Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – We live in a time when a once level-headed anti-populist politician such as J. D. Vance has increasingly adopted the language of white nationalism, signing on to the Great Replacement theory that nefarious forces, often coded as Jewish, are bringing in immigrants to replace “white” Americans, attacking “multiculturalism” and aligning himself with Christian theocratic nationalism. That his wife Usha is from India is inconvenient to this shift, of course. The shameful Great Replacement theory now embraced by Vance was invented by a French Nazi who considered all Americans “Negroes.”
Whiteness is a term with a checkered history. As a historian, I would argue that it is an objectively meaningless construct. It is only meaningful, like any political identity, in a carefully crafted context and through various sleights of hand. I have pointed out that Ben Franklin only considered the English white, dismissing Swedes as “tawny” and Germans as “swarthy.” In the twentieth century, working-class Italians, Greeks and Irish were gradually admitted to “whiteness,” which had in the nineteenth century been associated with Protestantism, middle and upper class status, and northern European origins. That is, whiteness in America was always mostly about class and religion and unfree antecedents rather than about skin color. Some African-Americans have a lighter complexion than some Mediterranean populations. Arabs were admitted to whiteness in the early 20th century by the courts, though after September 11 their whiteness was often revoked.
That ICE has not gone after the thousands of undocumented Irish in the Boston area or other “white” undocumented immigrants, but only after those coded “brown” or “black,” demonstrates that Stephen Miller’s project is a racialist one, not purely about immigration or undocumented immigration.
One of the symbols of whiteness for Americans constructing a white identity is Europeanness, especially northern Europeanness. It should be remembered that Adolf Hitler initially rebuffed Benito Mussolini’s offer of an alliance because he did not consider Italians white, and kept hoping that instead he could conclude an alliance with Britain.
The bad news for white nationalism is that Europe’s genetic history has revealed that Europeans were mostly dark-skinned until the first millennium BC, and even then whiteness advanced slowly. This belatedness of light complexions has been demonstrated by a scientific paper just this year:
S. Perretti et al., “Inference of human pigmentation from ancient DNA by genotype likelihoods,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (29) e2502158122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2502158122 (2025).
Joseph Shavit summarizes the paper of Professor Perretti and colleagues: “Researchers at the University of Ferrara in Italy studied the genomes of 348 people who lived between 45,000 and 1,700 years ago across Europe and western Asia. Their findings show that about 63% of ancient Europeans had dark skin. Only about 8% had pale skin. The rest had tones in between.”
In fact, Ötzi the iceman, from circa 3000 BC, is both one of Europe’s oldest preserved mummies and one of the darkest Europeans known. Reconstructions of him have made him look white, which is just ideology, not science.
Modern Europeans are immigrants, since much of Europe was not inhabited during the last Ice Age, the glacial maximum of which lasted from roughly 29,000 to 11,700 years ago. After that Africans and people from what we now term the Middle East came in to repopulate the continent.
They were black? They were black. They came from places closer to the equator where UV rays were strong and dark pigmentation blocked them, reducing the danger of genetic damage to embryos.
The major natural selection mechanism for light skin is that in northern climes UV rays are weak and dark pigmentation blocks absorption of them. UV rays provoke humans to produce vitamin D. Lack of vitamin D is associated with a range of poor health outcomes, including increased risk osteoporosis and “of common cancers, autoimmune diseases, hypertension, and infectious diseases.” It is also associated with multiple sclerosis and dementia.
Most important here is that lack of vitamin D damages fetal and maternal health.
So in subsaharan Africa, if two women were pregnant, and one was slightly darker than the other, her embryo would have a very slightly better chance of being protected from harsh UV rays and of being healthy and would be selected for.
Take the same two women to Sweden, and the shoe is on the other foot. The slightly lighter woman’s embryo would have a better chance of getting sufficient vitamin D by being exposed to the weak UV rays up there, and her child would be selected for. Thousands of years later, her descendants would be white as snow.
So modern Europeans are just Africans and Middle Easterners (and some Eurasians) who, under the impact of weak ultraviolet rays, lightened up over time under the impact of natural selection.
It wasn’t until the era of the foundation of Rome, however, than any significant number of Europeans began being lighter complected.
As Dario Radley concludes in Archeology News, dark skin was replaced much more slowly in Europe than had been earlier thought. Why? It turns out that diet is also important. European hunters and gatherers ate foods like meat, fish and wild plants, which were relatively high in vitamin D, and so they could survive even at northern latitudes with weak UV rays while retaining dark complexions.
The Neolithic agricultural revolution where people from what is now Turkiye gradually expanded into Europe and brought grain agriculture introduced a new diet relatively poor in vitamin D, as Shavit points out. So European farmers were exposed to the natural selection process favoring lighter skin. Some of the farmers who came in from the Middle East were from families that had already lightened up because of this diet change.
So, white Europeans in the sense of light-complected ones, are a recent historical phenomenon. And of course in southern Europe people are generally darker. But the point is that all human beings are descended from people we would now code as Black.
I don’t know what glory there is in being light-skinned descendants of Black people because of resettling in northern climes with weak UV rays. At the least, exulting in whiteness in this sense would mean demeaning your own ancestors and family line. All those Americans who think of Rome several times a day should be aware that Romulus and Remus, the mythical figures whose story is wrought up with the founding of Rome, couldn’t have gotten served in a restaurant in the American South in the 1950s.
Image of Ötzi the Iceman by bastiaan from Pixabay
That is not to mention that the Roman Empire was both among the greatest empires in history and the most multicultural. At its height, it ruled from Morocco to the Caucasus and from Spain to what is now Turkiye. It included Arabophone peoples, Aramaic speakers, Grecophone populations, Anatolian speakers of Iranian languages, Basques, Goths, Celts, and Etruscans along with Romans. When the Romans conquered Syria, they admitted its elites to their aristocracy and had as emperors Philip the Arab (r. 244-249 AD, born in Aurantis, Syria), as well as Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, both from the Emesene dynasty from Homs in Syria, as well as Caracalla, whose mother was from the Syrian Arab family of the Severans,
Elagabalus (r. 218-222) in Arabic is ilah al-jabal, the god of the mountain. Ilah is the Arabic for “a god,” with the definite being al-Ilah or in Jordan and the Hejaz, Allah. So Westerners who don’t like hearing the term Allah can’t even reckon with their own Roman legacy. As for Vance’s diss on multiculturalism, it doesn’t make it easy to understand the greatness of the great multicultural empires, not least Rome itself.
Whiteness and Westernness are such fragile ideas that they break down rapidly when subjected to the historian’s gaze. They are a fragile reed on which to base the politics of 350 million diverse Americans, all of them ultimately descended from Black people.
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