Describe how the racial category “white” has developed in the United States throughout its history. Use the concepts of scientific racism, census data, and assimilation in your answer

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1. The category “white” has never been based on skin color alone, but instead has resulted from social positioning and assimilation.
2. During the nineteenth century, social scientists categorized hundreds of allegedly distinct “races” into ten broad racial categories. Teutonic people (from England, Germany, and Scandinavia) were considered white, while people from other parts of Europe were not.
3. Early immigrants to the United States were mostly German, French, English, or Scots-Irish, and these early settlers were mostly Protestants who settled in small towns. A somewhat homogenous “white” identity developed—English speaking and Protestant.
4. Later waves of intense immigration brought so many Irish, Germans, Jews, and other European groups that they could not be quickly assimilated. They were excluded from whiteness, and there were fears of the white race disappearing (“race suicide”). The pseudo-science of “scientific racism,” which included theories of eugenics, tried to divide who was white from who was not both conceptually and physically.
5. Gradually, and often through people intentionally abandoning their cultural and linguistic traditions, many of these later groups achieved assimilation into the broader category of “white,” in exchange for the privileges that came with membership in this dominant group.
6. The U.S. Census has reflected these changes: In the nineteenth century, Europeans were separated into different categories, but as many of them assimilated, they became consolidated into the category “white.”