White people

Barack Obama, a man who may be considered white

The term "white people" (also "whites" or "white race") has been defined as "being a member of a group or race characterized by light pigmentation of the skin" and "to a human group having light-colored skin, especially of European ancestry."

The term white people functions as a color terminology for race; one that emerged from a racialized, European historical context.

Physical appearance

Although there is no single universal definition of whiteness, some traits that are associated with Europeans are associated with whites. The most notable trait describing people who identify as white is light skin. Many people from East Asia have light skin comparable with Europeans, however in normal discourse they are not referred to as white. Hence to distinguish whites from East Asians other facial features are considered in particular eye shape. People who are white have the same eye shapes as most black Africans in that they lack epicanthic folds. Other physical features sometimes associated with white people include a variety of hair and eye colors.

Light Skin

Skin color in various ethnicities, Clockwise from upper left: European American John Kerry, an albino African boy, Multiracial Thandie Newton , an East Asian girl from Shanghai. In the US, only the European American would be referred to as white

Further information: Human skin color and SLC24A5

White people are archetypically distinguished by lighter skin, and in general, Europeans have lighter skin (as measured by population average skin reflectance read by spectrophotometer) than other ethnic groups. While all mean values of skin reflectance of non-European populations are lower than Europeans, some European and non-European populations overlap in lightness of skin, as noted by the Supreme Court of the United States, which stated in a 1923 lawsuit over whiteness that the "swarthy brunette[s] ... are darker than some of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow races" .

Humans have pigment cells, which contain pigment granules called melanosomes. In people of European descent, the melanosomes are fewer, smaller, and lighter than those from people of African ancestry, while the melanosomes of East Asians show intermediate properties. In actuality the skin of Europeans is not actually white but the underlying layer of fat, the adipose tissue, is white. Adipose tissue is white in people of all races. In Europeans the upper layer of skin, the epidermis, is an almost transparent layer of film. Consequently the epidermis allows the white adipose tissue to become visible. Blood vessels interlaced between the fat produce the pale pink color associated with Europeans. In darker skinned people the epidermis is filled with melanosomes that obscure the underlying layers of fat.

The skin of albinos is similar to Europeans and East Asians in that it is depigmented. However in whites and East Asians the enzymes that produce melanin are still active. In the presence of UV radiation from the sun the skin cells produce enough melanin to tan the skin to a darker complexion. This effect protects the underlying layers of skin from sunburn. In albinos, the enzyme that produces melanin is defective, and as a result they are unable to tan. Their skin is thus very sensitive to UV radiation and is easily sunburned.

Origins of light skin

Light skin is not unique to human populations, in fact it is the default state of most mammals. However many animals have a thick layer of body hair that protects the skin from the sun's rays and also keeps the body warm at night. Chimpanzees are the closest living relatives to humans. Since they have light skin covered by hair, scientist believe that the common ancestor humans share with the chimpanzee would have been the same. Only a few mammals have lost their hair for a variety of reasons, these include aquatic mammals, hippopotami and Naked mole rats. As human evolution progressed, brain size increased. The increase in brain power would have required a finer thermoregulatory system since the brain consumes large amounts of energy and is very sensitive to heat. As a result humans evolved more sweat glands, especially on the face. For effective evaporation from these sweat glands the loss of body hair was necessary. Though naked skin is advantageous for thermoregulation, it exposes the epidermis to destructive levels of UV radiation that can cause sunburn, skin cancer and birth defects resulting from the destruction of the essential vitamin B folate. Consequently natural selection favored increased levels of melanin in the skin and humans lost their light skin. Bare skin may have become sexually attractive as a sign of health, hence sexual selection favored darker skin colors. The appearance of dark skin was therefore one of the most important events in human evolution since it enabled humans to lose their body hair and allow a more than threefold increase in brain size.

Since skin color is a quantitative trait in that it is varies continuously on a gradient from dark to light. Therefore it is a polygenic trait, under the influence of several genes. Many of these genes have yet to be identified, however two genes are known that do contribute to skin color. They are the MC1R and the SLC24A5 genes.

In general genes found among African population show greater diversity than non African populations. However the MC1R gene is unlike other genes in that the version found in African population shows little variation but the version found among Non-Africans is highly variable. The version of the gene in Chimpanzees and Europeans is more polymorphic. This is evidence that dark skin may have been under strong selection. Since early humans would have been barely clothed or naked, any mutation that produced lighter skin color would have been a severe disadvantage to those living under the hot African sun. For example light skinned individuals exposed to strong sunlight have lower levels of vitamin B folate, which essential for a healthy pregnancy. Folate deficiencies are known to cause birth defects, hence lighter skinned humans would have had less reproductive success. Light skinned individuals living in the tropics in places such as Australia have some of the highest rates of skin cancer. Together with sunburn, the combined effects would have made light skin a liability.

