Who Came Up With White Identity?

Have you ever wondered about the origins of White identity? Have you ever asked yourself who came up with it and why?

Like much of history, the story of white identity has layers, but we can understand it if we try. The real trouble isn’t actually how complicated the history is, it’s how unnerving it gets. And for Christians, the story of Whiteness gets really disturbing.

When it comes to the creation of White identity and race, we have to start with Zurara, a Portuguese scribe from the 1400s. His description of certain slaves as “white enough” in a slave auction in 1444 doesn’t initially sound any worse than a secret recording of a right-wing commentator, but when we read the full story we discover the abuse of Christianity for the sake of abusing Africans.

You can read the entire story for yourself (look for Chapter XXV) but here are 5 key takeaways that help us understand the origin of white identity:

1. White identity is the result of greed — the ‘birthplace’ of White identity is slavery: a slave auction and the desire of Portugal’s Prince Henry to show off his nation’s dominance over Africans is framing Zurara’s thinking.
2. Creating White identity was unnecessary — much of Zurara’s writings mention cities and peoples as the Bible does: the simple naming of people and places. There was absolutely no need for Zurara to make up a new category of identity, let alone one using color.
3. White identity was created for supremacy — Zurara calls some slaves “white enough” in comparison to the dark skinned slaves who were “ugly”. He calls them “brute animals”. Zurara doesn’t spell out all of what Whiteness meant to him because the implications are already clear.
4. Creating White identity was inexcusable — Zurara knew that this treatment of Africans was unbiblical because he notes that all people are united in Adam. He notes this while unable to hold back his own tears at how inhumane the auction was. Zurara knew better but sears his conscience at the end of the chapter by noting that the slaves were quickly baptized.
5. White identity was a pseudonym for Christian Nationalism — Zurara asks God to forgive him for his tears for the slaves, which sounds very strange unless we remember that Zurara believed that God desired the supremacy of Portugal. As Zurara’s ideas and the slave trade spread to Spain and England, national identity continued to be equated with Christian identity, with White identity an increasingly useful replacement for both.

If that last point sounds questionable, consider the words of a 1662 law passed in Colonial Virginia: “if any christian shall committ ffornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee so offending shall pay double the ffines imposed by the former act.” Did you catch that? Either someone is a Negro or they are a Christian, not both. The law was changed in 1691 to announce penalties for any “English or other white man or woman being free” who married a “negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman”. In other words, the word ‘white’ was really just a replacement for ‘Christian’ in the minds of the early founders of Virginia. And it was a useful replacement, because it covered up the obvious heresy of saying that Black people couldn’t be Christians.

This problem of racialization isn’t commonly understood by White Christians, so let’s try to connect this to the big picture the Bible gives us. The only division that God ever established among people was the division between Jews and Gentiles. The Jews were chosen and precious to God, the Gentiles were rejected and impure. The Jew/Gentile division wasn’t about birth or family, it was a spiritual difference, and Paul taught that it’s a difference that is based on faith (Rom. 4). Sadly, European Christians made the same mistake that many Jews (and especially the Pharisees) made: they imagined that being chosen and precious to God was about birth and nationality.

So when Europeans in their greed wanted to justify their enslavement of Africans, they reimagined the spiritual advantages of belonging to God as physical and social supremacy. The future elevated status of God’s people in glory was too far off and the mission of God was an easy excuse, so non-Europeans were reimagined as uncivilized, heathen beasts rather than fellow Gentiles who, like Europeans, had once been far-off from God, but could be brought near by the blood of Jesus.

But calling yourself a Christian AND justifying your supremacy over others is hard to do. Zurara felt this at the slave auction, and so did lawmakers in Colonial Virginia. White identity was a helpful — but dishonest and hateful — way for them and many other Europeans to continue to justify supremacy and retain the title of Christian.

As bad as all of this history is, we need to see that this isn’t just a historical problem. This is a problem for ‘White’ American Christians. Those of us who believed we were ‘White’, as if it were some immutable fact about who we are, are regularly recreating White identity in our own world by how we live and talk about each other and how we talk about ‘others’. When we choose our friends, our schools, our places of worship, the homes we buy and the stores we shop at, why is it that we segregate ourselves and avoid African American people and the schools, churches, neighborhoods and stores that they populate? Is it not because, like Zurara, we imagine those people and places to not be “White enough”? Do our segregated lives not loudly proclaim — while not fully spelling it out — that we prefer being around ‘White’ people because they’re not “ugly” (either in beauty or character), and we prefer ‘White’ places because they are not ‘sh*tholes’?

At the beginning, White identity was unbiblical, unnecessary, and useful for hiding supremacy. And sadly, this disturbing history is being recreated with every generation.