White people is a term for a set of socially constructed 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, white privilege, 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. 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[8] and the enslavement of native peoples in the Spanish Empire.[9] 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.[9] 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.[10] Alastair Bonnett argues that white identity, as it is presently conceived, is an American project, reflecting American interpretations of race and history.[11] 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, Shakespeares 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? Sources and references: The first are RETH, the second are AAMU, the third are NEHESU, and the fourth are THEMEHU. The RETH are Egyptians, the AAMU are dwellers in the deserts to the east and north-east of Egypt, the NEHESU are the Cushites, and the THEMEHU are the fair-skinned Libyans (chapter VI, translated by E. A. Wallis Budge, 1905). The first are RETH, the second are AAMU, the third axe NEHESU, and the fourth are THEMEHU. The RETH are Egyptians, the AAMU are dwellers in the deserts to the east and north-east of Egypt, the NEHESU are the Cushites, and the THEMEHU are the fair-skinned Libyans (chapter VI, translated by E. A. Wallis Budge, 1905).
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 12:25:02 +0000
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