White people

White people are people with light skin. Most white people are of European origin. In American English, the term "Caucasian" is used to mean "white people." Outside of North America, it refers to people or things from the Caucasus Mountains.

Before the modern age, Europeans did not think of themselves as "white." They defined their race, ancestry or ethnicity in terms of what place or culture they were from, for example Greek or Roman.

The idea of a single white race came into use starting in the 17th century. The term white was invented during American slavery to make European Americans seem different from enslaved African Americans. The people who were the strongest supporters of the white race being supreme in 20th century Europe were fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. They felt that some European peoples such as Slavs as a different race even though they were white. This was just for political purposes.

White People Media

• 

  Henry Strickland Constable's illustration in the nineteenth century which shows an alleged similarity between "Irish Iberian" and "Negro" features in contrast to the higher "Anglo-Teutonic"

• 

  The Georgian female skull Johann Friedrich Blumenbach discovered in 1795, which he used to hypothesize origination of Europeans from the Caucasus

• 

  Australians of European origin from 1947 to 1966 when racial data was collected

• 

  Proportion of White Americans in each county in 2020

Related pages

• Race (sociology)
• Racism
• Historical race concepts
• Black people
• White Americans
• White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
• White nationalism
• White supremacy
• White genocide myth
• White Mexicans
• White Hispanic and Latino Americans
• Caucasian race