Did you know that white people didn’t exist as a race until 1681? Before that, Europeans never saw themselves as “white.” The concept of whiteness was created in colonial America to divide laborers, grant privileges to some, and deny freedom to others. This video explains how the British ruling class built “white identity” as a legal and political tool to separate poor Europeans from enslaved Africans. In 1790, the first U.S. Congress even declared that only white people could become citizens—a