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"Whites" redirects here. For other uses, see White (disambiguation).

In basic English usage, White people (also whites) "relates to a human group having light-coloured skin, especially of European ancestry."

The term has been applied with varying degrees of formality and consistency in many disciplines. Such disciplines include sociology, political science, medicine, human languages, cultural analysis, and legal analysis.

Even though the natural sciences have been used in the past to justify varying treatments based on racial background, race today is largely considered a sociological construct, the definition of which is subject to change as society evolves.

The definition of whiteness has varied in different time periods and locations. The definition of whiteness has had implications for topics such as national identity, consanguinity, public policy, religion, population statistics, racial segregation, affirmative action, eugenics, racial marginalization and racial quotas.

History of the term

Ancient Greece and Rome used white (lenkon in Greek; alba in Latin) 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 lenkon genos or albi homines—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. In medieval Europe, an association was created between white, Christianity and "good" as opposed to black, Islam and "evil", with skin color sometimes described based on this, although differences in skin color between southern Europeans and Moors were nearly nonexistent and on occasion, religious conversion was described rhetorically 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 biological 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,

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"...

Within anthropology, a variety of research positions have been staked out regarding the importance and classification of race, with most 19th century positions assuming that races existed, and offering a variety of defintions of white people. Many such definitions--such as those of Earnest Hooton and Carleton S. Coon--classified Middle Easterns, Arabs and Jews, of defined as a "Mediterranean Subrace" as white. However, by the mid-20th century, following the work of Franz Boas and W.E.B. DuBois, a position of the nonexistence of biological equality had reached something approaching a consensus, as symbolized by the UNESCO statement on race in 1950, which included the text: "“Race is less a biological fact than a social myth and as a myth it has in recent years taken a heavy toll in human lives and suffering." This position resulted in a consequent near-complete disappearance of racial classifications from the biological and physiological analysis performed within anthropology.

Social and physical perceptions of white

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 Limpieza de sangre, 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.

United States

David R. Roediger argues that the construction of the white race in the United States was an effort to mentally distance slaveowners from slaves. By the 18th century, white had become well established as a racial term. Among [those not considered white at some time in American history are the Irish, Germans, Slavs, Greeks and other Mediterranneans. In Oklahoma, state laws identified Native Americans as white people during Jim Crow-era segregation.

Laws dating from 17th century colonial America defined children excluded children of at least one black parent from the status of white. Early legal standards did so by defining the race of a child based on a mother's race while banning interracial marriage, while later laws defined all people of some African ancestry as black, under the principle of hypodescent. These laws ensured that the children of slaves were available as labor to their parent's master and furthered racist standards of white women's "purity" under threat from black sexual "contamination." Some 19th century categorization schemes defined people with one black parent (the other white) as mulatto, with one black grandparent as quadroon and with one black great grandparent as octoroon. The latter categories remained within an overall black or African-American category. Some members of these categories passed temporarily or permanently as white.

Conversely, late 19th and 20th century interracial unions between Europeans and Native Americans were handled in the opposite way. Natives were seen as people without a future to be assimilated into a larger American culture. Tribal membership was frequently defined according to so-called blood quantum standards, so that "mixed race" children were eventually excluded. This led to the classification of increasing numbers of people with Native ancestry as white, a trend that has been reversed in the census figures of recent decades which show increasing self-identification as Native American.

The Immigration Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to "any alien, being a free white person;" an option which was extended to immigrants of African descent in 1870. 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.

Contemporary U.S. Census

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." In the current United States Census, the designation white or Caucasian overlaps with the term Hispanic, which was introduced in the 1980 Census.

In cases where individuals do not self-identify, the United States Census parameters for race gives each national origin a racial value. This groups Middle Eastern Americans and North African American together with European Americans as White Americans. The U.S. Census assumes that all unidentified Israeli Americans are white. By responding Israel in the U.S. Census, a person will be categorized as white, even though not all Israelis are of European descent (Ashkenazi or Sephardi). They may be Jews of Ethiopian (Beta Israel), Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) or Yemenite (Teimani or Indian descent), or may instead be Israeli Arabs or Druze (who may or may not identify themselves as Arabs).

