White people

[1] Contemporary anthropologists and other scientists, while recognizing the reality of biological variation between different human populations, regard the concept of a unified, distinguishable "White race" as a social construct with no scientific basis.

The assignment of positive and negative connotations of White and Black to certain persons date to the very old age in a number of Indo-European languages, but these differences were not necessarily used in respect to skin colors.

[6] As a result, men with pale or light skin, leukochrōs (λευκόχρως, "white-skinned") could be considered weak and effeminate by Ancient Greek writers such as Plato and Aristotle.

[11] Herodotus described the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair[12] and the Egyptians – quite like the Colchians – as melánchroes (μελάγχροες, "dark-skinned") and curly-haired.

... 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).

[26] In Spain's American colonies, Black African, Indigenous (indios), Jewish, or morisco ancestry formally excluded individuals from the "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre) requirements for holding any public office under the Royal Pragmatic of 1501.

[4] Historian Winthrop Jordan reports that, "throughout the [thirteen] colonies the terms Christian, free, English, and white were ... employed indiscriminately" in the seventeenth century as proxies for one another.

But while, in 1775, he had grouped into his "first and most important" race "Europe, Asia this side of the Ganges, and all the country situated to the north of the Amoor, together with that part of North America, which is nearest both in position and character of the inhabitants", he somewhat narrows his "Caucasian variety" in the third edition of his text, of 1795: "To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa.

[48] Through the mid to late twentieth century, numerous countries had formal legal standards or procedures defining racial categories (see cleanliness of blood, casta, apartheid in South Africa, hypodescent).

They came from the Australian colonies, Great Britain and Ireland, Germany (forming the next biggest immigrant group after the British and Irish),[65] France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United States, and Canada.

Writing for Al Jazeera, French journalist Rokhaya Diallo suggests that "a large portion of White people in France are not used to having frank conversations about race and racism.

[77][78] Accusations of anti-White racism,[77] suggestions of the displacement of,[71] or lack of representation for,[79] the group, and rhetoric surrounding Whites in France experiencing poverty have been, at times, utilised by various right-wing political elements in the country.

[98] For example, George Sims in his 1883 book How the poor live wrote of "a dark continent that is within easy reach of the General Post Office ... the wild races who inhabit it will, I trust, gain public sympathy as easily as [other] savage tribes".

However, after the Cuban revolution, due to a combination of factors, mainly mass exodus to Miami, United States, a drastic decrease in immigration, and interracial reproduction, Cuba's demography changed.

[127] The Minority Rights Group International says that "An objective assessment of the situation of Afro-Cubans remains problematic due to scant records and a paucity of systematic studies both pre- and post-revolution.

[139][140][141][142] The term "Light-skinned Mexican" is preferred by both the government and media to describe individuals in Mexico who possess European physical traits when discussing ethno-racial dynamics.

According to twentieth- and twenty-first-century academics, large-scale intermixing between the European immigrants and the native Indigenous peoples produced a Mestizo group which would become the overwhelming majority of Mexico's population by the time of the Mexican Revolution.

[158] Another study made by the University College London in collaboration with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History found that the frequencies of blond hair and light eyes in Mexicans are of 18% and 28% respectively.

[195] In United States v. Cartozian (1925), an Armenian immigrant successfully argued (and the Supreme Court agreed) that his nationality was White in contradistinction to other people of the Near East – Kurds, Turks, and Arabs in particular – on the basis of their Christian religious traditions.

[192] In conflicting rulings In re Hassan (1942) and Ex parte Mohriez, United States District Courts found that Arabs did not, and did qualify as White, respectively, under immigration law.

This binary approach 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.

[208][209] Among the most notable examples of the latter is President Barack Obama, who is believed to have been descended from an early African enslaved in America, recorded as "John Punch", through his mother's apparently White line.

[214] Argentina, along with other areas of new settlement like Canada, Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, the United States or Uruguay, is considered a country of immigrants where the vast majority originated from Europe.

Major contributors included Italy (initially from Piedmont, Veneto and Lombardy, later from Campania, Calabria, and Sicily),[230] and Spain (most are Galicians and Basques, but there are Asturians, Cantabrians, Catalans, and Andalusians).

[248] During colonial times in the eighteenth century, an important flux of emigrants from Spain populated Chile, mostly Basques, who vitalized the Chilean economy and rose rapidly in the social hierarchy and became the political elite that still dominates the country.

Chile experienced a tiny but steady arrival of Spanish, Italians, Irish, French, Greeks, Germans, English, Scots, Croats and Ashkenazi Jews, in addition to immigration from other Latin American countries.

[252] Facts about the amount of immigration do not coincide with certain national chauvinistic discourse, which claims that Chile, like Argentina or Uruguay, would be considered one of the "White" Latin American countries, in contrast to the racial mixture that prevails in the rest of the continent.

Sponsored by the Chilean government to "civilize" and colonize the southern region,[252] these Germans (including German-speaking Swiss, Silesians, Alsatians and Austrians) settled mainly in Valdivia, Llanquihue and Los Ángeles.

It is one of the most representative theatres of Colombia, with neoclassic architecture: was built by the Italian architect Pietro Cantini and founded in 1892; has more than 2,400 square metres (26,000 sq ft) for 900 people.

Until the last years of World War II, a large part of the European immigrants to Venezuela came from the Canary Islands, and its cultural impact was significant, influencing the development of Castilian in the country, its gastronomy, and customs.