When humans left Africa 50,000 years ago for less sun intensive regions of the world, the selective pressure on lighter skin would have been relaxed and different versions of the genes such as MC1R would increase in frequency. Hence a greater variety of skin colors are found outside Africa. Lighter skin colors may have been advantageous at lower latitudes since they allow greater penetration of the sun's UV radiation, a requirement for vitamin D synthesis. This may have further increased the adaptive value of the gene Another study in 2006 involving the SLC24A5 gene suggested that Europeans and East Asians have evolved light skin, at least partially independently and via distinct genetic mechanisms. Africans and East Asians have the same version of the gene whereas Europeans have a version that differs by one base pair. Mixed race individuals of Afro-European descent with the European version of gene had skin color that was 25-38% lighter than mixed race individuals without the gene based on the melanin index. It should be noted that scientists have identified at least 100 other genes associated with pigment processing but whose function is not yet fully understood. It is most likely that many of these genes were already present in the ancestral population in Africa prior to their dispersal. Though African populations are relatively dark, according to a recent study they possess greater diversity in skin complexion than all other populations. This is evidence that many of the genes for lighter skin are already present in Africa. When humans migrated out of Africa, the lighter skin causing alleles may have accumulated in one population, either by genetic drift, natural selection, sexual selection or a combination of these effects. Since their effects are additive it is possible light skin could arise over several generations without any new mutations taking place.

Some scholars suggest Europeans may have retained their dark skin until as early as 13,000 years ago. This is based on Magdelanian cave art in which the painters depict hunters as darker than the animals hunted.. The mutation in the SLC24A5 gene has been dated to 7,000 years ago indicating that light skin may be a recent adaptation. Other circumstantial evidence is that fossils of early Europeans show adaptations to hot tropical environments. The Cro-Magnon skeletal remains have long limbs, narrow bodies, and short trunks like the Nilotic populations such as the Maasai. Modern Europeans have evolved shorter limbs, longer trunks and wider bodies, adaptations for cold weather.

Hair and Eye Colors

Main article: Hair color

Main article: Eye color

A greater population diversity in hair and eye colors occurs in groups which are socially designated as white. Eye color experts Sturm and Frudakis note, "The common occurrence of lighter iris colours is found almost exclusively in Europeans (i.e. recent monophyletic, non-East Asian, non-Native American and non-African lineages) and individuals of European admixture."

Anthropologist Peter Frost geographically locates the variation as follows, "This diversity reaches a maximum in an area centered on the East Baltic and covering northern and eastern Europe."

Blonde

Main article: Blonde

Lighter hair colors occur naturally in humans of all ethnicities as rare mutations, but at such low rates that it is hardly noticeable in most populations, or is only found in children. In certain European populations, the occurrence of blond hair is more frequent, and often remains throughout adulthood. Based on recent genetic information, it is probable that humans with blond hair became distinctly numerous in Europe during the last Ice Age. Before then, Europeans had dark brown hair and dark eyes. Australian Aborigines have a fairly high instance of blond-brown hair.

Red Hair

Main article: Red hair

Red hair (also referred to as auburn, ginger, or titian) is a hair color that varies from a deep red through to bright copper. It is characterized by high levels of the reddish pigment pheomelanin and relatively low levels of the dark pigment eumelanin. Red hair is generally associated with Europeans, however similar hair colors are found amongst the populations of Oceania and Black Jamaicans.

Census and social definitions of white in different regions

Main article: Whiteness studies

See also: Caucasian race, Race, Social interpretations of race, and Race (historical definitions)

Definitions of white have changed over the years, including the official definitions used in many countries, such as the United States and Brazil. Some defied official regulations through the phenomenon of "passing", many of them becoming white people, either temporarily or permanently. Through the mid- to late 20th century, numerous countries had formal legal standards or procedures defining racial categories (see cleanliness of blood, apartheid in South Africa, hypodescent). However, as critiques of racism, scientific arguments against the existence of race, and international prohibitions on state racial discrimination arose, a trend towards self-identification of racial status arose. Below are some census definitions of white, which may differ from the social definition of white within the same country. The social definition has also been added where possible.

Australia

From the late 19th century through 1973, the Government of Australia restricted all permanent immigration to the country by non-Europeans under the White Australia policy, which was enabled by the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, but not formally codified. Immigration inspectors were empowered to ask immigrants to take dictation from any European language as a test for admittance, a test used in practice to exclude people from Asia, South America, Europe and Africa depending on the political climate. Under the policy, large numbers of Portuguese, Italian, Greek, South Slavic, German, Dutch and Polish immigrants were admitted following World War II, assimilating into the country's Anglo-Celtic population. Immigration is no longer restricted to White people.

Norway

According to the Norwegian Social Science Data Service, white/European is a possible census choice.

