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Whiteness Wednesdays: It's Not a Race, Not a Culture, Not an Ethnicity; It's a Caste System, Part 1 [1]
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Date: 2025-05-21
Welcome back to Whiteness Wednesdays. Last week, we started with what I hoped would be a fairly straightforward point: White privilege exists, and it’s a bad thing.
Aside from some minor kerfluffles, it seems like that point went more or less undisputed. That’s hardly surprising: acknowledging White privilege exists is the easiest step one, because it doesn’t even require personal accountability. One can shake their head sadly at a problem they know exists while telling themselves that it’s not their fault and there’s nothing they can do about it. Most White folks occupy this space or beyond, so I imagine it’ll get uglier from here.
It’s also going to get uglier in terms of the evidence presented. I’m going to warn people right now: this series is going to show some ugly images, and awful language. Not this particular week’s entry, but it’s coming. White people are too often ignorant of just how bad it was back then, itself a form of privilege. Sanitizing the ugly truth has led to a world where people simply refuse to learn how bad it was instead. I’ll include trigger warnings in future entries where appropriate, and I welcome feedback on how to provide them and show the evidence and truth in a manner that is respectful and treats it with the weight it deserves.
Now, while we’re on the topic: who IS a “White” person, anyway? The answer might seem straightforward enough, but it isn’t. It never has been, really. Oh sure, you might think you know what a White person is, but I promise you that you don’t. the definition has shifted so much that even “a pale person of European ancestry” was not always the correct answer.
But, if we passed a law in 1790 saying “free white [people]” can become naturalized American citizens, surely we had some sort of long-standing definition of whiteness, right? Perhaps one of those English common law things we brought with us in the 17th century?
Nope. “White” is as fabricated as alpha wolf pack structure, lemmings jumping off a cliff, or Korean fan death. Wait, no, those are bad science, misleading footage, and silly superstition, respectively. This is more like the Indian caste system, with all the ugliness, systemic oppression, and brutality that suggests
Before we go any further, I’m going to ask you to support me at my Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/…
I am struggling to pay my mortgage, and looking for a second job. Just $2,000 per month would be enough to cover that (after setting aside money for income tax to pay on it), so every little bit helps. If you like my writing, or anything else creatively I do and want to see more, that’s the easiest way to make it happen. I’d appreciate it immensely.
Last week, some people took issue with my asking for donations to help support my writing. They suggested that if I truly cared about fighting White privilege, I shouldn’t be asking for donations at all because, as a White person, I should be sending that money to Black people instead who need it more. That’s a lazy strawman, and I’m very disappointed in everyone who thought they were so terribly clever for saying something so deeply, profoundly ignorant and stupid. Also, nobody donated anything anyway (yet), so it ended up being a moot point.
But, in the off chance someone out there truly was thinking to themselves “Golly gee, Mister, I wish I could send some of my extra White money to a Black person or cause I knew could use it, but all you gave me was your ko-fi link! Now how am I going to donate money to help Black America?”
You can start by joining the NAACP: naacp.org/…
It’s not that expensive, even I could afford to do it.
Alright, back to the writing.
So, whiteness: it’s not THAT complicated, surely? Just means being White, and we all know what that is. Don’t we?
No. No, we do not. Not now, not when this country was founded, not ever. See, we defined "Black” (or rather “Negro” back then, but functionally the same) pretty early on out the gate: a Black person was an African or descended from Africans. But “White” was not a term used in the earliest days of the colonies: being Christian or English was how most of them defined themselves in contrast to the Natives and Africans.
Originally, the matter might have seemed simple enough, mainly because “White” was basically synonymous with “English”: the earliest colonies were all British colonies, and thus British Common Law was quite literally the law of the land. British Common Law regulated slavery to some degree of British subjects, but Africans initially imported as “indentured servants” (it’s debated when Black indentured servitude degraded to outright chattel slavery, but some were likely already living under de-facto chattel slavery terms and conditions regardless) were not British subjects, but rather foreigners living in British land in the eyes of the law (as were Native Americans, for that matter).
