When considering how race came to mean what it does today, it's important to look at the way ideas about race have changed over time. Race and racial difference are socially constructed; race is a social and political construction, not an inherent or static reality (Frankenberg, 1993, p.11). In other words, as power and politics have shifted, so have our ideas about who is white and who is not.

Biological Argument of Race and Racism
Two scholars named Omi and Winant, in their book Racial Formation, provide a chronology of the ways mainstream white America has thought about race. They say that there have been three main stages of thinking about race in the U.S. The first stage, and the one that encompasses most of U.S. history, is one in which arguments for the biological inferiority of people of color dominated the public discourse. European scientists started to classify humans into races in the eighteenth century (Brown, 2002, p.10). Race “was constructed as a biological category, and the assertion of white biological superiority was used to justify economic and political inequities ranging from settler colonialism to slavery” (Frankenberg, 1993, p.13). Science and social science supported this theory of race as a biological category and the idea that people of different races “differed in brain capacity as well as skin color” (Brown, 2002, p.11). Many have argued that “a sense of being white, of belonging to a white race, only widely developed in the USA in the nineteenth century as part of the process of establishing US identity…You might be British, you might even be Irish, Polish or Greek, but you were also white, not red or black” (Dyer, 1997, p.19).

Assimilation and the Melting Pot
In the second phase (beginning in the 1920s) racial difference was talked about in “cultural and social terms instead of, or simultaneously with, biological ones” and people began to talk about “ethnicity” instead of “race” (Frankenberg, 1993, p. 13). The ideal of many people at this time was that people of color, like white immigrants, would assimilate into “mainstream” (meaning white) U.S. society (Frankenberg, 1993). This thinking is often referred to as the "melting pot" theory. By the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists began to prove wrong the biological theory of race. They discovered that “the four basic blood groups are distributed over all the so-called races, not lining up with supposed racial categories” (Diamond, 1980; Salmon, Cartron & Rouger, 1984 in Brown, 2002, p.14).

Difference Radicalized
The third phase, beginning with the more radical and antiracist social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s (including Black Power, La Raza, and the American Indian Movement) “brought about a resurgence, reevaluation, and transformation of notions of the differentness of peoples of color from the white dominant culture, along with an analysis and critique of racial inequality as a fundamentally structuring feature of U.S. society” (Frankenberg, 1993, p. 14). Ruth Frankenberg conceptualizes these three phases in terms of the shift from “'difference' to ‘similarity' and then ‘back' to difference radically redefined” (1993, p. 14). While these three phases indicate the start of new ways of thinking about race, it should be noted that earlier ways of thinking remained in the minds of many Americans.

The biological theory of race has been proven wrong.

Presently, “most social and biological scientists agree that there is no scientific basis for dividing people into races. Race is not a valid biological category…Geneticists have found that there is more genetic variability between individuals than between any groups” (Brown, 2002, p.15). Further, “the evidence is overwhelming that there is one mother continent” and that “everyone is African,” meaning that “white-skinned people have evolved from black-skinned people” (Brown, 2002, p.15). While it is clear that race does not exist as a biological category, that is not to diminish the reality of racism, which most certainly does exist (Brown, 2002). It also does not erase the existence of different cultures which have tended to develop around racial and ethnic lines.

Now that we've taken a look at how the public discourse on race and racial difference has changed over time, we can begin to think about why white people's thinking developed the way it did. This is largely a story about the links between racism, capitalism, and the development of the United States of America. See

A Selected History of the Political and Economic Development of the United States (which is the Development of White Supremacy in the United States ).

References_______________________________________________________________________

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. (2002). Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Teachers College Press.

Dyer, Richard. (1997). White. New York: Routledge.

Frankenberg, Ruth. (1993). The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.