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this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Historically, even the "whiteness" of Irish was not always a thing in the US.
The Nazis wouldn't have qualified by the standards at the time of the American Revolution in Benjamin Franklin's eyes. Nor even the Italian side of Bovino's family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_Concerning_the_Increase_of_Mankind,_Peopling_of_Countries,_etc.
https://www.profmarkbaker.com/blog/2017/6/3/whiteness
"White" is a surprisingly mutable term over time as social norms change.
EDIT: I'd also add that you can also watch, over the course of America's history, "Protestant" morph into "Christian" and then morph into "Judeo-Christian" in political speeches and the like among people complaining about traditional American values being under threat.
Sorry what? I literally can't even. And that's not hyperbole.
But they are not of those noble Saxon roots, are they? As we all know the miraculously only white complexion among all those swarthy German tribes. That is because that would be awkward if they hadn't been, given that they were a key group forming the English master race I suppose. The only truly white people on earth. /s
Racism usually is just the outer face of xenofobia.
Historically, whiteness doesn't exist.
Biologically whiteness does not exist. Culturally, some asshole came up with it and was adopted widely.
I mean, low melanin is a thing. Having to slather on the factor 50 before even thinking about leaving the house is a thing. I used to think that was what white meant. Then I met The Americans and their really odd ideas.
Rich landowners to get poor Europeans to fight against the newly freed slaves.
Only just recently
"Recently" is a nicely intangible term that can cover some bandwidth of meaning, depending on one's intention.
The concept of whiteness is roughly 400 years old and a very important part of western cultural history after the middle ages. It exists as a cultural phenomenon that needs to be studied critically.
400 years ago, were Italians (like Bovino) considered white?
Why would that matter? The cultural concept of whiteness began in the 17th century. Definitions and categorizations have shifted but what different makes the exact time when italians were considered white and when not? Different dates would not chance the fact that whiteness is a cultural concept and an important one in modern (as in "post middle ages", not as in "right now") western history.
What are you even trying to argue, what is your point?
It matters because people that consider themselves white today were only "granted" whiteness recently (to use the term again).
To say that the concept has existed for 400 years but that somehow it doesn't matter that the definitions of the concept have changed is to lose the plot.
I agree that whiteness is a concept. However, I would say it is forced into culture, rather than being a part of it. Bovinos parent's would not have been considered white in America when they were growing up, and the fact that he considers himself to be white now is proof that it is recent, but also meaningless as a label.
There is no such thing as white culture, or food, or music, or any other thing that one would call culturally relevant to being white. With one exception, white surempisism.
I don't know why you're arguing with me then. I started this with the examples of irish people not being considered white in the US for a time. It was exavtly my point that not all pale faced europeans where considered white all the time. You then contended the historicity of that and started bullshitting around.
The concept of whiteness as it stands today is recent.
Bovino being Italian and a white nationalist is terrible irony that shows what happens when a group attempts "ethnic whitening," wherein Italians were absorbed into the white majority by embracing prevailing racial hierarchies and shedding solidarity with other marginalized groups.
For the record, I was trying to add to your comment, not argue with you about the whiteness of Irish people. Especially since again, the term is arbitrary and continually changing.
Again, recency is relative. And arguing recency on an ever changing subject is weird imho.
You could also argue that it didn't change that much, since most of the key characteristics didn't change, only who fulfills these.
That did not come across.
I'll post this once more since the definitions of Whiteness change a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States
You didn't get my point. When the legal definition changes from "people X is white" to "people Y is white", that does not necessarily chance on what characteristics the definition is based. It just means that the perception of who fulfills these characteristics changed. And historically, not being white usually was depending on a people or culture being perceived as (for example) "brutish", "uncivilised", "less intelligent" etc. These characteristics have not changed much.
Can you point me to a non-US source showing that Italians (or rather people from the area of modern day Italy) were debating or thinking about concepts like "whiteness" in the 17th century? (Or really at any time). I am really curious where those debates among members of a country or realm were using that as a category in discussions or considerations.
During the 17th century, all sources were non-US.
The concept of whiteness originated in the context of the slave trade from Africa to the New World and the enslavement of indigenous americans by the Spanish empire. According to anthropologist Irene Silverblatt, white, black and brown were used to described colonisers, slaves and colonised as far back as the 17th century by spanish colonisers in Latin America.
Swedish biologist Carl von Linné proposed the four coloured race scheme (black, brown, yellow, white) in 1785.
I am, however, not aware of any italian sources or discussions before the 19th century. There then are for example Antonio Bresciani's Dei costumi dell'isola di Sardegna comparati cogli antichissimi populi orientali (A Comparison of the Customs of the Island of Sardinia with Those of the Ancient Eastern Peoples) or Cesare Lombroso's works (e.g. L'uomo bianco e l'uomo di colore (The White Man and the Man of Color)). Interestingly, in these Italians consider themselves mostly "white" but attributed certain features (like black hair or bigger lips) as "foreign contamination" and higher crime rates in southern Italy to these "contaminations".
I was maybe not clear about it, by non-US source I was talking about historical studies and works not done by US Americans. So, no need to tell me that the US did not exist in the 17th century. Studying "whiteness" is a very US American thing, and the easiest way to prevent such bias is to look at work from elsewhere. But let's take that Michigan/North Carolinian anthropologisat for a second. What you describe there is purely external, concerning colonies, not the homeland.
From what you describe it does not appear, that even in Italy, people were classifying people as white and non-white amont the domestic, non-immigrant population. Not in the 17th century. Now, in the 19th century of course you have the rise of modern racism but even in those works you quote it sounds like they were not separating local non-immigrant population of Italian speaking regions into populated by white and non-white.
I mentioned several sources, two of them primary. Take the US anthropologist as an extra.
And none of them are differentiating the local non-immigrant population into white and black groups, are they?
Yes, they do as far as I read about them. Btw, I am not your damn personal search engine, nor your AI summariser. If you are interested in this, research it.