[idroveatrain]

Is "white" really even a race? There's a lot of distinct people in Europe. Are Spaniards, Portugese, Italians "white" are Slavs "white"? Scottish or Irish? Germans? Where do we draw the line of distinction? Or are we just going off skin color?

[spacechild1]

Actually, there is no such thing as human races from a scientific perspective. Applying the biological concept of race to humans is already racist.

FWIW, here in Germany/Austria the word “race“ (= “Rasse“) is more or less taboo and you would get strange looks asking someone about their race. It always bewilders me how the concept of race is still a thing in the US when it's really just about skin color.

[finfinfin]

Unfortunately this aspect is missing from the discussions about race in the US. You can be born and raised in a poor family in Italy but after moving to the US you will be immediately recognized as a privileged white oppressor.

[marton78]

White in this context follows the definition on the US census

[skissane]

I'm not sure it actually does.

Officially the US census defines "White" as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa" [0]

However, the "Middle East, or North Africa" part seems rather disputed in American culture. Some Americans are happy to view the Middle Eastern and North African people (MENA for short) as "White", and some MENA Americans are happy to identify as "White". Other Americans disagree that MENA people count as "White", and some MENA Americans disagree with the application of the "White" label to themselves. [1]

The US Census Bureau proposed to add a separate MENA racial category to the 2020 US Census, [2] but later dropped the proposal, allegedly due to political pressure from the Trump administration [3]

Another issue is the status of Hispanic people. Approximately 65% of all Hispanic/Latino people in the US identify as "White" (that's what they put down on their Census forms), but I know from discussions I've had with Americans on this topic that some of them don't actually perceive "White"-identified Hispanic/Latino people as "White". And many US sources, e.g [4], claim that the US will become "minority white" around 2045; that is only true if one excludes "White Hispanics" from the category "White" – if one includes "White Hispanics" as "White", the US will likely still be majority "White" by the end of this century – but this just shows how even in official contexts "White Hispanics" are often not considered "really White".

Many other countries sidestep these kinds of issues by officially avoiding putting people into broad racial categories, and focusing instead on narrower ethnicity/nationality/ancestry categories (Nigerian, Mexican, Argentine, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Iranian, Indian, Arab, Jewish, Kurdish, Tibetan, etc). But, viewing human diversity as coarse rather than fine-grained groups is deeply entrenched in American culture, and seems in the last few years to have become even more emphasised than it was in the past, so it appears unlikely that America will follow the example of any of these other countries any time soon.

[0] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html

[1] https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-census-middle-east-no...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/03/11/519548276...

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/1/why-is-there-no-mena...

[4] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-...