwise known as Nubians, which was (, "burned-faced").Herodotus: Histories, 2.17. Later Xenophanes of Colophon described the Aethiopians as black and the Thracians as having red hair and blue eyes.Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments, J. H. Lesher, University of Toronto Press, 2001, , p. 90. In his description of the Scythians, Hippocrates states that the cold weather "burns their white skin and turns it ruddy."
History
The term "White race" or "White people" entered the 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. It has repeatedly been ascribed to strains of blood, ancestry, and physical traits, and was eventually made into a subject of pseudoscientific research, which culminated in scientific racism, which was later widely repudiated by the scientific community. According to historian Irene Silverblatt, "Race thinking… made social categories into racial truths." Bruce David Baum, citing the work of Ruth Frankenberg, states, "the history of modern racist domination has been bound up with the history of how European peoples defined themselves (and sometimes some other peoples) as members of a superior 'white race'." Alastair Bonnett argues that "white identity", as it is presently conceived, is an American project, reflecting American interpretations of race and history.
According to Gregory Jay, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee:
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "East Asian peoples were almost uniformly described as White, never as yellow." Michael Keevak's history Becoming Yellow, finds that East Asians were redesignated as being yellow-skinned because "yellow had become a racial designation," and that the replacement of White with yellow as a description came through pseudoscientific discourse.
A social category formed by colonialism
A three-part racial scheme in color terms was used in seventeenth-century Latin America under Spanish rule. Irene Silverblatt traces "race thinking" in South America to the social categories of colonialism and state formation: "White, black, and brown are abridged, abstracted versions of colonizer, slave, and colonized." By the mid-seventeenth century, the novel term ("Spaniard") was being equated in written documents with , or "White". In Spain's American colonies, 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. Similar restrictions applied in the military, some religious orders, colleges, and universities, leading to a nearly all-White priesthood and professional stratum. Blacks and were subject to tribute obligations and forbidden to bear arms, and black and women were forbidden to wear jewels, silk, or precious metals in early colonial Mexico and Peru. Those (people with dark skin) and (people of mixed African and European ancestry) with resources largely sought to evade these restrictions by passing as White. A brief royal offer to buy the privileges of Whiteness for a substantial sum of money attracted fifteen applicants before pressure from White elites ended the practice.
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. Early appearances of White race or White people in the Oxford English Dictionary begin in the seventeenth century. Historian Winthrop Jordan reports that, "throughout the [thirteen] colonies the terms Christian, free, English, and white were ... employed indiscriminately" in the seventeenth century as proxies for one another. In 1680, Morgan Godwyn "found it necessary to explain" to English readers that "in Barbados, 'white' was 'the general name for Europeans.'" Several historians report a shift towards greater use of White as a legal category alongside a hardening of restrictions on free or Christian blacks.Baum (2006), p. 48. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro 1974, p. 52, puts the shift to white from earlier Christian, free, and English to around 1680. White remained a more familiar term in the American colonies than in Britain well into the 18th century, according to historian Theodore W. Allen.
Scientific racism
Western studies of race and ethnicity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed into what would later be termed scientific racism. Prominent European pseudoscientists writing about human and natural difference included a White or West Eurasian race among a small set of human races and imputed physical, mental, or aesthetic superiority to this White category. These ideas were discredited by twentieth-century scientists.
Eighteenth century beginnings In 1758, Carl 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, his descriptions of these groups included cultural patterns and derogatory stereotypes.Sarah A. Tishkoff and Kenneth K. Kidd (2004): "Implications of biography of human populations for 'race' and medicine" (), Nature Genetics.
In 1775, the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach asserted that "The white color holds the first place, such as is that of most European peoples. The redness of the cheeks in this variety is almost peculiar to it: at all events it is but seldom to be seen in the rest".
In the various editions of his On the Natural Variety of Mankind, he categorized humans into four or five races, largely built on Linnaeus' classifications. But while, in 1775, he had grouped into his "first and most important" race "Europe, Asia this side of the Ganges, and all the country situated to the north of the Amoor, together with that part of North America, which is nearest both in position and character of the inhabitants", he somewhat narrows his "Caucasian variety" in the third edition of his text, of 1795: "To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa."Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: The Anthropological Treatises. Longman Green, London 1865, pp. 99, 265 ff. Blumenbach quotes various other systems by his contemporaries, ranging from two to seven races, authored by the authorities of that time, including, besides Linnæus, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Christoph Meiners and Immanuel Kant.