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Notes -
I think in the context of American race politics, both "Black" and "White" are normally used to refer to specific ethnic groups, and are therefore correctly capitalised. American Blacks are definitely an ethnic group - they have a distinct identity and their ancestors have been in America and mostly endogamous since 1808. American Whites' status as an ethnic group is less clear - their distinct identity (as White, rather than the various European nationalities their ancestors came from) comes from an artificial project designed to hold the Democrat's corrupt bargain between northern "white ethnics" and southern racists together, and they weren't meaningfully endogamous until the taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage weakened after WW2. But the Democrats' racist project was successful, and in the current year "White American" is an ethnic group and American White nationalists (and Black nationalists) are bad people, but intellectually coherent.
Applying the American ideas of Black and White to the rest of the world makes you stupid - outside American there are black people and white people (based on broad racial characteristics, and not capitalised because the words are purely descriptive like "short" and "big-nosed") but neither is an ethnic group. For a European to be a White nationalist is not even wrong - there is no White nation over here.
You are, if anything, understating thé taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage; before WWII different kinds of ethnic Catholics wouldn’t marry other ethnicities of Catholic. But it’s also more or less true that red tribe whites are functionally an ethnicity these days, and this is what ‘white’ as an ethnic group normally refers to(because it is the majority, and often a large majority, of the white population outside of New England).
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