White Americans
Based on Wikipedia: White Americans
Here's a question that might seem straightforward but actually isn't: Who counts as white in America?
The answer has shifted dramatically over the course of American history. Groups we now consider unambiguously white—the Irish, Italians, Greeks, Poles—were once viewed as something else entirely. And today, the federal government is once again redrawing these boundaries, preparing to reclassify millions of Middle Eastern and North African Americans as a separate racial category in the 2030 census.
This isn't just bureaucratic reshuffling. These definitions have real consequences for how people see themselves, how others see them, and how power gets distributed in American society.
The Numbers Game
Let's start with what the census actually says. As of 2024, about 59.8 percent of Americans—roughly 203 million people—identify as white alone. Add in people who identify as white in combination with other races, and that number rises to about 72 percent.
That first figure represents a historic low. In 1940, nearly 90 percent of Americans were classified as white. The share has been declining steadily ever since.
But here's where it gets interesting. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the white-alone population appeared to drop sharply, from 72.4 percent to 61.6 percent. At the same time, the multiracial population exploded, jumping from 2.4 percent to 9.4 percent.
Did millions of Americans suddenly discover mixed ancestry? Not exactly.
Researchers found that most of this shift came from changes in how the Census Bureau collected and categorized responses. In 2010, about 53 percent of Hispanic Americans identified as white alone. By 2020, that had plummeted to just 20 percent. The people didn't change. The questions did.
The Official Definition
The United States Census Bureau defines "white" as a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. This is broader than what many Americans might expect.
Under this definition, a Lebanese-American is white. So is an Egyptian-American, a Moroccan-American, or an Iranian-American. The Bureau groups together a Swedish Lutheran from Minnesota, a Sicilian Catholic from New Jersey, and a Syrian Orthodox Christian from Michigan under the same racial umbrella.
This creates some awkward situations. Arab Americans have long questioned whether this classification reflects how they actually experience American life. In the early twentieth century, people of Arab descent were sometimes denied entry to the United States or even deported because officials considered them nonwhite. Courts debated their racial status in citizenship cases.
That's about to change. In 2024, the Office of Management and Budget announced that the 2030 census will include a separate "Middle Eastern and North African" category. Millions of Americans currently classified as white will soon have the option to identify differently.
The Invention of Whiteness
The concept of a "white race" didn't exist for most of human history. It emerged in fifteenth-century Spain, in the aftermath of the Reconquista—the centuries-long campaign to drive Muslim rulers from the Iberian Peninsula.
Spanish society developed an obsession with "limpieza de sangre," or blood purity. Europeans were described as white and pure, in contrast to the darker Arabs, Jews, and Roma who supposedly contaminated the bloodlines of the homeland. This wasn't just social prejudice. It was codified into law, determining who could hold certain offices, attend universities, or join religious orders.
As Spain became the pioneer of Western colonization, it exported this racial vocabulary across the globe. Terms like "mulatto," "negro," and "indio" spread to other European languages. By the seventeenth century, most European societies were using phrases like "white race" or "white people."
The Spanish caste system—with its rigid hierarchies based on ancestry and skin color—traveled to the Americas along with the conquistadors. Other colonial powers developed their own versions.
Whiteness Comes to America
In the American colonies, the term "white" first appeared as a legal category in early Virginia, and it served a very specific purpose: justifying the enslavement of Africans while protecting European settlers from the same fate.
The ruling class needed to draw a bright line. On one side stood European colonists and white indentured servants, who possessed legal rights as subjects of the crown. On the other side stood enslaved Africans, who were treated as property with no legal protections whatsoever.
A colonial census from 1620—just after the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia—recorded 2,282 "White" individuals and 20 "Negroes." From that moment forward, the American government has never stopped counting its population by race.
The first federal census in 1790 enumerated 3.17 million white Americans, primarily English descendants with smaller numbers of Germans, Irish, and Scots. As the nation expanded westward, this population grew to 19.5 million by 1850, representing about 81 percent of the total population.
When White Wasn't White Enough
Here's where the story gets complicated. Being European didn't automatically make you white in the eyes of American society.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers, once wrote that the Saxons of Germany and the English "make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth." He viewed most other Europeans with suspicion.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, successive waves of immigrants discovered that whiteness was provisional, conditional, something that had to be earned rather than assumed.
Irish immigrants, fleeing famine in the 1840s and 1850s, faced "No Irish Need Apply" signs and were caricatured in newspapers as ape-like creatures. They were Catholic in a Protestant country, poor in a nation that equated poverty with moral failure.
Italians, arriving in large numbers after 1880, encountered similar hostility. In 1891, eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans—one of the largest mass lynchings in American history. The mob was never prosecuted. When Italy protested, the United States paid a settlement but defended the killings.
Greeks, Poles, and Spaniards faced their own forms of discrimination. They were too dark, too Catholic, too Orthodox, too foreign.
Even Finns found their whiteness questioned. Some Americans classified them as Mongoloid rather than European, leading to prejudice and legal debates about their racial status.
