What is white identity?

Shared descent and shared culture are crucial.

Written by Simon Maass.

In response to Bo Winegard’s recent article on “whiteness,” a number of readers commented that “white” was an ambiguous term, and that it was unclear to them where its boundaries should be drawn. I confess I had the same thought about that essay, and about Winegard’s previous one on the same topic. One commenter remarked that “European” would be a more fitting term than “white.” I am inclined to agree with that position, though since it is a semantic point, one could just as well say that being “white” should be defined as being from Europe.

Let me explain why I take that view. In one paper, Winegard, Winegard and Anomaly address the argument that racial categories are meaningless because genetic variation among human populations is utterly gradual, with no clean breaks. The authors object that “even if human variation were completely clinal, researchers could still classify it without committing some kind of scientific sin.” They compare it to aging, which progresses smoothly, and yet teenagers can be distinguished from adults.

This is a reasonable point: the fact that the genetic differences are gradual does not make it impossible to define a “white race.” But you still have to draw the line between white and non-white somewhere, so where should it be drawn? Well, Winegard’s core claim, in his articles on Aporia, is that white ethnic groups “created and maintained Western civilization.” Therefore, for the purposes of articles like his, the line has to be drawn around Europe, because it was Europeans, not Turks or Arabs, who created Western civilisation. More on that in a minute.

Despite the apparent lack of clean breaks, there is a decent amount of genetic difference between European and Near Eastern populations, if Frank Salter’s volume On Genetic Interests is correct. According to Salter, studies have found that no more than 20% of European genetic material is derived from Near Eastern infusions. He concludes that the samples of Europeans which have been analysed constitute a distinct population indigenous to Europe. Salter also calculates that, typically, a “European Caucasoid” would increase the amount of genetic material he would share with his own children by 6% if he married another “European Caucasoid” instead of a “Non-European Caucasoid.” So European genes are substantially distinct from those of adjacent populations, even though the transition is gradual.

I stated earlier that Western civilisation had been created by “Europeans.” Of course, that view must itself be defended. What argument is there for seeing the whole continent of Europe as a cultural unit, and the parent of said civilisation? I would say that sociologist Ricardo Duchesne makes a strong argument to this effect in his book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. In this opus, he contends that Western civilisation has a record of achievement unrivalled elsewhere, and that the original source of its productivity is to be sought in “the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers.” This was spread across Europe, nearly all of which now communicates in Indo-European languages. The Indo-European legacy included a mindset of “restlessness” which produced a unique ambition to strive for improvement.

Naturally, Indo-Europeans went elsewhere, too, but Duchesne argues that their influence in those areas was not as profound or transformative. Western Asia was home to more advanced societies than Europe when “Indo-European speakers” arrived there, so their influence was weaker; they were absorbed into the region’s pre-existing cultures and “[t]he Near-East was not Indo-Europeanized.” The Indo-Europeans’ influence on India and Iran was relatively pronounced, but still, ultimately, more diluted than their impact on Europe.

As far as I can tell, Duchesne’s analysis of proto-Indo-European culture largely accords with other scholars’ work. For instance, he asserts that Indo-European society was governed by “free aristocrats,” meaning that “the king [was] not an autocrat,” but was treated as just “one more warrior of noble birth.” M. L. West has similarly commented: “It was a feature of Indo-European societies that the people, or the body of fighting men, ‘came together’ at intervals for assemblies at which judicial and other decisions were made.”

Duchesne’s thesis that the whole history of European societies bears traces of their Indo-European inheritance strikes me as plausible. The time of the proto-Indo-Europeans may be quite remote, but the cultural inheritance they left behind is, in some ways, surprisingly unified and persistent. Examples are not hard to find. “Over almost all the Indo-European area,” wrote West, “we find the belief in a breed of supernatural females who haunt the lonelier parts of the land, especially the waters, the trees, and the mountains.” The name “Zeus” and its cognates appear in traditions “from India to Italy.” Moreover, the feudal system of government has been practiced throughout Europe. Jaan Puhvel considers feudalism a continuation of the class structure of proto-Indo-European society, which was preserved in the Celtic tradition. It then migrated from England into northern France, “whence it expanded to form the basis of the medieval European and later three estates, which in France lasted as the basis of society down to the revolution of 1789.” In other words, the class structure of proto-Indo-European society was mostly lost, except among the Celts of the British Isles, but then spread throughout the European continent once more in the form of feudalism.