Genetic Studies

A recent American study indicates that self-described race is a near-perfect indicator of an individual's genetic profile. Using 326 genetic markers, Tang et al. (2005) identified four genetic clusters among 3,636 individuals sampled from 15 locations in the United States. They were able to correctly assign individuals to groups that correspond with their self-described race (white, African American,East Asian or Hispanic) for all but five individuals (an error rate of 0.14%). They concluded that ancient ancestry, which correlates tightly with self-described race and not current residence, is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population..

The study states that Hispanics generally represent a mixture of European, Native American and African ancestry. The sample used was of a single location in Texas, and was composed of Mexican Americans. As to African Americans, it stated that this group has an estimated white admixture of 10% to 20%, while many whites also have some degree of non-White admixture. The report stated "In a survey of college students who self-identified as “white” in a northeastern U.S. university, ∼30% were estimated to have less than 90% European ancestry."

The Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, notes that "although genetic analyses of large numbers of loci can produce estimates of the percentage of a person’s ancestors coming from various continental populations (Shriver et al. 2003; Bamshad et al. 2004), these estimates may assume a false distinctiveness of the parental populations, since human groups have exchanged mates from local to continental scales throughout history (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994; Hoerder 2002)."

Brazil

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 marks a trend towards lesser identification as white as the status of people of African descent, blacks and pardos increases.

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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, Black, 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.

Norway

According to the Norwegian Social Science Data Service, white is a possible answer to ethnic/people group category question. After Norwegians, Sami, Kvens and other Nordics, it is mentioned as white/European. Other categories are Asian, Black/African/Caribbean and "other". Statistics Norway considers the Asian category to include Turkish people.

United Kingdom and Ireland

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. In the UK white usually refers only to people of European origin.

The term Black Irish does not refer to people with black skin, but instead to hair color and eye color. The term White Irish is not used in the UK in contrast with Black Irish; it refers to the ethnically Irish immigrant population in Britain. British surnames such as White, Whitlock, Whited and Whitehead also trace their origins to blonde or white hair color.

Australia

Although the definition of white is always opinion-based in Australia, it primarily pertains to what the word `literally' means, that is `white skinned'. In Australian society, it refers to people of percieved Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, Celtic, Germanic and Slavic descent, sometimes excluding people from the Balkans, and Mediterranean basin.

Australians are of primarily British origin and consider the people of the British Isles to be white yet sometimes exclude the people of the Mediterranean basin however many past and present anthropologists have noted that a certain percentage of the indigenous population of the British Isles are of Mediterranean appearance. These anthropologists include Carleton Coon, Madison Grant, Earnest Hooton and John Beddoe. Madison Grant in his map entitled "The European Races" stated that the population of Wales and Cornwall are of a predominantly Mediterranean appearance. He also stated that the population of the western half of Ireland, western Scotland and south western, western and central England are of mixed Nordic and Mediterranean appearance with the rest of the population of the British Isles being of Nordic appearance.

Recent genetic evidence, in conjunction with archaeology, history and linguistics, has led to the publication of books by leading genetic anthropologists stating that most Britons, either of perceived Celtic or Anglo-Saxon origins, descend themselves from the western Mediterranean Basin from migrations the took place in the paleolithic, mesolithic and neolithic. Geneticists have shown that there is a higher rate of Y-chromosome marker R1b in the regions of the British Isles where a Mediterranean appearance is more common amongst the indigenous population. Genetic marker R1b averages 90-95% amongst the Basques of northern Spain and south western France.

Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer and Brian Sykes argue that most people of the British Isles descend from the Iberian refuge of northern Spain and south western France.

The Immigration Restriction Act was a key part of a legislative package passed by Australia's federal parliament in 1901. The goal of the act was to exclude all non-European migrants. It enacted a law that was the cornerstone of the country's White Australia policy.

Physical Traits

Template:Biasutti skin color map Although there is no single universal definition of White, given the relationship between Whites and Europeans, as discussed in above sections, some traits which are associated with Europeans are associated with Whites.

According to anthropologist Peter Frost, "Most humans have only one hair color and one eye color. Europeans are a big exception: their hair is black but also brown, flaxen, golden, or red; their eyes are brown but also blue, gray, hazel, or green. This diversity reaches a maximum in an area centered on the East Baltic and covering northern and eastern Europe. If we move outward, to the south and east, we see a rapid return to the human norm: hair becomes uniformly black and eyes uniformly brown."

