[archagon]

As a Russian person, my cultural heritage is Slavic, not "white". Ignoring skin tone, I’m not sure what my Slavic background has in common with — for instance — Italian or Irish culture. In fact, Italians, Irish, and Russians would not have been considered fully white in America during various parts of the last century.

The notion of a "white race" is a recent invention borne of slavery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people

What are your cultural traditions? How much do they overlap with mine as a fellow "white" person?

[dqv]

> As a Russian person, my cultural heritage is Slavic, not "white". Ignoring skin tone, I’m not sure what my Slavic background has in common with — for instance — Italian or Irish culture. In fact, Italians, Irish, and Russians would not have been considered fully white in America during various parts of the last century.

Well, yes. If you weren't dispossessed of your culture generations ago, then you won't identify with a grouping of people who were dispossessed of theirs in service to the idea of "whiteness".

You are caught up in the racial definition of whiteness, but I'm talking about culture. For the same reason a Ghanaian expat isn't black, neither would you be white. There is a reason many black Americans reject the term "African-American": it makes no sense - they were systemically dispossessed of their African roots generations ago.

> The notion of a "white race" is a recent invention borne of slavery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people

Yes, we know. I am specifically talking about the resultant culture that derived from this invention. If you can understand that black culture developed out of this invention through racist policy, then it should be possible to understand how this artificial separation did the same to white people.

> What are your cultural traditions? How much do they overlap with mine as a fellow "white" person?

What are my cultural traditions? I don't have a complete answer to that. We don't exactly have a "whiteness studies" major at colleges, and I wouldn't want one without serious and thoughtful consultation with the groups of people hurt by colonization.

To study even part of a culture is lifelong work. It took black academics decades to create a complete definition of racism as we know it today. And many more decades to describe black culture, which still hasn't been fully mapped out. To untangle what white culture is and what it isn't will also take many decades.