How is whiteness socially constructed?

Whiteness has been socially constructed in a variety of ways. Beginning with the social construction of race through global exploration in the late 1700s. Scientists began to create categories for racial classification and used these categories to justify European colonialism through racial superiority. These European scientists claimed that white people were the superior race and therefore justified the often sub-human treatment of colonial subjects. Society continued to construct whiteness in the United States as people immigrated and people tried to maintain a rigid social hierarchy. Initially there was a clear distinction between African Americans, Native Americans, and European immigrants. However, in the 1800s as increasing numbers of European immigrants arrived in the US, White Americans felt that their whiteness was being threatened. These new European immigrants were undesirable and therefore were not granted the same status of whiteness as the established white American residents. We see this in history with the various waves of anti-immigrant sentiment directed at the Polish, Irish, Italian, and Jewish. However, given time each of these immigrant groups was enveloped into the American construction of Whiteness. America continues to construct whiteness today through the systemic oppression of people of color. White people in the United States are afforded increased access to education, economic opportunities (ex. loans), higher wages, decreased arrest rates, etc. In order to be considered "white" in the United States people not only have to look a certain way but also have to comport themselves in specific ways. There are clear unspoken expectations in this country about what is and is not acceptable to the dominant (white) culture and in this country the dominant culture is White culture. A further way that Whiteness is constructed and works to oppress people of color is through forced assimilation into White culture. Dominant culture (white culture) expects people of color to speak and act in certain ways and when they do not the dominant (white) culture punishes these people by refusing to promote them, denying them access to loans, marketing them as dangerous, etc. Whiteness is a meaningless social construction like every other racial category. However, what gives these racial categories power is the way which we validate them and use them to oppress certain people and privilege other people.

Whiteness is socially constructed inasmuch as certain characteristics are assigned to it, and boundaries are drawn around it. Historically, "whiteness" has been constructed by societies that have assigned benefits to it. In slave societies, for example, laws have determined who was legally white and who wasn't. This was because not being white carried the stigma of slavery. Over time, legal mechanisms established whiteness in the South, where eventually anyone with an African-American ancestor was deemed to be nonwhite and subjected to the discrimination of Jim Crow laws. This might be the case irrespective of skin color, which demonstrates the constructed nature of "whiteness": a person, like Homer Plessy of the famous Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, could be deemed non-white. There have been times in American history when Irish immigrants, regardless of skin color, were portrayed and imagined as non-whites, and the same was true of Eastern European immigrants later. Both of these peoples "became white" as legal distinctions against them were dropped over time. So "whiteness" describes a group of people whose members correspond to a certain "race," that are designated as privileged by a society. Because scientists have observed that race itself is essentially a meaningless, spurious means of categorizing people, the concept of "whiteness" is a complete social fabrication devoid of any meaning beyond maintaining power and privilege.