Human hair and eye color is unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe. The many alleles involved (at least seven for hair color) and their independent origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicate some kind of selection. Sexual selection is particularly indicated because it is known to favor color traits and color polymorphisms. In addition, hair and eye color is most diverse in what used to be, when first peopled by hunter-gatherers, a unique ecozone of low-latitude continental tundra. This type of environment skews the operational sex ratio (OSR) of hunter-gatherers toward a male shortage in two ways: (1) men have to hunt highly mobile and spatially concentrated herbivores over longer distances, with no alternate food sources in case of failure, the result being more deaths among young men; (2) women have fewer opportunities for food gathering and thus require more male provisioning, the result being less polygyny. These two factors combine to leave more women than men unmated at any one time. Such an OSR imbalance would have increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of color traits: hair- and eye-color diversity and, possibly, extreme skin depigmentation.

Hair Color

There is considerable variety in the hair color of whites.

Dark hair

Most white people have dark hair.

Blond

Blond hair is a relatively rare human phenotype, occurring in 1.7 to 2% of the world population with the majority of natural blondes being white.

Blond hair is genetically associated with lighter eye color such as blue, green, or light brown and with pale, often freckled, skin tones. It ranges from nearly white (platinum blond, tow-haired) to a dark golden blond. Strawberry blond is a rare type: a mixture of blond and red hair. Blondness is a recessive gene. Blond hair has more phaeomelanin than eumelanin but has less than red hair. Natural blondes have the thinnest strand of hair but have more hair on their heads than others, with an average of 140,000 hairs.

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, however, the occurrence of blond hair is more frequent, and often remains throughout adulthood, leading to misinterpretation that blondness is a European trait. Based on recent genetic information, it is probable that humans with blond hair became distinctly numerous in Europe about 11,000 to 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age. Before then, Europeans had dark brown hair and dark eyes, which is predominant in the rest of the world.

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. People with red hair are often referred to as redheads.

Red is an uncommon hair color among humans, found mainly in Northern and Western European populations (and descendants of these populations), although it occurs in low frequencies throughout other parts of Europe and Asia. Red hair appears to be caused by a recessive gene on chromosome 16 which causes a mutation of the MC1R protein. It is associated with fair skin color, freckles, and sensitivity to ultraviolet light.

Eye Colour

Those with non-European ancestry generally have darker eyes and less variability in eye color than those of European descent. For example between 60 and 70 percent of the Norwegian population have blue eyes.

This varies to a great extent by ethnic group. Germanic populations tend to have a high incidence of blue and green eyes. Mixed populations tend to show gray, hazel, light brown and amber, while populations with predominant dark hair tend to have brown or black eyes.

Eye color is inherited on a number of genes which leads to considerable diversity. Not all eye colors that are described as blue or green are precisely the same on close examination. There are variations in hue, clarity, the ring, texture and other features.

Light Skin

White people are archetypically, though not always in practice, distinguished by lighter skin. Some people recognized as white by some definitions are darker than some of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow races ," as the Supreme Court of the United States recognized in litigation over whiteness in 1923. Research indicates:

The evolutionarily conserved ancestral allele of a human coding polymorphism predominates in African and East Asian populations. In contrast, the variant allele is nearly fixed in European populations, is associated with a substantial reduction in regional heterozygosity, and correlates with lighter skin pigmentation in admixed populations, suggesting a key role for the SLC24A5 gene in human pigmentation.

People with the mutation apparently proliferated as humans moved northward into what is now Europe where there is less sunlight available, explaining between 25 and 38% of the European-African difference in skin melanin index.

The advantage of light skin in higher latitudes is that it does not block sunlight as effectively, leading to increased production of vitamin D₃, necessary for calcium absorption and bone growth. The lighter skin of women may result from the higher calcium needs of women during pregnancy and lactation. The reduced blockage of sunlight can be a disadvantage as people with lighter skin are more prone to sunburn and skin cancer caused by repeated exposure to the sun. Reduced melanin in white skinned people also reduces scarring.

Origins infered from genetics

It has been suggested that this article be merged into Genetic history of Europe. (Discuss) Proposed since January 2007.

