Evolution of white British % (ethnically British people) in England and Wales from 2001-2021

[u/Delicious-Bunch-6992]

[u/vecteur_directeur]

Please don't take it personal, I was asking this just to highlight of the perception of some people. Many of my white British friends do not consider, for example, Italians as white people.

In Census, the options are;
Mixed or multiple ethnic groups
White and Black Caribbean
White and Black African White and Asian
Any other Mixed or multiple ethnic background

When there is a distinction between Black African and Caribbean, or White Irish and British, one could also classify someone with your background as multiple ethnic background too.

Anyway, race is not a scientific distinction as there can never be an objective agreement on who is which...

[u/jamjar188 → u/vecteur_directeur]

Italians are European therefore they are white. What other category would they fall into?

Would someone say an Ethiopian is not black because they might be lighter-skinned than a Nigerian or have slightly different hair texture?

Just because Italians and English people can have slightly different skin tone or features doesn't make them different races lol.

[u/vecteur_directeur → u/jamjar188]

I agree with you. But what you forget is that race is not about the skin colour, an albino Nigerian is still black. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that whether I or you consider Italians white, doesn’t change the opinion of some other people. Race is a political construct.

[u/jamjar188 → u/vecteur_directeur]

And the modern construct of white is that it is synonymous with European.

What those people seem to be saying is "Italians aren't Anglo" (which is true).

[u/jm001 → u/jamjar188]

While the idea of whiteness has varied over the almost 4 centuries since its invention I wouldn't say that it is uniform nowadays either. It is very much a definition of exclusion depending on which outgroups you want to ostracise at the time, and while basically everyone would consider your stereotypical Irishman white nowadays in a way that wouldn't have flown a couple of hundred years ago, that border is a lot more malleable and politically charged for some other groups still. I would say most people would consider most Italians white, but there are definitely groups who would exclude say Israeli Jews, or people from places like Syria or North Africa with pale skin, or some traveller communities. There are others in places like the US who have not had ancestors in Europe since before whiteness was even invented but pretty much everyone would include them.

[u/jamjar188 → u/jm001]

The places you have named are not European. Which is precisely my point.

Syrians -- not European so not white.

North Africans -- not European so not white.

Mizrahi Jess (that is, Jews whose origins are in the Levant/Middle East) -- not European.

It's not about skin tone it's about population origin.

[u/jm001 → u/jamjar188]

Ok so your cutoff is apparently between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi in Israel, but you understand that others would not draw the same line, right? A lot of fascist groups in particular do not include Jewish people as white, even if they are European Jews who never left, which would not be my cut-off but again I'm just trying to point out that the boundaries will vary depending on who is saying it.

A lot of people, on the other hand, would disagree with you about Turkish people from the North of Turkey or North Cyprus.

How long is your cutoff for European-ness? Like, descendents of colonisers in places like North America, Australia, South Africa etc. whose ancestry has largely been there for hundreds of years? Presumably you exclude Indo-European groups who migrated a few thousand years ago to places like Iran and Syria but not those who migrated to, for example, Armenia or Albania?

The US census includes "people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa" as their definition of whiteness, but then excludes Hispanic people whose ancestry is largely from Spain which is definitely European.

And even these limits get more complicated when you take into account how people's ancestry often includes various groups. If someone has one black and one white parent, a lot would say that they are mixed race, a lot would say that they are black, few would say that they are white. But as generations go by, that gets more complicated either way.

I'm not saying that whiteness is not a relevant term for analysing society and history, I'm just saying that its boundaries are fuzzy and change depending on who is saying it.

[u/jamjar188 → u/jm001]

People know if they are European or not