Who is white?

Americans assign each other to racial categories all the time, often without thinking. Very often, we toss around the terms “black, “Hispanic” and “white” as if we all agree on what they mean. Yet a look at history shows that ideas about our nation’s racial categories — what they are and who fits into them — are always changing. And in particular, answers to the question “Who’s white?” have never been simple.

“White people as a category has a strange and circuitous history,” said Duke University historian Gunther Peck. “The people who are white today were not white yesterday, and people have literally fallen in and out of that category.”

White people as a category has a strange and circuitous history. The people who are white today were not white yesterday.

Even the blond, blue-eyed Finns were once not considered white.

“The census takers, when they’re marking ethnicity off the boat at Ellis Island, listed them as not white,” Peck said. “Census takers were trying to lower them. They were trying to group them with the southern and eastern Europeans that they were coming into the country with.”

And the Finns weren’t alone. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Italians, Greeks, Hungarians and Bulgarians were all classified as “nonwhite.”

Sarah Gaither, a psychologist who teaches at Duke, has experienced shifting racial perceptions firsthand. Her mother is white and her father is black. Sarah is often mistaken for “white.”

“There are those white people that learn that I’m half black, and then they’re more nervous about talking to me about diversity issues,” Gaither said. “They become confused about where I stand on things like affirmative action, for some reason. Just by the simple switch on a label that has been applied to myself.”

Gaither’s biracial identity has led her to study cross-racial communication and cross-racial perception. For instance, she looked at what happens when white college students room with students of another race.

“At the end of students’ first years, those white students who were living with someone who was not white — so either Asian, black, or Latino, doesn’t matter what race — they were able to interact much more positively with a black person they had never met before,” she said.

Pilar Marrero, a senior political correspondent for the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion in Los Angeles, has also been misidentified. Marrero grew up in Venezuela, but is often mistaken for white.

“It’s almost like I don’t fit their idea of what a Latina is,” Marrero said. “People don’t quite know where to put me. The way I look — light skin, green eyes, lighter hair — makes them think I’m an Anglo American , a white person. But then I speak and I have an accent. Or I speak Spanish, I start speaking Spanish and they go ‘What?’ That happens to me all the time.”

For immigrants of the past, becoming “white” meant joining the majority. That’s changing now. Census predictions suggest that within 30 years, white Americans — at least as currently defined — will be a minority. Meanwhile, the number of biracial Americans is growing.

“Race is a socially constructed category,” Gaither said. “We have made what white is. We have made what black is. We’re slowly making what biracial is or is not.”

In the past, waves of lighter-skinned immigrants joined the American mainstream by letting go of their ethnic identities. They merged into the famed American melting pot and became “white.”

Now it seems that “white” may soon be one racial category among many. And with that demographic shift, perhaps what it means to be “white” in America will change yet again, said Pilar Marrero.

“Who knows if whiteness will stop being this great thing,” Marrero said. “We may not be a melting pot any more, we may be more of a salad bowl. But there are certain ideas that unite us, there are certain aspirations we all have and I think that’s what continues to make it possible for this country to exist.”

For more from Gunther Peck, Sarah Gaither and Pilar Marrero, check out the latest episode of the Ways & Means podcast. Ways & Means explores bright ideas for how to improve human society.

Ways & Means is hosted by Emily Hanford, an education correspondent for American RadioWorks, the national documentary unit of American Public Media.