This key difference (being a British subject versus an African alien) is what set the groundwork for the modern White caste system: by the start of the 18th Century, legal precedent had made Black and Native ownership of fellow Blacks and Natives as slaves legal (in fact, one of America’s earliest slaves, John Casor, was actually owned by a free Black, a story which is flogged to no end in certain circles online). Despite this “right”, the divide had already begun: Blacks and Natives, despite being allowed to own one another as slaves were forbidden from owning proper God-fearing, civilized Christian Englishmen and women. John Casor aside, White privilege already existed: you literally had a greater choice of slaves as a White person, and that’s not where it ended by any stretch.
In fact, the dubious “honor” of the first official slaveowner in America goes to Hugh Gwyn, a white legislator and landowner. Gwyn was awarded permanent ownership of a slave as a criminal punishment: three of his indentured servants ran away before their contract was up, two of whom were White and the third Black. Only the Black servant, John Punch, was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life in slavery for the escape attempt (showing that color-based bigotry was already entrenched). White privilege afforded two White men their freedom in a few additional years, but the Black man spent the remainder of his life in chains for the same crime. This was all still, ostensibly, based around the British Common Law roots, which had ruled:
“Insofar as Negroes were heathens, they could never become Englishmen; insofar as they were not Englishmen, they could not be entitled to the protections of the common law...” - ABA Journal, 1970, citing 1644 Virginia Statute
Do note that the “heathens” assessment isn’t just insulting and bigoted, it’s factually incorrect. Some slaves, free Blacks, and Natives had converted before or after coming to America (or in the case of Natives, after Europeans came to them). Despite this, it wasn’t uncommon to ignore it when convenient (most often when the convert was, well, not White, and especially if they had something a White person wanted from them). A precedent had been set, and it was furthered when Virginia declared (in direct contrast to British Common Law) that the children of female slaves were slaves themselves for life. Normally common law determined inherited slavery through the father’s side, but for obvious reasons White slaveowners did not want their illegitimate half-Black offspring to be regarded as legally recognizable (for the same reason most powerful aristocrats have punished bastardy), so making their offspring a free source of slaves elegantly solved the problem (for them, anyway). Yet another instance of White privilege already creating a deep divide in the nascent colonies.
Still, the only reason White meant “English Christian” at first is because other White people hadn’t moved here yet, right? Surely, when all those other White Europeans arrived on our shores they were greeted with open arms by their fellow White Americans?
Well, yes and no. White Europeans WERE welcome, but who counted as a “White” European was not what you’d expect:
"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?
..
Which leads me to add one Remark, that the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny; Asia chiefly tawny; America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe,the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are,as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we, in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People?”
- Ben Franklin, “Concerning the Increase of Mankind, People of Countries, Etc.”, 1751
Italians, French, and Swedes are "swarthy”, even Germans too much so for Ben’s taste, “the Saxons only excepted”.
Even Donald Trump thinks Sweden’s people are his kind of White People, but Ben was not interested in their kind literally and metaphorically darkening our shores.
So, to summarize: in the mid 1600s White was a rarely-used legal proto-term for English Christians, excluding of course foreign “heathens”. By the 1750s, men of science like Ben Franklin now knew better: Anglo-Saxons were of course also White, but the rest were too swarthy for his tastes. Franklin also dreamed of Whiteness spreading across America and didn’t want to dilute it with lesser races if pure, proper White people could be had for the job. Yes, that is in fact a Founding Father longing for a transcontinental ethnostate. We’ll come back to this in the future.
Prior to Jim Crow and the American legal system really dialing in on who is, but mostly who is not, White, popular opinion included some very strange exceptions based on Old World grudges: Italians occupied a middle ground as too swarthy to be respectable Whites but too European to be fully ignored until the 1920s; the Irish were considered White as Europeans in the eyes of the law, but were despised in practice as inferior Celtic-descended stock little better than apes (there were plenty of political cartoons depicting them as subhuman caricatures very much akin to how Blacks were depicted in Antebellum); Finnish people, despite many speaking Swedish (a “White” peoples’ language), were considered to be inferior Mongol-descended Asians and thus not White. Finland, Ireland, Italy: not White enough, apparently, for the first American citizens’ tastes.