Brazil

Main article: White Brazilian

Brazil's definition of whiteness is premised on racial mixture rather than hypodescent, producing a range of historical categories for race. As a term, white is more broadly applied than in North America.

Recent censuses in Brazil are conducted on the basis of self-identification. In the 2000 census, 53% of Brazilians (approximately 90 million people in 2000; around 100 million as of 2006) were white and 39% pardo or multiracial Brazilians. White is applied as a term to people of European, Jewish and Arab descent. The census shows a trend of fewer Brazilians of African descent (blacks and pardos) identifying as white people as their social status increases.

Canada

In the results of Statistics Canada's 2001 Canadian Census, white is one category in the population groups data variable, derived from data collected in question 19 (the results of this question are also used to derive the visible minority groups variable).

In the 1995 Employment Equity Act, '"members of visible minorities" means persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour'. In the 2001 Census, persons who marked-in Chinese, South Asian, African, Filipino, Latin American, Southeast Asian, Arab, West Asian, Japanese or Korean were included in the visible minority population. A separate census question on "cultural or ethnic origin" (question 17) does not refer to skin colour.

United Kingdom

In the UK, the Office for National Statistics uses the term White as an ethnic category. The terms White British, White Irish and White Other are used. White British includes Welsh, English and Scottish peoples, as well as residents of Northern Ireland who identify as British. The category White Other includes all white people not from the British Isles. Socially, in the UK white usually refers only to people of native British and European origin. Even Turkey, which is on the periphery of Europe is seen as a non-white country.

United States

Main article: White American

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. The U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation also categorizes "white people" as "people 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.

The cultural boundaries separating Caucasian Americans from other racial or ethnic categories are contested and always changing. Among those not considered White at some time in American history have been the Irish, Germans, Ashkenazi Jews, Italians, Spaniards, Slavs, Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples.

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. 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.

History of the term

The definition of white people has varied in different time periods and locations. Any definition has implications for areas as diverse as national identity, consanguinity, public policy, religion, population statistics, racial segregation, affirmative action, eugenics, racial marginalization and racial quotas. The term has been applied with varying degrees of formality and consistency in many disciplines. Such disciplines include sociology, political science, genetics, biology, medicine, biomedicine, human languages, cultural analysis, and legal analysis.

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. 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. 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."

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. Although differences in skin color between southern Europeans and Moors were nearly nonexistent and on occasion, religious conversion was described figuratively as a change in skin color.

The term white race or white people entered dictionaries of the major European languages in the 1600s. 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. 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." 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 afer 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.

In 1775, Blumenbach categorized humans into five races, which largely corresponded with Linnaeus' classifications, except for the addition of Oceanians (whom he called Malay). Immanuel Kant used the term weiß (white) in Von den verschiedenen Rassen den Menschen (About The Different Races of Men - 1775).

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"...

Gallery

The following people represent diverse examples of the term: "White People" as described in this article.

• German Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Ketterle
  German Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Ketterle
• 
  French politician Ségolène Royal
• 
  Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki
• 
  Brazilian (German ancestry) model Gisele Bündchen
• 
  Italian actress Monica Bellucci
• 
  Spanish-Basque politician Juan José Ibarretxe
• 
  Georgian singer Sopho Khalvashi
• Irish-American US president John Kennedy
  Irish-American US president John Kennedy
• British Former Prime Minister Tony Blair
  British Former Prime Minister Tony Blair
• Russian athelete Anna Kournikova
  Russian athelete Anna Kournikova
• Iranian Last King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
  Iranian Last King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
• Greek-American actress Olympia Dukakis
  Greek-American actress Olympia Dukakis

See also

• First white child
• Genetic history of Europe
• Caucasian race
• Human skin color
• White African
• White American
• Stereotypes of White Americans and Europeans
• White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
• White Australia policy
• White flight
• White guilt
• White Hispanic
• White Latin American
• White male
• White nationalism
• White pride
• White privilege (sociology)
• White separatism
• White supremacy
• Whiteness studies

Bibliography

• 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.
• Oppenheimer, Stephen (2006). The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story. Constable and Robinson Ltd., London. ISBN 978-1-84529-185-7.
• Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945, 2003, ISBN 0-19-515543-2
• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Harvard, 1999, ISBN 0-674-95191-3.
• Frank W. Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule, Backintyme, 2005, ISBN 0-939479-23-0.
• Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, Routledge, 1996, ISBN 0-415-91825-1.
• Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America, Rutgers, 1999, ISBN 0-8135-2590-X.
• 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
• Rosenberg NA, Pritchard JK, Weber JL, Cann HM, Kidd KK, et al. (2002) Genetic structure of human populations. Science 298: 2381–2385.Abstract
• 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
• 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.
• Daniel A. Segal, 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

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
• "Separated by a Common Language: The Strange Case of the White Hispanic by Alfredo Tryferis