White people

White people (also white race or whites) is an informal label given to a segment of the human population based on inconsistently-applied characteristics such as ethnicity, country of origin, skin tone, language, and religion.

The designation has social, political, scientific, and legal implications such as on a nation's census, anti-miscegenation laws, racial segregation, affirmative action, eugenics, racial marginalization, and racial quotas.

Terminology

From a purely biological perspective there is no genetic basis for a discrete definition of a white race. Craig Venter (the first researcher to sequence the human genome) has stated that race is a social concept, not a scientific one.

A recent article in the journal Nature states,

Knowledge from the Human Genome Project and research on human genome variation increasingly challenges the applicability of the term 'race' to human population groups, raising questions about the validity of inferences made about 'race' in the biomedical and scientific literature.

Lynn B Jorde and Stephen P Wooding point out that while genetic diversity does exist and is correlated with geographic origin, genetic diversity does not create distinct races

Clustering of individuals is correlated with geographic origin or ancestry. These clusters are also correlated with some traditional concepts of race, but the correlations are imperfect because genetic variation tends to be distributed in a continuous, overlapping fashion among populations.

Guido Barbujani*,, Arianna Magagni, Eric Minch, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza concur. They state,

Differences among continents represent roughly 1/10 of human molecular diversity, which does not suggest that the racial subdivision of our species reflects any major discontinuity in our genome.

Still, genetic variation over geographic space does allow one to very roughly identify the subject's origin,

Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%. Nevertheless, without using prior information about the origins of individuals, we identified six main genetic clusters, five of which correspond to major geographic regions, and subclusters that often correspond to individual populations.

But geographic origin has very little predictive value for genetics as research by L. B. Jorde, W. S. Watkins, M. J. Bamshad, M. E. Dixon, C. E. Ricker, M. T. Seielstad, and M. A. Batzer has shown,

All systems except the Y-chromosome STRs show less variation between populations within continents than between continents.

and 'race' has even less as indicated by research by Michael J. Bamshad, Stephen Wooding, W. Scott Watkins, Christopher T. Ostler, Mark A. Batzer, and Lynn B. Jorde,

Membership in these groups [that is, groups of genetically similar people] is commonly inferred by use of a proxy such as place-of-origin or ethnic affiliation. These inferences are frequently weakened, however, by use of surrogates, such as skin color, for these proxies, the distribution of which bears little resemblance to the distribution of neutral genetic variation.

The American Anthropological Association states,

genetics....indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes....there is greater variation within 'racial' groups than between them.

While some research agrees with these findings, other research varies has found slightly different percentages, slightly lowering the figures of AAA. Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London agreed with Cambridge University statistician, A.W.F. Edwards about the elementary error of ignoring correlations while analyzing genetic variation. This is known as Lewontin's Fallacy. Leroi states:

The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry. But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from—and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information. Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many—a few hundred—variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so.

Therefore it has not been established that perceptions of racial difference are entirely socially mandated. However, there are different meanings of the word white, in a racial context. In China, white people refers to a segment of Asians. Europeans who travelled to Northeast Asia in the 17th century applied the term white to the people they encountered. The name of the Bai people of Yunnan, translates into white.

As European colonization of the Americas and other parts of the world brought different races into close contact with each other, the term white and other color-based racial terms came into wide use, including black, brown, yellow, and red. By the 18th century, white had become well established as a racial term. In the United States, confusion over the designation white or Caucasian is considerable, due partly to the introduction of the term Hispanic in the 1980 United States Census.

Social vs. physical perceptions of white

See also: Social interpretations of race

Whether any individual considers any other individual as white often comes down to whether the person looks white; however this is a very subjective judgement. It is difficult to disentangle social from physical perceptions, because the former depends upon the latter. Today, most Americans consider Eastern Slavs and many consider European Jews as white, but this was not always the case.

In medieval Europe, Christendom was the dominant community, and Pagans, heretics, Jews, and Muslims were the outsiders, regardless of skin color. When the primacy of religion was eroded by the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and secularism, separation of peoples based on religion shifted to concepts like white and civilized.

United States

Main article: White American

In the United States, white most commonly refers to people who are of European descent and phenotype. Merriem-Webster defines White people (White race or sometimes just Whites) as a certain segment of humans characterized by their light skin color. The word white is used by the US government as one of five racial categories used for census data.

The 2000 United States Census, speaking of race categories, states, "They generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country. They do not conform to any biological, anthropological or genetic criteria."

The United States Census parameters for race give national origin a racial value. This can be confusing in regards to people of Middle Eastern and North African heritage — who are commonly classified as Caucasian. Another difficulty is that by responding Israeli in the US census, a person will be categorized as white, even though not all Israelis are of European descent (Ashkenazi); they may be of Ethiopian (Falasha), Yemenite (Teimani), or Indian descent.

During the era of racial segregation in the Southern United States, facilities were commonly divided into separate sections for white and colored people. These terms were defined by white people in positions of authority.

Europe

Most countries of Europe do not use racial classification in their census or identity papers, therefore there is no official definition of white.

In the UK, the national 2001 census used the term White as an "ethnic" category. The term "White British" is defined by the United Kingdom Census to include Irish and English. The peoples who marked "Other White" were mostly of European, American and Australian descent followed by North African and Asian (West Asia).

Latin America

In some Latin American countries, even those of visible partial African or Indigenous ancestry may be considered white. The individual decides what (if any) race he or she wishes to be considered as. In some countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile etc. the majority of the population is of Spanish or other European ancestry, making them white or half white (mestizo). Race in parts of Latin America "refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry." In Latin America, "...A single drop of European blood is seen to inevitably whiten... A person with discernible African heritage is not necessarily immutably black." For detailed sources and citations, see "Chapter 6. Features of Today's Endogamous Color Line" in Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0-939479-23-0. A summary of this chapter, with endnotes, is available online at Features of Today's Endogamous Color Line.

According to census takers' instructions in Brazil, color is explicitly defined as recording the subject's observed skin tone and has nothing to do with race. Nevertheless, skin color is used to identify racial heritage.

See also

• Apartheid
• Black people
• Caucasoid
• Caucasian race
• Caucasian American
• European American
• Human skin color
• Race (historical definitions)
• White American
• Whiteness studies

Further reading

• 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
• Alfredo Tryferis, "Separated by a Common Language: The Strange Case of the White Hispanic," The Raw Story, http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/tryferis/hispanic.htm

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