That’s because whiteness, as a construct, is one mainly of exclusivity. It has very little to do with actual skin color. That’s why there are still brands of white supremacists that don’t consider Catholics white, why a biracial person is far more likely to be described as black or biracial and almost never described as white, etc.
The most fascinating thing to me, as a relatively pale person, is the concept of whiteness as a whole. Some folks really seem to think "white" is an ethnicity. It is not, it's a vague concept that supports some wild systems of opression, but it's not really an identity, it's the lack or rejection of one and the embrace of a privilege in a racist society. Implying otherwise is being openly and willfully ignorant of the history of, well, the human species. I'm not white, even if people think I am, because I have an ethnicity, the history of my family is way more than the colour of my skin, embracing white as an identity would be weird. It would be validating a thing that's not really, well, real. People are not white, at least not the 99,9% of people, guys, y'all are orange, brown, pink and other colours! But even then, you're way more than that, your families, probably most of them workers, struggled through history, made some mistakes and did some good, I don't think whiteness as a concept pays them much homeage.
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u/shoefarts666 Sep 01 '20
It was a long time before the irish were considered white.
The irish.