White Americans

White Americans by the Numbers

White Americans are one of the five racial designations defined by the U.S. government, the others being Black/African American, Asian, Native American/Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (and Other). Whites are defined by the U.S. government as comprising people of European, Middle Eastern, or North African descent. The U.S. Census conducted in 2000 found that 77.1% of the American population indicated that they were White, alone or in combination with another race, with 75.1 % [Page 1372]reporting that they were White only. Whites also had the opportunity to indicate their family ancestry, the most commonly reported being German (with 15.2% of the total population), followed by Irish (10.8%) and English (8.7%). With regard to place of residence, Whites are distributed fairly evenly throughout the United States, with the largest total numbers of Whites living in the South (34%) and the Midwest (25%) relative to the West (21%) and the Northeast (20%). The highest concentrations of Whites can be found, however, in the populations of the Midwest (85%) and the Northeast (79%).

Sociopolitical Location

In terms of their social, political, and economic standing, White Americans are the dominant racial group in the United States. The United States has had White presidents and vice presidents exclusively, and as of the November 2006 elections, Whites held approximately 94% of seats in the U.S. Senate and 83% percent of those in the House of Representatives. With fewer than 10 exceptions throughout history, all elected governors of all 50 states have been White. Whites occupy the overwhelming preponderance of corporate executive positions, serving as chief executive officers at about 495 of the 500 largest corporations as represented by Fortune Magazine in 2006. White people are overrep-resented in every powerful and highly paid profession: Overwhelmingly, American lawyers, judges, physicians, bankers, college professors, and journalists are White. The vast majority of American wealth resides in White hands, as documented by Meizhu Lui and her colleagues in their 2006 book The Color of Wealth. For every dollar of wealth owned by a White family, people of color own less than a dime. Family median net worth (i.e., assets minus debts) provides another way of looking at this disparity. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, the median net worth for White American families in 2001 was $120,900, whereas for people of color it was $17,100. In short, in nearly every walk of life, the lists of the wealthiest, the most powerful, and the most influential feature a preponderance of White Americans.

The Origins of Whiteness

Another way of understanding White Americans involves the origins of Whiteness itself as a collective group identity. Race in general has been declared a biological myth by bodies such as the American Association of Anthropology; rather, racial groupings are understood to be socially constructed, historically contingent identities that arise from a particular confluence of social, cultural, political, and/or economic forces. More specifically, the notion of Whiteness as a meaningful way to categorize human beings is a fairly recent development that did not exist at the time the first European settlers ventured onto this continent. The first colonists, therefore, would likely have called themselves English, Dutch, German, or perhaps Christian rather than White. As described by such historians as Howard Zinn, the socioeconomic forces that initiated the creation of Whiteness in the 1700s derived from the emergence of one of the most important economic engines of the new American nation: the transatlantic slave trade. Not only were the profits to be made from the importation and sales of African people considerable, the developing plantation system relied completely upon slave labor. In response to the necessity of justifying these practices, Whiteness materialized as a new group identity that collectively privileged the new American owning class by establishing a racial hierarchy in which Whites could claim superiority. Whiteness, therefore, provided a rationale for the buying and selling of Africans and their children, their subsequent lifelong enslavement, and the appropriation of all profits from their labor.

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