An important part of Duchesne’s thesis is his notion that proto-Indo-European society put a premium on a leader’s fame and personal reputation. This, he maintains, paved the way for European individualism. Perhaps some support for this assessment can be found in Ola Wikander’s observation that “one of the best inherited poetic formulae in Proto-Indo-European has to do with heroic fame.” The formula in question is a phrase meaning “imperishable fame,” which is found in Homer in its Greek form. This point also lends credence to  Duchesne’s basic notion that the Indo-European legacy had shaped European culture in lasting ways. It suggests, at least to me, that the values expressed in the Homeric epics partly go back to proto-Indo-European times; and Homer has been a cultural institution among educated people across the continent for many centuries.

Naturally, one could point to other elements of cultural heritage, such as Christianity or Roman law, which for centuries were almost universal across Europe and almost non-existent outside it. Still, it seems to me that Duchesne has identified the oldest and most all-encompassing basis of European cultural distinctiveness, that being the Indo-European legacy.

In his original piece on whiteness, Winegard has his character Cleanthes object that civilisation is not ethnically defined: “It is not in the blood, as it were.” In response, I would point to something like Noah Carl’s article showing that Americans whose ancestors came from different European countries tend to vote differently. “Americans of Northern European origin are the most conservative,” writes Carl, whereas “those of Southern and Eastern European origin are [less so].” Well, if differences in social attitudes persist even between European ethnicities in the United States, then culture is clearly very sticky and not easily separable from ethnicity. Moreover, Pierre van den Berghe contended that, from an evolutionary-psychological point of view, people use cultural distinctions as a means of identifying members of their own ethnicity and promoting their own genes. If this is correct, then one should expect that combining genetically distinct populations in the same country will result in persistently different cultures. Lastly, I repeat my previous citation of Joseph Henrich, who has written that human beings “preferentially learn from co-ethnics.” This should facilitate the transmission of culture within the same ethnic group and the maintenance of cultural differences between ethnic groups.

All that, I think, adds up to a reasonable case for white identity, defined as the common identity of ethnic groups from Europe. There are still a few points which complicate this picture, but not by much. I proceed to discuss them.

One of our themes has been that whites – Europeans – are the people of Western civilisation. However, there are European ethnic groups which belong to other civilisations, namely the Orthodox one and the Islamic one. How to think about them?

The “Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map,” published by the World Values Survey, arranges countries according to two measures of social values. Countries from the same geographic regions and with similar cultural backgrounds tend to land near each other, so the map identifies and names several clusters of states. Strikingly, Muslim-majority Albania is the one European country that falls within the “African-Islamic” cluster. (Similarly, the Philippines are the only east Asian country that falls within the cluster marked “Latin America.”) Bosnia, despite being a Muslim-majority country, still sits deep within the “Orthodox Europe” cluster. So perhaps we can give Bosnia the benefit of the doubt, but Albania seems quite different from the rest of Europe.

In his landmark work The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P. Huntington depicted the European continent as shared by three civilisations: “Western,” “Orthodox” and “Islamic.” Muslim-majority Albania and Bosnia would naturally belong to the “Islamic” civilisation, whereas Huntington grouped states from Russia to Serbia to Greece under his “Orthodox” civilisation.

How does this fit the notion that Europe is the home of Western civilisation? Well, when it comes to white Muslim peoples in Europe, the answer is obvious. Islam is not a homegrown element of their identity. Instead, it is an imposition, an outside influence forcibly imposed by non-European occupiers – specifically, Ottomans. It is also a fairly recent influence as civilizations go, since even Islam itself is not yet one-and-a-half millennia old. Moreover, it is in zero-sum opposition to the values of Western civilisation, to which these peoples should naturally be predisposed by their older, Indo-European heritage. Thus, the link between European ethnic groups and Western civilisation is not fundamentally called into question; we can still discern it underneath the foreign ideology that has been layered atop it in a few peripheral cases.

So much for the Islamic parts of Europe. What about those that belong to the Orthodox civilisation? Here, too, I believe much of the non-Western element was imposed from without. More on that below. First, we should note that Huntington appears to have overstated the scope of Orthodox civilisation.

