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That's a retrospective categorization that people living in those historical eras might have accepted as descriptive, but wouldn't have felt was particularly accurate. Imagine if someone from 2060 zapped in and started talking about the importance of being a microsoft windows culture and how the decline of america was due to ios and android destroying traditional microsoft-linux values. Even if their argument convinced you, you still probably wouldn't see your OS affiliation as being central to your identity, and you still wouldn't be convinced to create systems of mutual support and intermarriage within your OS denomination.
But what do I know. Maybe you're an Arch Linux user.
One of the very first laws in the history of US Congress was limiting citizenship to "free White persons of good character", and as late as 1923 there was Supreme Court decision which declared a high-caste Indian who identified as Aryan could not attain citizenship because he was not white.
You have fallen for the intentional lie that White is a non-existent or retrospective categorization. It was the most important racial categorization constructed into the very foundation of the country, and consistently so throughout its history for hundreds of years. "This is what they took from us" indeed. It was coldly-calculated, planned, intentional to do so.
"White" is not the same thing as "European Descended". And as stated, your argument used the latter and not the former. And that's because White is a non-existent categorization, or at least, it's a fuzzy one, like "red" or "blue" or "heap". If european descent was what mattered, you'd think people would care about either defining an exact threshold at which it becomes meaningful or disambiguating between the relative amount of time ethnic groups have spent in europe. But no one cares about the relative admixture of neolithic DNA or about creating a specific hierarchy of european descent based on how late or recent one's ancestors migration into europe is. The main determinant is literally aesthetic. Whiteness itself was the intentional lie-- a deception against the anglo-french-dutch settlers of north america intended to convince them to expand their circle of concern to include first each other and then traditionally dissimilar groups like the italians, polish, and germans. It's a lie I have some sympathy for, of course. Creating new national identities that concentrically include the old ones is the only way for an expanding empire to survive. But there's nothing special about "whiteness" relative to "americanness" or "being-from-a-particular-part-of-Britain."
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