6,078 articles
White Night riots
White Night riots: May 21, 1979 San Francisco unrest after Dan White's voluntary manslaughter verdict for killing Harvey Milk and George Moscone; Castro march on City Hall, police retaliation, and lasting LGBTQ political impact.
White people
White people: a socially defined racial category used in law and censuses, historically tied to US naturalization law from 1790, with boundaries that vary by country and lack biological validity per National Academies genetics findings.
White pride
White pride is a slogan used predominantly by white supremacist and white nationalist groups, tied to the Klan, Christian Identity, and neo-Nazi movements, and to slogans like the 14 Words, White Lives Matter, and It's okay to be white.
White privilege
White privilege: unearned social and institutional advantages held by white people in racially stratified societies. Popularized by Peggy McIntosh's 1988 Wellesley paper, anticipated by Du Bois's 1935 "psychological wage"; studied empirically and contested politically.
White savior
White savior (white saviour): a white person cast as heroic rescuer of non-white people, criticized in film, humanitarian aid, and development studies; theorized by Teju Cole as the White-Savior Industrial Complex (2012).
White South Africans
White South Africans are South Africans of primarily European descent, mainly Afrikaners (about 2.7 million, Afrikaans-speaking) and English speakers, about 4.5 million people or 7.3% of the 2022 census population, declining from 11% in 1996.
White supremacy
White supremacy: the belief in white racial superiority and the systems built on it, from colonial slave codes, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and apartheid to modern alt-right and white nationalist movements and hate-crime trends.
White Supremacy Culture
White Supremacy Culture is Tema Okun's 1999 essay, updated in 2021, listing 15 organizational characteristics such as perfectionism, urgency, and objectivity that it argues reproduce white supremacy in institutions.
White supremacy in the United States
White supremacy in the United States is the ideology of white superiority and its supporting institutions, traced from the 1790 Naturalization Act through Reconstruction, the Klan, Jim Crow, and modern extremist violence.
White trash
White trash is a derogatory American term for poor, low-status white people, first recorded in the South in the early 1820s, considered an offensive slur.
White Zimbabweans
White Zimbabweans: Zimbabweans of European ethnic origin, formerly Rhodesia's settler minority. Settled 1890s, ruled until 1980, 28,732 counted in 2012, ~4,000 farmers lost land in 2000 reforms, compensation announced 2024.
White's
White's is London's oldest gentlemen's club, founded in 1693 at 37 St James's Street. A men-only, Grade I listed aristocratic institution famous for its historic betting book, closed waiting list, and royal members.
Whiteness studies
Whiteness studies: interdisciplinary field, from the late 1980s and 1990s, examining white racial identity as a social construction, white privilege, and whiteness's role in reproducing racism; includes critiques, historiography, and later quantitative and health research.
Whitney Houston memorial service
Whitney Houston memorial service: private invitation-only homegoing funeral, February 18, 2012, New Hope Baptist Church, Newark, about 1,500 attendees, streamed by AP, burial February 19 at Fairview Cemetery, Westfield.
Whitney Young
Whitney M. Young Jr. (1921-1971), American social worker and civil rights leader, headed the National Urban League 1961-1971, joined the Big Six, proposed the Domestic Marshall Plan, and won the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Who is a Jew?
Who is a Jew? examines criteria for Jewish membership: halachic matrilineal descent and conversion, biblical patrilineal origins, Reform's 1983 patrilineal ruling, Israel's Law of Return, court cases, and survey evidence on Jewish identity as religion, ethnicity, and culture.
WHO-5 Well-Being Index
The WHO-5 Well-Being Index is a five-item World Health Organization questionnaire measuring psychological well-being over the previous two weeks, which also serves as a depression screening tool.
Wichita Confederacy
The Wichita Confederacy, self-named Kitikiti'sh, was a loose alliance of Caddoan-speaking Native American peoples of the Southern Plains whose descendants are the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma.
Widow
A widow is a woman whose spouse has died and not remarried; widower is the male term. Covers the widowhood effect on health and mortality, dower and inheritance law, cultural practices, and social protection gaps.
Wife
Wife: a woman who is a party to a marriage. Covers the common-law doctrine of coverture, married women's property acts, CEDAW equality standards, and survey data on wives' household roles and obligations.
Wife selling (English custom)
Wife selling, sometimes called the Smithfield bargain, was an English custom of the 1600s to 1800s in which husbands publicly auctioned wives as an informal divorce.
Wigger
Wigger is a pejorative American slang term, a contraction of "white nigger," for a white person, usually a young middle-class male, who adopts hip-hop speech, dress, and mannerisms; also spelled wigga, it peaked in the 1990s and 2000s.
Wikipedia community
Wikipedia community: the global body of volunteer editors (Wikipedians) who write and enforce policies on Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation has no editorial role; governance is consensus-based peer governance under a Universal Code of Conduct.
Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon
The Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon, also called the Philosophy Game, is a pattern where first hyperlinks in English Wikipedia articles loop at the "Philosophy" article, popularized by a 2011 xkcd webcomic.
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), Austrian psychoanalyst and physician, Freud pupil, creator of character analysis and vegetotherapy, sex-pol activist, and originator of the pseudoscientific orgone energy theory and orgone accumulator, died in US federal prison after an FDA case.
Wilkomirski syndrome
Wilkomirski syndrome names the uncritical acceptance of fabricated victim testimony, from the 1995 fraudulent Holocaust memoir Fragments by Bruno Dössekker (Binjamin Wilkomirski), exposed in 1998 and investigated by Stefan Mächler.
Will Stancil
Will Stancil, or William Stancil, is an American attorney and housing policy researcher at the University of Minnesota, a 2024 DFL legislative candidate known for prolific posting on Twitter/X.
William Jefferson Blythe Jr.
William Jefferson Blythe Jr. (also printed as Blythe III), 1918–1946, American traveling salesman, first husband of Virginia Dell Cassidy and father of Bill Clinton; died in a May 18, 1946 car accident near Sikeston, Missouri, three months before his son's birth.
William Joseph Simmons
William Joseph Simmons was an American minister who founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915. He led the organization as its Imperial Wizard until 1922.
William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) was the leading American abolitionist editor who founded The Liberator in 1831, led the American Anti-Slavery Society, demanded immediate emancipation through moral suasion, denounced the Constitution as proslavery, and closed his paper after the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.