White

It is the ongoing malleability of white in reference to a category of human beings – and its propensity to be shiftingly employed for inclusion or exclusion, with deadly results – that renders it a keyword. White as a category of human beings has, over the centuries, been defined in practice in multiple, ever-changing ways, including a wide range of physical attributes well beyond (skin) colour; geography; (mythical or biological) lineage; simple habit or custom; or genetics. Often, these definitions have been at odds with each other.

White has cognates across Indo-European languages, referring to light colour or brightness. White in this sense could be used absolutely – referring strictly to the colour of snow, for example – and as an absolute term did not have synonyms in OE.

From OE, white could describe light-coloured skin as a mark of illness or cowardice, alternating with wan, blake, pale, dead, and bloodless from ME (with no synonyms in OE). White alternated with fair from OE to indicate light-coloured skin as a mark of femininity and beauty; white could, in this sense, signify an unfavourable femininity in men. To describe a typical, healthy skin colour, white was uncommon: instead, red and bright were common from OE; ruddy from C13. Crucially, red in OE subsumed what we might now call purple, pink, red, orange, and brown.

When precisely white comes to be used as a category of human being – rather than as a relative descriptor – is contentious. The process certainly begins in EModE, and it is firmly in place by LModE in the pseudo-science of race. Today, the entrenchment of this meaning is reflected in corpus data insofar as descriptions of population demographics – by category – produce some of the most common collocations with white: predominately white, overwhelmingly white, mostly white, disproportionately white. In this sense, white no longer refers exclusively – or indeed, sometimes, at all – to colour. Blumenbach's 1795 dissertation, foundational to racial pseudo-science, introduces Caucasian – now a common synonym for white – but Blumenbach seemed less preoccupied with skin colour than with facial structure, geography, lineage, and ranked degrees of beauty. In C19 and C20 American writing, facial structure, hair texture, and lineage are commonly referenced as definitive characteristics of a category of white people – by that point, white has moved well beyond relative lightness of skin.

This element of the semantic development of white parallels – in reverse – that of black. Black's negative senses and uses in OE were expanded and intensified in the early modern era, alongside Atlantic slavery. Similarly, white's positive senses and uses seem to multiply and intensify from the seventeenth century, and it would be impossible to separate this semantic development from the invention and development of race. Among many other examples, white-hearted evolves from meaning ‘cowardly’ to meaning ‘saintly’ during this time. The increasingly positive semantics became so essential to many white-identifying writers that by early C20, there were numerous attempts to explain a purportedly universal human psychological association of white with good, black with bad. These are easily countered not only in theory – as Richard Dyer writes, ‘one might well argue about the safety of the cover of darkness, and the danger of exposure to the light’ – but by the history of English itself: white, for centuries, was largely an indicator of illness, cowardice, and death. In studying English worldwide, we also find impressive evidence that white is not a universal human symbol for good. Recently, in Hong Kong's grassroots pro-democracy demonstrations, the English phrase white terror has referred to political persecution.

By insisting on associating white so unequivocally with ‘good’, white-identifying people have used it to grant or withhold – or to exercise – in-group power. In South Africa, British- and Dutch-identifying people were viewed – and viewed themselves – as separate ‘races’, until in C20 they moved to shore up power by identifying as one white – and superior – group, with devastating consequences.

Similar issues played out in William Wells Brown's 1853 novel Clotel, whose heroine is seen by all as white due to physical characteristics but held and sold as a black slave based on her lineage. A more recent example is the residents of Waverley, Ohio, who have received international attention after years of being defined in their local communities as black, based on understood lineage, despite being seen by outsiders as apparently white, based on physical characteristics. A comparable case is that of Happy Sindane in South Africa, whom white-identifying families embraced (and sought to adopt and ‘rescue’) as an apparently white orphan purportedly abducted into a black community – until a DNA test ‘proved’ that he was not white at all. Each of these examples reflects a notion of white as quite apart from physical attributes.

Sindane's circumstances also relate to a genetic definition of white, demonstrably apart from – and potentially at odds with – other definitions. Genetic definitions have proven untenable, in part, precisely because white is so shifting and malleable – a mirage of a goalpost for correlative statistics and measurements of genetic material. If white is defined as a combination of physical attributes (or not), lineage (often imaginary), geography (in no stable way), power, and social norms, we can hardly expect it to be consistently reflected in bodily proteins.

Other definitions of white have explicitly placed habit or custom above physical attributes. South Africa's Population Registration Act No 30 of 1950 defined as white ‘a person who in appearance obviously is, or who is generally accepted as a white person … [This] does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person’. In another example of the law reflecting custom in South Africa, legal honorary white status was offered to groups including people of Chinese descent and Maori rugby players, and individuals including Arthur Ashe and E. R. Braithwaite.

Alongside white, Caucasian, and of European descent, we find a wide range of semantic alternates. Schuyler (1927) is scathing and satirical, and particularly inventive with his lexis, within one short essay: ‘white folks’, of course, but also ‘Nordic Americans’, ‘Caucasians’, ‘Anglo-Saxons’, ‘pale neighbours’, ‘crackers’, ‘peckerwoods’, ‘townsfolk of the paler hue’, ‘the white rabble’, ‘the white mob’, ‘white Lilliputians’, ‘ofays’, ‘pork-skinned friends’, and ‘pinks’. It is worth noting that these terms relate to relative colour, geography, lineage, and power.

In the first instance, white children refers to ‘a lighter example’ rather than an essential category. The second example, alongside pallid and cadaverous, and in contrast to red, evokes OE and ME sense of illness. The final example, white blood, refers to an essential category of human being, defined by lineage.

Morrison's description reflects a necessary, but apparently difficult, rhetorical navigation for English users today between white as non-essential – an invention, a construct – and the very real, lived consequences of that construct.

Other compounds from C20 and C21, which reflect both the construct and its consequences, include white fragility, white backlash, white Negro, white trash, and white nationalism; as well as the derivation whiteliness. White working class became a central term in discourses surrounding C21 right-wing populism in the United States.

Frederick Douglass, in 1847, wrote that in America, ‘it was the colour of the skin that was the mark of distinction or the brand of degradation’. We might say that it was the invention of white – rather than the colour of the skin – that served to mark power. In this way, there are no practical synonyms for all that white entails. It will always be inadequate – and often duplicitous – to substitute it with of European descent or Caucasian, or Anglo or Nordic, or pale or bright, because white seems uniquely to encapsulate the conflicting confluence of colour, geography, lineage, custom, pseudo-science, and power in ways inconsistent, arbitrary, and lethal.