Of course, you can’t have laws based on opinions, “what we all know to be true”, and other such nonsense. Not even Ben Franklin’s opinions and common sense beliefs. Eventually, somebody is going to hire a lawyer and sue you to clarify the matter. In a land ostensibly based on laws and equality under them, it’s no surprise that as soon as people had the means to challenge these assumptions and definitions they would. The naturalization process had been redefined in 1802 to include Africans and those of African descent, so you had two distinct classes of Americans: Whites and Africans/Blacks (“Negroes” then). Native Americans were not eligible for naturalization on their own, and had to qualify for citizenship via other methods. So, the question of whether or not someone counted as “White” was very germane for anyone who wasn’t from Europe or Africa, the two places defined in the law.
This wasn’t a problem back when the overwhelming majority of people in the country were either from Europe or Africa (either as chattel or migrants), and is why groups that had been despised in Europe (such as the Irish) were still able to apply for citizenship in spite of the bigotry. So, what happened when people from other parts of the world started coming?
We started hashing it out, of course. The first landmark case was brought by Ah Yup in 1878, a Chinese immigrant who applied for naturalized citizenship and was denied. His case was dismissed by the 9th Circuit Court. Mr. Yup went to court to have Chinese recognized as “White” under the law, so that he could apply for naturalized citizenship. The ruling established that “Mongolians” (meaning “East and South Asian” people as we tend to understand it today) could not be White, and reiterated that citizenship was for “whites” and African-descended peoples only.
You’ll notice a trend: “White” still wasn't defined itself, but rather another group was defined as “not-White”. Who IS White? That was still unclear. It was, and always has been, easier to say who doesn’t get to be White than who does. That is, of course, part of the point of a caste system. Nonetheless, for almost a century and a half this argument played out as people from around the world applied for citizenship here. Judges and lawyers wrangled over the law, historical precedent and tradition, “self-evident” facts, and so-called “scientific” arguments, in case after case after case. Dozens of them, each dedicated to settling the debate of whether a given group was or wasn’t “White”.
So, how many court cases were involved here?
Fifty-two in total. 52.
And the decisions are often contradictory, sometimes absurdly so: Syrians were declared “White” in 1909 and again in 1910, but ruled to be not White in 1913 and 1914 before being declared White again in 1915.
Asian Indians were ruled to be White in 1910 and 1913, then not in 1917, then again in 1919 and 1920, and stopped being White again after 1923.
Half Asian was too Asian in 1912, when In re Young decided a half-German, half-Japanese person was not White. In 1938, In re Cruz determined that being ¾ Native American and ¼ Black did not count as Black, either.
And though Syrians and Armenians were both considered “White” decades earlier, Arabs initially were declared not White in 1942.
The bulk of these cases predate 1924, and for good reason: prior to 1924 skin color and other arbitrary criteria were more commonplace for determining who was, and was not, White. The Immigration Act of 1924 shifted the debate on Whiteness away from skin color (which was a notoriously unreliable metric for determining ancestry) and moved the conversation firmly towards one based on national origin. This bill, perhaps more so than any other legislation or court decision before it, is heavily responsible for the notion of “White” being Western/Northern European ancestry because of its favoring those immigrants to the exclusion of almost all others. The message was finally clear-ish, at least clear enough for the Jim Crow era. (Incidentally, 1924 was also the year the Indian Citizenship Act was signed into law granting America’s indigenous people at last a pathway to citizenship in the country occupying their ancestral homeland).
However, it is worth noting that the question of who IS “White” or what defines it was never formally settled in the courts. Whiteness was, until the 1950s (when race-based naturalization was ended entirely), always defined by who did not count more so than who did. Whiteness as a concept therefore was defined entirely in opposition: which places, people, languages, traditions, cultures, foods, clothes, and so on were emphatically not part of the vision for a “White” country. This isn’t how an ethnic group or culture is defined: those are defined by their shared aspects and unique features, they are defined by what they ARE. Whiteness is, and always has been, defined by what it is NOT. It was a pan-ethnic label for America’s ruling class, so who was not eligible was the main component that mattered. Like any exclusionary club, the most important thing you have in common with the other members is that you’re the only ones allowed in.
But this alone does not make it a caste system. So what does? Why is “White” more than just a clumsy and useless artificial label?
That is what we’ll be exploring next week, when we look at the nature of the American Whiteness caste system itself: how Whiteness was used to exclude, divide, and control using colorism, class, and privilege to ensure compliance.
[END]
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