Huntington viewed “Orthodox civilization” as encompassing an array of Eastern European and Caucasian states, plus Kazakhstan, with Russia as the “leading” country among them. For Huntington, Orthodox civilisation was marked by greater authoritarianism and centralism than Western civilisation, as well as the comparative lack of a civil society.

That is a fairly apt description of life in Russia. However, Huntington erred in defining Orthodox civilisation too broadly. In my opinion, the real civilisational rift runs between Russia and virtually all other European and Caucasian states. In Freedom House’s ranking of Eastern European, Caucasian and Central Asian states, Russia and Belarus are the only two non-Muslim countries classified as having “Consolidated Authoritarian Regime[s],” and as the numerical scores show, this is not a close call. Needless to say, the dictatorship in Belarus can be disregarded, since it has only remained in power due to Russian support. As regards political culture, then, the distinction to be drawn is between Russia and everyone else.

Furthermore, Huntington himself stated that his theory should be judged by the accuracy of its predictions. He explained that, instead of war between Russia and Ukraine, his notion that Ukraine’s eastern and western parts were separated by a “civilizational fault line” implied that Ukraine was likelier to break apart along that line, while war with Russia was unlikely. History has handed down its verdict, and Huntington has been proved wrong. There is no civilisational fault line that runs through Ukraine, as evidenced by the occurrence of war with Russia and the non-occurrence of any endemic split in Ukrainian society.

In conclusion, Huntington’s “Orthodox civilization” is real, but it is coterminous with the Russian Federation – rather than including other countries, as Huntington supposed.

So why is Russia so dífferent from the rest of Europe? A major reason seems to be the centuries it spent under Mongol rule. Philosopher Oleg Bazaluk believes that two and a half centuries of Mongol dominion taught the local Slavs to value authoritarianism, centralism, submissiveness, collectivism, spartan living and so forth. It was therefore appropriate that Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, one of the pioneering anti-Western ideologues during the early twentieth century, “affirmed that Russia-Eurasia was the conscious heir to and bearer of the great legacy of Genghis Khan” and that “the Russian Empire and Soviet Union were a geopolitical continuation of the Mongolian monarchy.”

Historian Orest Subtelny offers some relevant insights into the cultural aftermath of the Mongol invasions, and his account is enlightening in the contrasts it reveals between Ukraine and Russia. Subtelny notes that, “as a result of centuries of Mongol rule,” the Principality of Moscow, which would become Russia, “had little opportunity to familiarize itself with the principles of Western legality.” On the other hand, the territories of present-day Ukraine gained close acquaintance with western European legal ideas. In particular, those areas which belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were exposed to the Lithuanian Statute  of 1529 and its revised editions. This proved a decisive influence on the history of law in Ukraine. “In fact, as late as the nineteenth century, laws in parts of eastern Ukraine were still based on the statute.” Familiarity with that crucial document helped the local population to internalise “such concepts as legally defined and guaranteed rights.”

Though the Mongols subjugated even Galicia and Volynia, in western Ukraine, their power there was quite tenuous. Consequently, Galicia’s prince Danylo could seek papal support for a crusade against the occupiers. “In his attempt to stave off the East, Danylo turned to the West, thereby providing West Ukrainians with an example that they would follow for centuries.”

That Russian culture combined a European element with an Asian one was acknowledged by early-twentieth-century Russian thinkers including Nikolai Berdyayev and Maxim Gorky, the latter of whom exhorted his countrymen “to fight against the Asian layers of our mentality.” But again, there were also those who, like Nikolai Trubetzkoy, thought those Asian layers should be enthusiastically embraced.

Thus, there has long been tension between pro- and anti-Western elements in Russia. In recent years, the anti-Western elements have evidently gained the upper hand. This climate was exemplified in October 2023, when former presidential advisor Vladislav Surkov wrote an article suggesting that “a Great North” could emerge once the war in Ukraine was over, with “Russia, the USA and Europe forming a common socio-cultural space.” In response, Surkov was investigated by Russian police.

