# "Multi-racial whiteness" **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 19, 2021, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/multi-racial-whiteness/930901 "2021-01-19T17:32:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 33
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2021, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/multi-racial-whiteness/930901/33 "2021-01-21T00:06:35Z")
> [@DemonTree](#): > > US culture isn’t white culture, and the former seems to be what you are describing. It makes perfect sense that the dominant culture in the US is defined by the majority race, but that it’s not necessary to be white to share it, or to contribute to it. […] > > No one ‘became white’. Given that race isn’t a biologically immutable quality but rather a set of social categories, it seems perfectly reasonable to refer to changing criteria about who belongs in a particular category in terms of “becoming white”. For instance, [Benjamin Franklin, along with many of his contemporaries, famously had a much narrower definition of “whiteness” than is current nowadays:](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/swarthy-germans/48324/) > [@](#): > > And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. [Here’s a 1916 industrial relations report illustrating the distinction that many employers of the time took for granted between “white men” and “Italians”](https://books.google.com/books?id=luYeAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA2171&lpg=PA2171&dq=%22white+men+and+Italians%22&source=bl&ots=6otrex2uLj&sig=ACfU3U2iy5hz45Lu8SHdlNGK6zQkZoH6xw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiAtevY16vuAhUpTd8KHaYQCAIQ6AEwA3oECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=%22white%20men%20and%20Italians%22&f=false): > [@](#): > > Mr. Barnes: Now, Mr. Petersen, let us establish a couple of facts so we can go on. All of your men that you employ there that are not Italians, are white men? You employ white men and Italians? > Mr. Petersen: In discharging we employ all Italians, and in loading all white men—all nationalities. […] > Mr. Barnes: Yes; but why do you put the Italians at discharging and the white men at stowing. Are not the white men better for stowing? > Mr. Petersen: Because the Italians are not qualified for it—stowing. […] > Mr. Barnes: So you make a division between the Italians and white men and put the white men to stowing and the Italians to discharging? [This article](https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/race-and-americas-immigrant-press-how-the-slovaks-were-taught-to-think-like-white-people/ch4-a-slav-can-live-in-dirt-that-would-kill-a-white-man-race-and-the-european-other.pdf) discusses similar evolution of racial classifications of various groups of Europeans, illustrated by the contemporary quote in the article’s title, “A Slav can live in dirt that would kill a white man”. Nobody is claiming that the physical skin color of people of, say, Swedish or Italian or Slavic ethnicity significantly changed between then and now. But it is absolutely true that their perceived qualification to be included in the category of “white people”, according to commonly understood definitions of that category, did change. We see a similar evolution going on now, for example, in the inclusion of Hispanic/Latinx people in the category “white”. It’s commonly held nowadays that Hispanic and Latinx aren’t racial categories, and may describe people who are either white or nonwhite. But [in this 1983 article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4191332/) entitled “Differences among black, Hispanic, and white people in knowledge about long-term care services”, for example, it was taken as a given that “Hispanic” signified a racial category that was neither white nor black. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/multi-racial-whiteness/930901)._