I'm doing some quick searching with calibre and he asserts in the intro that the idea began after Bacon's Rebellion which was 1676-ish.

Moreover, the colonial project unfolded alongside a kind of Cold War between Catholics and Protestants13 (studded with the periodic equivalent of a kind of “Sino-Soviet” split that from time to time disunited Madrid and Paris). The chaos of colonialism combined with this defining religious rift ironically created leverage for Africans as they could tip the balance against one European power by aligning with another—or with the indigenous. Then there was the developing notion of “whiteness,” smoothing tensions between and among people hailing from the “old” continent, which was propelled by the need for European unity to confront raging Africans and indigenes: this, inter alia, served to unite settlers in North America with what otherwise might have been their French and Spanish antagonists, laying the basis for a kind of democratic advance, as represented in the freedom of religion in the emergent U.S. Constitution. Surely, the uniting of Europeans from varying ethnicities under the umbrella of “whiteness” broadened immeasurably the anti-London project, with a handsome payoff delivered to many of the anti-colonial participants in the form of land that once was controlled by the indigenous, often stocked with enslaved Africans—not to mention a modicum of civil rights denied to those who were not defined as “white.” Ironically, the founders of the republic have been hailed and lionized by left, right, and center for—in effect—creating the first apartheid state.

The famed “Bacon’s Rebellion” has been described as a civil war as much as an insurrection spearheaded by servants—there were about two thousand slaves and six thousand servants in the colony’s forty-thousand-strong population, as tabulated: the indigenous population also has to be accounted for when assessing the balance of class and racial forces. The growth in the population of enslaved Africans—their numbers reputedly tripled between 1680 and 1690—happened to occur as the more encompassing category of “whiteness” ascended 89 and, perhaps, as a result of this abortive revolt. This rebellion—according to a recent study—illustrates the illiberality of the settlers, making it difficult to swallow wholly the progressiveness of their revolt against London a scant century later: for, it is reported, driving this rebellion was a settler desire to enforce a quicker extermination of the indigenous, which was thought to be resisted by London’s delegates. After this revolt, religion and “race”—which pointedly excluded Africans—helped to bond the colonial elite and European servants 90

89. Sharples, “Flames of Insurrection,” 62, 140. See also Strange News from Virginia; Being a Full and True Account of the Life and Death of Nathaniel Bacon, London: Harris, 1677, Huntington Library; “Mss. on Negroes, Slaves, etc. Together with Some Papers on Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion,” Folder 183, Daniel Parish Slavery Transcripts; Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, 133: “After the rebellion’s conclusion, Anglo-Virginian planters emphasized whiteness and Christianity as the two bonds that held English people together against Indians who threatened from without and enslaved people who threatened from within.”

90. James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.`

If I go searching for "white" there's quite a bit to go through. And I don't have that kind of time right now, but I do plan on trying to give this a reread with the intention of finding meme-able content.🤞