The difference between Russian and Western culture is too large to shrug off. Alexis de Tocqueville touched on the gulf separating them when he juxtaposed Russians and Americans as representing fundamentally opposite worldviews:

The American struggles against obstacles that nature opposes to him; the Russian is grappling with men. The one combats the wilderness and barbarism; the other, civilization clothed in all its arms. Consequently the conquests of the American are made with the farmer’s plow, those of the Russian with the soldier’s sword.

To reach his goal the first relies on personal interest, and, without directing them, allows the strength and reason of individuals to operate.

The second in a way concentrates all the power of society in one man.

The one has as principal means of action liberty; the other, servitude.

Russia’s consistent history of one-man autocracy stands in marked contrast to Western civilisation. Thus, Duchesne noted that “liberal-democratic culture” had been essential to “the rise of the West.” However, much of Russia’s autocracy, collectivism, and related values did not develop internally, but rather was inherited from the non-European Mongols. This baggage rests uneasily upon the patrimony Russia shares with the West, to the point that Huntington speaks of the “duality” between openness and hostility to the West as a perennial feature of Russian society.

In sum, Winegard’s notion that white populations “created and maintained Western civilization” is complicated by the circumstance that white ethnic groups belong to three different civilisations. Still, the exceptions can be said to prove the rule, in that those cultural elements which make those groups civilisationally different had to be forcibly imposed from without. By contrast, the cultural elements which are more universally European work in favour of Western civilisation.

What is left now is only to discuss a few more edge cases in my proposed scheme of “white identity.”

As I have argued in an earlier article, we Jews are fundamentally a European ethnic group. Accordingly, I would classify us as “white” in the present sense. I have proposed the rule that “white” should mean, in contexts like Bo Winegard’s two articles, from Europe. Now I am making a slight exception, but it is another exception which proves the rule. One thing I did in that earlier article was to cite Cyrus H. Gordon’s observation that “Hebrew history dawned in a partially Indo-Europeanized Palestine.” So, yes, technically not quite in Europe, but right outside it and in an Indo-European environment. Subsequent Jewish history was also heavily defined by European (notably, Greek) influences.

Likewise, it remains disputed where Europe’s eastern border should be drawn, and thus whether Armenia and Georgia are part of the continent. The prevailing view is that they are not. Still, I would count Armenians and Georgians as European or “white.” It is hardly necessary to argue that these peoples are culturally European. And judging by Freedom House’s ranking, their politics are far more European than Russia’s.

The currently predominant notion seems to be that the proto-Indo-Europeans lived in modern-day Ukraine and southwestern Russia. Under this theory, the Proto-Indo-Europeans were themselves from Europe, which would make them “white” in the sense in which this essay has used that term. Now, Iranians, Kurds, Indians, and so forth are all partially Indo-European, by culture as well as by descent. So are they, therefore, white? I would say, partly. And I see nothing wrong with that answer.

Having read Winegard’s first essay, I was somewhat fascinated by the concept of “white identity,” so I decided to write this article. Yet I also do not consider it an overwhelmingly important concept. There are substantial differences between more narrowly defined ethnic groups as well. As I contended in a previous essay, interethnic marriage is suboptimal even within racial groups. In my ideal world, each population would reproduce at or above the replacement level, and each country would preserve its core ethnicity, insofar as it had one. Singaporeans would not immigrate to England, but neither would Swedes.

Finally, it is worth addressing a possible objection. “White” has been treated here as a sort of umbrella ethnic category, but one whose significance stems mainly from the cultural heritage of the ethnicities included. It could be argued that this is overly different from the term’s normal usage, which seems to stress the racial aspect of biological relatedness. Yet these things are not mutually exclusive; a term can refer to both at the same time. As argued by Pierre van den Berghe and J. Philippe Rushton among other scholars, people are naturally inclined to cooperate with their biological relatives, and that includes ethnic kin. But in the complicated human construct we call “ethnicity,” common descent and genetic relatedness interact with shared culture in endlessly complex ways. It is not abnormal for shared descent and shared culture to be mashed together; it is usual. Such is the way of the world.

Simon Maass holds a degree in International Relations. His writings on politics, art, and history have appeared in Providence, Cultural Revue, Redaction Report, Intellectual Conservative, the Independent Sentinel, the Cleveland Review of Books, and other publications. He also has a collection of poetry, Classic-Romantic: A Pamphlet of Verse, and writes on his own blog Shimmer Analysis.

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