Although a small portion of human genetic variation is geographically distributed, and populations of people that inhabit proximate regions can be shown on average to be more genetically similar to each other than to peoples from more distant regions, the variation is too low, and human origins too recent, for this variation to be considered characteristic of discrete subspecies or coherent groups.

Recent work in anthropological genetics suggests that the traditional, historic and socially-constructed ‘racial’ aggregates that have permeated the Western biomedical literature since the 18th century are largely genetic illusions. Important human biological variation exists, but classical races, as the term is used systematically and taxonomically in the natural sciences, appears inapplicable to modern humans.....Our species collective origins are too recent, the extent of gene flow between us is too great, and our current diversity is too evolutionarily superficial to warrant the racial or subspecies level of differentiation among contemporary humans.

There has been much work done on European mitochondrial and Y chromosome genetic markers. These have been used to infer the origins of the European population, their usefullness derives from their respective matrilineal and patrilineal transmission. Autosomal genetic markers, while often used in geographic variation and biomedical studies, are less useful in studies of origin due to recombination, these markers are not passed down patrilineally or matrilineally.

Origins of the British islanders

However many past and present anthropologists have noted that a certain percentage of the indigenous population of the British Isles are of Mediterranean appearance. These anthropologists include Carleton Coon, Madison Grant, Earnest Hooton and John Beddoe. Madison Grant in his map entitled "The European Races" stated that the population of Wales and Cornwall are of a predominantly Mediterranean appearance. He also stated that the population of the western half of Ireland, western Scotland and south western, western and central England are of mixed Nordic and Mediterranean appearance with the rest of the population of the British Isles being of Nordic appearance.

Recent genetic evidence, in conjunction with archaeology, history and linguistics, has led to the publication of books by leading genetic anthropologists stating that most Britons, either of perceived Celtic or Anglo-Saxon origins, descend themselves from the western Mediterranean Basin from migrations the took place in the paleolithic, mesolithic and neolithic. Geneticists have shown that there is a higher rate of Y-chromosome marker R1b in the regions of the British Isles where a Mediterranean appearance is more common amongst the indigenous population. Genetic marker R1b averages 90-95% amongst the Basques of northern Spain and south western France.

Bryan Sykes, in his Book, Blood of the Isles, and Stephen Oppenheimer, in his book, The Origins of the British, come to similar conclusions: British Celts and British Celtic languages do not come from Central Europe. They come from Spain. As to the British population in general they also agree, using different genetic markers, linguistics and archaeology: Modern Britons (Anglo-Celts)are mainly of South-Western European origin, exactly of ancient Iberian (Spanish) origins.

Y chromosome markers

During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) much of Europe is believed not to have been inhabited at all by humans, it is thought, however, that three areas of Europe were inhabited, these are often called "Ice Age Refuges" (or Refugia). The refugia are believed to have occupied regions approximating to; the Basque country, roughly around the Pyrenees (western refuge or Iberian refuge); the Italian peninsula (central refuge); and a region just north of the Black sea extending to the Balkans. The refugia were each spread out and may have had distinct zones, so they probably do not represent genetically homogeneous regions.

Haplogroup R1b

Most common of all haplogroups among European peoples is R1b, it represents the only R group lineage to expand out of the western refuge in Northern Spain and South-Western France. It probably arose in the refuge at some point during the LGM, this was probably before 20,000 years ago. R1b expanded out of the refuge after the end of the LGM but before the Younger Dryas at about 16,500 years ago.

Due to its origin in the Pyrenean refuge R1b is very common along the Atlantic façade of Europe, with its frequency diminishing farther north and east. 90% of Basque men have the R1b haplotype and about 70% of non-Basque Spanish and Portuguese men, 70% of Dutch men, 60% of French men, 50% of German men, 36% of Danish men, 25% of Norwegian and Swedish men, 21% of northern Russians, 16% of Polish men and 0% of Finnish men.

Within the British Isles haplogroup R1b is most common in the west, in Ireland, north and south Wales and Cornwall, accounting for about 90% of males in these regions. In eastern parts of the British Isles R1b frequency declines somewhat in line with the general west-east cline seen for this haplogroup, it represents about 60% of Y chromosome markers in York and East Anglia in the far east of England.

