What it’s like to live in countries with highest white population as a non-white person? Do residents of these countries show tolerance towards their non-white fellow citizens? Is white population on the decline in these countries? Do governments encourage the inclusion of non-white population into society? These are some questions we will try to answer as we present you countries that have ranked as the whitest in the world.
Overall taken, whites are still privileged – they are richer, have better access to education, job market, and health care compared to other races. Still, individual differences between countries regarding racial tolerance aren’t negligible. While in some countries whites believe in a society that is built upon the principle of equality, in others racial incidents, even in parliament, are almost part of everyday life.
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While ranking countries by whiteness, we had a similar problem as when we created the list 11 countries with highest black population outside Africa. What do terms “white” and “white population” mean, or more precisely, who identifies as white? US Census Bureau defines white as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa”. However, this definition might change very soon, as organizations that represent people from the Middle East and South Africa emphasize that people they are representing can’t identify with the label white. For this reason, we didn’t include countries from the Middle East on this list, although, if we followed Census Bureau’s definition, Iran would found a place.
To create the list of countries with highest white population we used multiple sources. While census in countries like the US includes questions about respondent’s race, most European countries don’t collect data on its citizens’ racial identity. So we relied on CIA Factbook, which gives an ethnic profile of all countries in the world. For instance, Factbook describes the population of Poland in the following way: “Polish 96.9%, Silesian 1.1%, German 0.2%, Ukrainian 0.1%, other and unspecified 1.7%”. To estimate the number of white residents we summed up percents of white ethnical group and got the number of around 38 million. Additionally, we used other rough estimation we could find. Besides the number of white residents, we also look into racial tolerance in this countries using as a source European Value Survey (EVS), World Value Survey 2005-2009 (WVS 2005-2009) and World Value Survey 2010-2014 (WVS 2010-2014).
