When Cleopatra was alive, she wasn’t categorised by the colour of her skin | Kenan Malik
In 1751, the great American polymath Benjamin Franklin worried about the small number of purely white People in the World". All Africa," he wrote, is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny... And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also." Only the Saxons... [and] the English make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth."
The question of who is white?" might seem to us today as self-evident. Yet it has over the past three centuries been fiercely contested. Many groups we now think of as white were certainly not seen as such for much of that period, from the Irish to the Slavs, from Italians to Jews. It took a long process of social negotiation and conflict before they were admitted into the club of whiteness.
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