To elaborate, I mean the current idea of whiteness. It seems like everyone who has white skin is considered “white” unless they can prove otherwise. If I remember correctly, this wasn’t always the case. I remember learning in school, for example, that the Irish were discriminated against in colonial times. They weren’t considered “white” then, even though they had white skin. So when did everyone with light skin start to be considered white?
What inspired me to ask this is I’m biracial, half black and half white, but I’m white-passing. I never knew what to label myself for gov’t forms until they added the “two or more races” option. Until recently, I always used “other” because I’m not just white or black. So I’d love to hear the history of whiteness just because I’m pretty curious how it came to be (or if I’m wrong and it was always this way.)
You'll find a lot of different viewpoints on this topic in these previously asked questions.
I study race in the early Atlantic world, especially Spanish America. What is interesting is 'white' as a racial reference only really begins in the tail end of the sixteenth century.
For the Spanish at least the first collective category they use to differentiate themselves from darker skinned Africans (negros) and Native Americans (Indios) is cristiano. Then as a national identity becomes more pronounced (over regional Iberian ones) they switch to español. Other Europeans we're almost always refered to by national labels or religious ones (luteranos being a generic Protestant epithet).
Only at the end of the sixteenth century does blanco come into use and even then national markers are much more commonly used for Europeans until well into the seventeenth century and beyond.
Roman authors like Vegetius comparing italian Romans to the people they conquered, lump Gauls and Germans together as being strong of body, while Africans, though he most certainly does not mean sub-saharan Africans but rather Egyptians, Numidians and Punics, are supposed to strong of mind (and from the text I am pretty sure he means to imply that Northern Europeans are conversely kinda dull and Africans kinda wimpy).
I believe he echoes Aristoteles, Politics Book VII
Those who live in a cold climate and in Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organisation, and are incapable of ruling over others. Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic race, which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent.
However Vegetius, Book I
Is less of a naturalist and seems convinced that superior culture (of arms), is what brought the Romans to overcome these people.
Without these, what chance would the inconsiderable numbers of the Roman armies have had against the multitudes of the Gauls? Or with what success would their small size have been opposed to the prodigious stature of the Germans? The Spaniards surpassed us not only in numbers, but in physical strength. We were always inferior to the Africans in wealth and unequal to them in deception and stratagem. And the Greeks, indisputably, were far superior to us in skill in arts and all kinds of knowledge.
Something very similar to the racial bias even within seemingly completely identical groups, like any such inner-european racism, Aristoteles also provides us with.
There are also similar differences in the different tribes of Hellas; for some of them are of a one-sided nature, and are intelligent or courageous only, while in others there is a happy combination of both qualities. And clearly those whom the legislator will most easily lead to virtue may be expected to be both intelligent and courageous.
Of course there is not a direct line between these racial theories and the early modern racial theories, but these authors illustrate how racial thinking has always served people with a lack of understanding in history and the social sciences to explain the world as they found it, i.e. Aristotle the wealth and political order of the Greek city states and Vegetius the order of the known world.