This post presents an abbreviated history of how we in the United States have arrived at the point where the article shared in the previous post could be considered headline news worthy to be broadcast and published by major news outlets.
The information is from Wikipedia, and I encourage you to donate to their request for contributions to enable them to provide online information to the public. I note the website this is taken from at the end of the post, as there's a wealth of additional information, bibliographies and sources to continue to free your mind of the American and European belief system of white superiority that infects all of our consciousness.
lovu all~
Kentke
Definitions of white have changed over the years, including the official definitions used in many countries, such as the United States and Brazil. Some people of color 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. However, as critiques of racism and scientific arguments against the existence of race have risen, a trend towards self-identification of racial status has become more prominent.
The cultural boundaries separating white Americans from other racial or ethnic categories are contested and always changing. According to John Tehranian, among those not considered white at some points in American history have been: the Irish, Germans, Levantines (including diaspora Jews and Levantine Arabs), Italians, Spaniards, white Hispanics, Slavs, and Greeks. Studies have found that while current parameters officially encompassed Arabs as part of the White American racial category, many immigrants from the Gulf states feel they are not white and are not perceived as white by American society."
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.
In 1923, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that people of India were not "free white men" entitled to citizenship, despite anthropological evidence in "the extreme northwestern districts of India"there is present the "Caucasian or Aryan race" with an "intermixture of blood" from the "dark skinned Dravidian". 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. White Americans made up nearly 90% of the population in 1950.
One-third of Americans classified as "white" in a study contained between two and twenty percent African genetic admixture, which can be extrapolated to about 74 million whites in America with this admixture.
One drop rule
The one drop rule–that a person with any amount of known African ancestry (however small or invisible) is not white–is a classification that was used in parts of the United States. It is a colloquial term for a set of laws passed by 18 US states between 1910 and 1931, many as a consequence of Plessy v. Ferguson, a Supreme Court decision that upheld the concept of racial segregation by accepting a separate but equal argument. The set of laws was finally declared unconstitutional in 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled on anti-miscegenation laws while hearing Loving v. Virginia, which also found that Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was unconstitutional. The one drop rule attempted to create a bifurcated system of either black or white regardless of a person's physical appearance, but sometimes failed as people with African ancestry sometimes passed as "white", as noted above. This contrasts with the more flexible social structures present in Latin America (derived from the Spanish colonial era casta system) where there were less clear-cut divisions between various ethnicities.
As a result of centuries of having children with white people, the majority of African Americans have European admixture, and many white people also have African ancestry. Robert P. Stuckert, member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio State University said that the majority of the descendants of African slaves are white. Writer and editor Debra Dickerson questions the legitimacy of the one drop rule, stating that "easily one-third of black people have white DNA". She argues that in ignoring their European ancestry, African Americans are denying their fully articulated multi-racial identities.
The peculiarity of the one drop rule may be illustrated by the case of singer Mariah Carey, who was publicly called "another white girl trying to sing black", but who in an interview with Larry King, responded that—despite her physical appearance and the fact that she was raised primarily by her white mother—due to the one drop rule she did not "feel white".
White people, rather than being a straightforward description of skin color, is a term denoting a specific set of ethnic groups and functions as a color metaphor for race.
The definition of "white person" differs according to geographical and historical context. Various social constructions of whiteness have had implications in terms of national identity, consanguinity, public policy, religion, population statistics, racial segregation, affirmative action, eugenics, racial marginalization and racial quotas. The concept has been applied with varying degrees of formality and internal consistency in disciplines including sociology, politics, genetics, biology, medicine, biomedicine, language, culture and law
History of the term
The notion of "white people" or a "white race" as a large group of populations contrasting with non-white or "colored" originates in the 17th century. Pragmatic description of populations as "white" in reference to their skin color[citation needed] predates this notion and is found in Greco-Roman ethnography and other ancient sources.
Antiquity and Middle Ages: occasional physical description
1820 drawing of a Book of Gates fresco of the tomb of Seti I, depicting (from left) four groups of people: Libyans, Nubians, Semitics, Egyptians.
In the literature of the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity, descriptions of the physical aspect of various nations in terms of color is commonplace.
The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg-ga, meaning "the black-headed people". Vicki Leone contrasts this in her book Uppity Women of Ancient Times, noting that the Sumerians paintings and mosaics depict a people possessing dark blue eyes. The Ancient Egyptian (New Kingdom) funerary text known as the Book of Gates distinguishes "four races of men". These are the Egyptians, the Levantine peoples or "Asiatics", the "Nubians" and the "fair-skinned Libyans".
Xenophon describes the Ethiopians as black, and the Persian troops as white compared to the sun-tanned skin of Greek troops.Herodotus similarly used Melanchroes "dark-skinned" for the Egyptians and he compared them to the Aithiopsi "burned-faced" for the Ethiopians. Herodotus also describes the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair.
These color adjectives are typically found in contrast to the "standard" set by the own group, not as a self-description. Classicist James Dee found that, "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—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 Indo-European languages, but these differences were not applied to skin color per se. Religious conversion was described figuratively as a change in skin color. Similarly, the Rigveda uses krsna tvac "black skin" as a metaphor for irreligiosity.
The pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomica (2nd century BC) in keeping with the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean postulates that the ideal skin tone was to be found somewhere between very dark and very light:
"Those who are too black are cowards, like for instance, the Egyptians and Ethiopians. But those who are excessively white are also cowards as we can see from the example of women and Europeans, the complexion of courage is between the two."
Similar views were held by a number of Arabic writers during the time of the medieval Caliphate period. Some Arabs at the time viewed their "swarthy" skin as the ideal skin tone, in comparison to the darker Sub-Saharan Africans and the fairer "ruddy people" (which included Levantines, Persians, Turks, North Caucasians, South Caucasian and Europeans).
"White people" and modern racial hierarchies
The term "white race" or "white people" entered the major European languages in the later 17th century, originating with the racialization of slavery at the time, in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and enslavement of native peoples in the Spanish Empire. While first a social category, it has repeatedly been ascribed to strains of blood, ancestry, and physical traits, and was eventually made into a subject of scientific research, which culminated in scientific racism, before being 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,
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" ...
—Gregory Jay, "Who Invented White People?"
White people as a social category
A three-part racial schema 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. "The term white came into wide use in the British colonies in America from the 1680s.]
White people in the science of race
18th century beginnings
In 1758, Carolus 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, he used both taxonomical and cultural data in his subdivision descriptions.
In 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach described the white race as "the white color holds the first place, such as it is that most Europeans. The redness of cheeks in this variety is almost peculiar to it: at all events it is but seldom seen in the rest... Color white, Cheeks rosy". He categorized humans into five races, which largely corresponded with Linnaeus' classifications, except for the addition of Oceanians (whom he called Malay). He characterized the racial classification scheme of Metzger as making "two principal varieties as extremes:(1) the white man native of Europe, of the northern parts of Asia, America and Africa..", and the racial classification scheme of John Hunter as having, "seven varieties:... brownish as the southern Europeans, Turks, Abyssinians, Samoiedes and Lapps; white, as the remaining Europeans, the Mingrelians and Kabardinski". Blumenbach is known for arguing that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., were correlated with group character and aptitude. Craniometry and phrenology would attempt to make physical appearance correspond with racial categories. The fairness and relatively high brows of Caucasians were held to be apt physical expressions of a loftier mentality and a more generous spirit. The epicanthic folds around the eyes of Mongolians and their slightly sallow outer epidermal layer bespoke their supposedly crafty, literal-minded nature.
Later in life, Blumenbach encountered in Switzerland "eine zum Verlieben schöne Négresse" ("a Negress so beautiful to fall in love with"). Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other individual Africans as Europeans differ from Europeans'. Furthermore he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind 'concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities'. These later ideas were far less influential than his earlier assertions with regard to the perceived relative qualities of the different races, which opened the way to secular and scientific racism.
I also highly recommend Dr. Joy Degruy Leary's book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome Chapter 2 for deeper insight into Linnaeus, Blumenbach and others who put in place the cornerstones of the ignorance at the foundation of humanities' beliefs about race, skin color, attributes and capacities within the human family.
In a 1775 work, Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen ("Of [About] The Different Races of Humans"), German philosopher Immanuel Kant used the term weiß (white) to refer to "the white one [race] of northern Europe".
Caucasian race
The study into race and ethnicity in the 18th and 19th centuries developed into what would later be termed scientific racism. During the period of the mid-19th to mid-20th century,[25] 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 North Caucasus (Caucasus Mountains) but extending to all Europeans, figured as one of these races, and was incorporated as a formal category of both scientific 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. Thus, Carleton S. Coon (1939) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasian label, while Thomas Henry Huxley (1870) classified the same populations as Mongoloid, and Lothrop Stoddard (1920) excluded the populations of the Middle East and North Africa as well as those of Central Asia, classifying them as "brown", and counted as "white" only the European peoples.
Some authorities, following Huxley (1870), distinguished the Xanthochroi or "light whites" of Northern Europe with the Melanochroi or "dark whites" of the Mediterranean.
21st century
Alastair Bonnett has stated that, a strong "current of scientific research supports the theory that Europeans were but one expression of a wider racial group (termed sometimes Caucasian), a group that included peoples from Asia and North Africa". Bonnett, does, however, note that this is not a commonplace definition: in Europe and North America the inclusion of non-Europeans is a "technicality little favoured outside certain immigration bureaucracies and traditional anthropology."
Raj Bhopal and Liam Donaldson opine that white people are a heterogeneous group, and the term white should therefore be abandoned as a classification for the purposes of epidemiology and health research, and identifications based on geographic origin and migration history be used instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terms_for_white_people_in_non-Western_cultures
I also highly recommend these books:
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, by Joy Degruy Leary, Ph.D
Race and the Cosmos, by Dr. Barbara A. Holmes,
Order from: Marcus Books (S. F. Bay Area) or EsoWon Books/
http://www.esowonbookstore.com/