These groups didn't become white overnight. The transformation happened gradually, through intermarriage, through military service, through geographic and economic mobility. By the mid-twentieth century, the descendants of once-despised immigrants had largely merged into a generic white American identity.
The Melting Pot
Immigration transformed what it meant to be white in America. The nation that was overwhelmingly English in 1790 became something far more complex.
Today, the most commonly reported ancestries among white Americans are German (7.6 percent), Irish (5.3 percent), Italian (3.2 percent), and Polish (1.3 percent). English ancestry, at 12.5 percent, remains the largest single group—but it's almost certainly an undercount.
Why? Because many Americans of English descent have been here so long—often since before the Revolution—that they've simply forgotten their origins. They mark "American" on census forms rather than identifying with any specific European nationality.
Genetic studies confirm this suspicion. Research on European Americans shows that British and Irish ancestry is actually the most common genetic component, ranging from 20 percent in upper Midwestern states like Wisconsin and Minnesota to 55 percent in Southern states like Mississippi and Tennessee. The states where people most often claim "American" ancestry are the same states where genetic testing reveals the highest British and Irish heritage.
Many white Americans carry ancestry from multiple European countries. According to recent surveys, over 76 million Americans identify with more than one European ethnic group.
The Hispanic Complication
Nothing confuses American racial categories quite like Hispanic identity.
The Census Bureau treats "Hispanic or Latino" as an ethnicity, not a race. This means Hispanic Americans can be of any race—white, Black, Indigenous, Asian, or some combination thereof. A blond Argentine of German descent and a dark-skinned Dominican of African descent are both "Hispanic" but belong to different racial categories.
This creates statistical oddities. In 1930, the census briefly listed "Mexican" as a separate race, with officials explaining that "practically all Mexican laborers are of a racial mixture difficult to classify." By 1940, the policy reversed: Mexicans were to be counted as white "unless definitely of Indian or other nonwhite race."
Today, many Hispanic Americans don't fit neatly into any racial box. When forced to choose, some pick "white" and others pick "some other race." Genetic studies show that most Hispanic Americans carry varying amounts of European ancestry—often Spanish or Portuguese—mixed with Indigenous American and African heritage in proportions that vary by region and family history.
It's difficult to track how many white Americans have Spanish ancestry because the census treats Spain as a nationality rather than a racial origin. About 1.9 million Americans claim direct Spanish ancestry, but genetic testing suggests the actual number with some Spanish heritage is far higher.
Social Definition, Not Biological
The Census Bureau is remarkably candid about what its racial categories actually measure. The 2000 census stated explicitly that its classifications "generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country. They do not conform to any biological, anthropological or genetic criteria."
This is important. When the government asks about race, it's not asking about DNA or skull measurements or any of the pseudoscientific criteria that racists once employed. It's asking how you see yourself and how society sees you.
These are related but not identical questions. Someone might have African ancestors but pass as white. Someone else might have entirely European ancestry but, through some quirk of appearance, be perceived as something else.
The historian David Roediger argues that the construction of whiteness in America was fundamentally about creating psychological distance between slave owners and slaves. To enslave people, you had to convince yourself they were fundamentally different from you. Race became the mechanism for that differentiation.
The Shifting Boundaries
What strikes me most about this history is how recently the boundaries moved, and how quickly people forgot they ever moved at all.
My own grandparents came from countries that weren't considered properly white when they arrived. Within two generations, that history was essentially erased. Their descendants became simply "white," indistinguishable from families who had been here since the Mayflower.
This happened because whiteness in America was never really about ancestry or genetics or even skin color. It was about who got included in the category of full citizenship, who got access to housing and jobs and education, who got to be considered a real American.
The Irish became white when they gained political power in cities like Boston and New York. The Italians became white when their children fought in World War II and came home to buy houses in the suburbs with GI Bill loans. The Jews became white when they moved out of the Lower East Side and into the professions.
Each group paid dues. Each group proved its loyalty. And eventually, each group was admitted to the club.
What Comes Next
The 2030 census will look different from any that came before it. Middle Eastern and North African Americans will have their own category. Hispanic and Latino identity will be treated more like a racial classification.
Some see this as long overdue recognition. Arab Americans have been asking for separate classification for decades, arguing that lumping them with European Americans obscures their distinct experiences and challenges.
Others worry about fragmentation, about what happens when people who once shared a category suddenly find themselves in different boxes.
But perhaps the deeper lesson is that these categories were always more fluid than they appeared. The census didn't discover race. It invented it, then reinvented it, then reinvented it again. Each version reflected the anxieties and power dynamics of its era.
The white majority that seemed so permanent in 1940 is now a shrinking plurality. The clear lines between racial groups grow blurrier with each generation of intermarriage. The old categories strain to contain new realities.
In another century, Americans may look back at our debates about who counts as white and find them as quaint as we find Benjamin Franklin's suspicion of Germans. Or they may have moved on to entirely new categories, new divisions, new ways of sorting humanity into us and them.
The only certainty is that the definitions will keep changing. They always have.