Technically, "white" people only exist in America. The usage of the term "white" in America started out to mean you weren't "black" (i.e. one of the nigger monkeys from Africa) and even sometimes got applied to the Mongoloid settlers of the Americas and Jews. Later on since the European stock of the United States began to be genetically mixed and culturally homogeneous, the term "white" started to be used to refer to people of European descent, most of which were all mixed up at this point but even if you were a pure bred German, Finn, etc.