Haplogroup I

Haplogroup I appears to be native to Europe. Its initial spread is believed to be connected to migrations of people during the last glacial maximum (LGM). It can be found in most European populations, most commonly in Scandinavia, Sardinia and Slavic populations of the Western Balkans. Haplogroup I Y-chromosomes have also been found among some populations of the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, but they are found at frequencies exceeding 10% only among populations of Europe and Asia Minor, particularly among Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Uralic, and Turkic peoples, as well as among the Romance-speaking populations of France, Romania, Moldova, and Sardinia, the Albanian-speaking population of Albania, and the Greek-speaking population of Greece.

Haplogroup R1a1

It is common in Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia. Lower frequencies ofR1a1 are found among populations of West Asia. In Europe, the highest frequencies are found in Eastern Europe. Today it is found with its highest levels in Poland (67%), Ukraine, and Russia, where one out of two men has this haplogroup. Relatively high frequencies are also found in Northern Europe and it is believed to have been spread across Europe by the Indo-Europeans or perhaps later migrations of Vikings, which accounts for the existence of it in, among other places, the British Isles.

Haplogroup N3

This haplogroup appears in Central Europe and Eastern Europe, as well as in Scandinavia, the Baltic states, and throughout Russia. It is also very common in northern Asia. Haplogroup N is a descendant haplogroup of haplogroup K, and is believed to have first appeared in Siberia, Mongolia, or Northern China thousands of years ago. It was transported across Eurasia by vast movements of Uralic-speaking peoples.

Neolithic haplogroups

During the neolithic several haplogroups entered Europe from the Near East, possibly with the spread of farming. These include Haplogroup J and Haplogroup E3b. E3b is thought to have arisen in East Africa and migrated by way of the Near East to Europe during the neolithic. It has a presence of 5-10% in southern Britain, and a high point in the British Isles in Abergele in Wales (33%). E3b and J are most highly represented in southern and south-eastern Europe.

Mitochondrial DNA

According to University of Oulu Library (Finland):

Classical polymorphic markers (i.e. blood groups, protein electromorphs and HLA antigenes) have suggested that Europe is a genetically homogeneous continent with a few outliers such as the Saami, Sardinians, Icelanders and Basques (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1993, Piazza 1993). The analysis of mtDNA sequences has also shown a high degree of homogeneity among European populations, and the genetic distances have been found to be much smaller than between populations on other continents, especially Africa. (Comas et al. 1997).

The mtDNA haplogroups of Europeans are surveyed by using a combination of data from RFLP analysis of the coding region and sequencing of the hypervariable segment I. About 99% of European mtDNAs fall into one of ten haplogroups: H, I, J, K, M, T, U, V, W or X (Torroni et al. 1996a). Each of these is defined by certain relatively ancient and stable polymorphic sites located in the coding region (Torroni et al. 1996a).......Haplogroup H, which is defined by the absence of a AluI site at bp 7025, is the most prevalent, comprising half of all Europeans (Torroni et al. 1996a, Richards et al. 1998)......Six of the European haplogroups (H, I, J, K, T and W) are essentially confined to European populations (Torroni et al. 1994, 1996a), and probably originated after the ancestral Caucasoids became genetically separated from the ancestors of the modern Africans and Asians.

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Culture

Western culture or Western civilization is a term used to refer to the cultures of Europe, and to societies outside of Europe with a substantial Western European cultural or physical influence. The term which comprises the broad heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs (such as religious beliefs) and specific artifacts and technologies as shared within the Western sphere of influence. Although there is no single universal definition of White, most people defined as Whites live in such societies.

Numerous white people also take part in societies with non-Western cultures.

