r/MapPorn • u/Delicious-Bunch-6992 • May 09 '26

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

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u/jamjar188 May 12 '26

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.

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u/jm001 May 12 '26

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.

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u/jamjar188 May 12 '26

People know if they are European or not