See also

Footnotes

1. White, from the Compact Oxford English Dictionary.
2. ^ Adams, J.Q. (2001). Dealing with Diversity. Chicago, IL: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. 0-7872-8145-X. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
3. Thompson, William (2005). Society in Focus. Boston, MA: Pearson. 0-205-41365-X. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
4. James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White,'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Dec., 2003 - Jan., 2004), p. 162.
5. Alan Cameron, Black and White: A Note on Ancient Nicknames, The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 119, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 113-117
6. James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White,'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Dec., 2003 - Jan., 2004), p. 163.
7. James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White,'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Dec., 2003 - Jan., 2004), p. 164.
8. James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White,'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Dec., 2003 - Jan., 2004), p. 164.
9. Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man's Burden, (condensed version of Black Over White), 1974, p. 52.
10. http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html
11. http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1438.html
12. http://www.uwm.edu/~gjay/Whiteness/Whitenesstalk.html
13. E.A. Hooton, Up from the Ape, 1946. Carleton S. Coon, The Story of the Middle East, 1958.
15. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 186; Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York, 1998).
16. John Tehranian, "Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America," The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 109, No. 4. (Jan., 2000), pp. 825-827.
17. ^ Kathleen O'Toole, "Toggling Between Ethnicities," Stanford Today, November/December 1998.
18. Winthrop Jordan, Black Over White, ch. IV, "The Fruits of Passion."
19. John Tehranian, "Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America," The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 109, No. 4. (Jan., 2000), pp. 817-848.
20. Questions and Answers for Census 2000 Data on Race from U.S. Census Bureau, 14 March 2001. Retrieved 15 October 2006.
21. http://shrn.stanford.edu/workshops/revisitingrace/Risch_confound.pdf Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies
22. http://backintyme.com/essay040608.htm
23. ^ Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group, National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, The Use of Racial, Ethnic, and Ancestral Categories in Human Genetics Research
24. Gregory Rodriguez, "Brazil Separates Into Black and White," LA Times, September 3, 2006. Note that the figures belie the title.
25. "Groups" in Statistics Canada, Sample 20001 Census form. Statistics Canada, 2001 Census Visible Minority and Population Group User Guide
26. Human Resources and Social Development Canada,
27. Census 2001: 2B (Long Form)
28. http://www.nsd.uib.no/data/ny_individ/norStudy/norVariable.cfm?norVarID=7989
29. http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/02/01/10/innvbef_en/
30. Identity, Ethnicity and Identity, National Statistics online. Retrieved 03 November 2006.
31. Census 2001 - Ethnicity and religion in England and Wales, Ethnicity and religion. Retrieved 03 November 2001.
32. Kissoon, Priya. King's College of London. Asylum Seekers: National Problem or National Solution. 2005. November 7, 2006.
33. http://www.cre.gov.uk/diversity/ethnicity/whiteirish.html
34. http://mizian.com.ne.kr/englishwiz/library/names/etymology_of_last_names.htm
35. Immigration Restriction Act 1901
36. Why Do Europeans Have So Many Hair and Eye Colors? by Peter Frost Université Laval (Canada) and St. Andrews University (Scotland)
37. http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513805000590/abstract
38. ^ "Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun", from The Times.
39. Frudakis T, Thomas M, Gaskin Z, Venkateswarlu K, Chandra KS, Ginjupalli S, Gunturi S, Natrajan S, Ponnuswamy VK, Ponnuswamy KN. Sequences associated with human iris pigmentation." Genetics. 2003 Dec;165(4):2071-83. PMID 14704187.
40. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-225478/Norway
41. John Tehranian, "Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America," The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 109, No. 4. (Jan., 2000), p. 827.
42. ^ Lamason RL, Mohideen MA, Mest JR, Wong AC, Norton HL, Aros MC, Jurynec MJ, Mao X, Humphreville VR, Humbert JE, Sinha S, Moore JL, Jagadeeswaran P, Zhao W, Ning G, Makalowska I, McKeigue PM, O'donnell D, Kittles R, Parra EJ, Mangini NJ, Grunwald DJ, Shriver MD, Canfield VA, Cheng KC (2005). "SLC24A5, a putative cation exchanger, affects pigmentation in zebrafish and humans". Science. 310 (5755): 1782–6. PMID 16357253.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Cite error: The named reference "washpost" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
43. Jackson (2004), p. 218.
44. Oppenheimer (2006). pp. 102-103.
45. World haplogroup maps
46. Y-chromosome DNA Haplogroups
47. Robert Oppenheimer, "The Origins of the British" Appendix C, Fig A4. Oppenheimer (2006). p. 438.
48. Oppenheimer (2006) p. 123.
49. Oppenheimer (2006). p. 116
50. Oppenheimer (2006) p. 116
51. Oppenheimer (2006). p. 122.
52. Oppenheimer (2006) p. 378)
53. Oppenheimer (2006). pp. 206-207.
54. Mitochondrial DNA sequence variation in human populations, Oulu University Library (Finland)
55. http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9514255674/html/x367.html

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

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

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