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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Republicans are 'wannabe' whites, Democrats are 'wannabe' POC

Inspired by @ymeskhout 's thread below

The culture war in America is less religious, or even strictly ethnic, and more about whether a given group ‘identifies’ as white.

In America the GOP is the white party. That doesn’t mean it’s actually the ‘white party’ in some absolute anthropological sense, it’s entirely possible that largely native third-generation Central Americans might one day ‘identify as’ huwhite for the purposes of political alignment (cf Amerimutt memes). But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish, Italian, Cuban, Mayan, WASP, Jewish, Armenian or whatever else. Even black Republicans, even if they won’t overtly admit it, identify as white; Tim Scott was effectively raised by a neighborhood white businessman who owned the local Chick-fil-A franchise, Candace Owens is married to an English hedge fund manager and son of a peer, Clarence Thomas has a white wife etc. In several generations the modal black Republican with a white spouse will have white descendants.

Conversely, white progressives, even if they are literally as Nordic huwhite as it is possible to be under a Madison Grant-esque racial designation from 1890, do not ‘identify as’ white. Sure, they’ll tick white on a checkbox so they don’t get made fun of, Rachel Dolezal style, by their peers, but in the traditional, tribal sense they aren’t white. As the famous chart shows, white progressives are the only demographic in the entire western world (possibly the entire world) with out-group bias. Even if they would never admit it, they are transracial. Some part of Robin DiAngelo believes that, even if she knows she isn’t ‘black’ per se, she is on the PoC team in a tribal sense, just like Candace Owens, in marrying an Englishman, has declared her lineage to be ‘white’.

My grandfather, born in the 1920s, would never describe himself as a Jew, even though he, his parents, his wife, his children and (some of) his grandchildren were of course Jews. He would only describe himself as a “man of the Jewish religion”. He was a socialist in his youth, then became a Republican in the 50s and, in his final years on this earth, a devout Trump supporter. Before 9/11, when as is often stated, Muslims voted largely for the GOP (and pre-9/11 American Muslims were more Levantine/North African than they are today), they too identified as ‘white’, like my grandfather.

The political division in the US is and will remain between groups who ‘identify as’ white and those who do not, regardless of their actual ethnic origin. Religion won’t really come into it.

I am not so sure if it is simply a binary of "White" vs "Non-White".

I believe this is more akin to a Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe scuffle, as Scott commonly mentions. It is more of difference in which "type" of White person one is. Red Tribers, especially White Red Tribers, are depicted as having higher in-group biases shown through racism and discrimination, along with a host of other traits ascribed to your typical "back-country, red-neck" Republican. On the other hand, Blue Tribers are depicted conversely as understanding the history of racism and discrimination, and are accommodating in terms of cultural and ethnic acceptance, often to the point of their own self-detriment. These stereotypes are reified both in the media and in daily conversations, if one notices the subtle undertones of many people's speech.

While they may be just stereotypes, they still do have real cultural foundations and implications. An aversion towards racism, whether it be innate or learned, could steer White people towards the Blue Tribe because of these archetypes. Personally, I have witnessed in many peers and friends, either through direct mention of the unsavory stereotypes towards White Republicans, or through indirect methods such as jokes or sarcasm. This is used as a device to increase their status by showing moral superiority over the ignorant White Republicans/Red Tribers. A gander at current media and their attitudes towards Red Tribers should make it obvious that it is a low status identity, in certain areas at least.

This desire to gain status ultimately drives the now Blue Tribe members to convey values or even culture converse to the Red Tribers, effectively showing their membership to the group. However, much of culture ascribed to Red Tribers is traditional "White Culture". Whether it be Country music, Christianity, Meritocracy, and various forms of art, these cultural identifies must be rejected to not be mistaken as a Red Triber. Other cultural ideas must be used instead, especially those without the baggage of Colonialism, slavery, or other discrimination. Consequently, by identifying and pursing these cultural ideas and values leads the Blue Triber to feel closer to Non-Whites, since to the Blue Triber culture is a much stronger glue than race.

Another angle is that the moral significance of being White may be too much for some Blue Tribers to bear. Books such as "White Fragility" state that racism is the White man's original sin, unable to be saved from. The White Blue Triber may attempt to relieve some of the pent up guilt by loosening attachment to White culture.

The last angle I can think of comes from the stereotype that White people are uncool. This theory goes along with the first as they both use status to explain the repulsion from the White identity. In popular media, White people have been portrayed as less cool than their melanated brethren. An explain could be the reaction to White rappers, where many were said to be "corny". That is changing in the current atmosphere, but some of the sentiment is still alive. This reaction to the perceived lack of coolness from Whites could explain the motivations of the less politically active segment of Blue Tribers who are less likely to identify with their ethnicity.

On the other hand, this schism in White identity sort of strengthens the Red Tribers perceived Whiteness. A common theme among White Republican, whether view from the lens of someone like Trump or even red-necks, is the rejection of what the mainstreams prescribes for polite society and replacing it with a rebellion from those values. The sentiment, "You can't tell me what to do!" and then doing the action, even to self-detriment, encapsulates this phenomena. In the face of being told they are wrong, they do the opposite, many times in accordance to their in-group, as seem with "ugly" fashion styles such as mullets, camo, or even raised pick-ups. If sufficient push is given, many Red Tribers are likely to have this approach to race and become more White-centric.

TLDR:

White Liberals are trying to either:

  1. Gain status from identifying opposite of White Republicans.

  2. Escape the perceived shame and guilt from being White that surrounds racial politics.

  3. Gain status from popularity, or from being seen as cool.

White Conservatives may form more White identity to gain status from their in-group, which sometimes defines itself counter to the prevalent liberal norms.

I don’t think this is true. The basic thesis of Anglo sphere conservatism is that if you(individual) make good decisions, you’ll(individual) have good outcomes. Wokes declaring whiteness the devil is just them realizing that by describing whiteness they’ve described what their political opponents think is best for everybody.

I was in policy debate before woke declared whiteness axiomatically evil, I remember this. I mean I still thought it was offensive in a particularly retarded way, but I saw this shit forming and ‘evil whities’ was a later import.

But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish, Italian, Cuban, Mayan, WASP, Jewish, Armenian or whatever else.

How do you disentangle self-identification from social treatment? Do people come to believe they are white and so vote Republican, or are they treated as whites and so believe their interests are served by the same party as white people? My sense is that back when there was more discrimination against Italians and the Irish they formed distinct voting blocs and now they mostly vote according to age, educational characteristics and urban/rural split. Is this a product of Irish people self-identifying as white, or is it a product of society treating them differently as they assimilated?

Scotts-Irish & Italians are European descended and assimilated a generation or more ago. Cubans in general are 72% European descended and the upper class fleeing a communist revolution is probably more European descended than average. Vietnamese are also refugees from a Communist revolution and they are the only Republican-leaning asian ethnicity despite not being white. Jews may be white but they don't vote Republican, I couldn't find polling on how Armenian descended Americans vote.

Age, educational attainment and evangelical Christianity are big drivers of Republican voting even among Asian and Hispanic voters. I would chalk this up to the salience of various identities rising and falling rather than transracial identification. It's not that they identify as white and vote for white interests, it's that they identify as evangelicals, small business owners, or cultural traditionalists and vote accordingly.

I wouldn't say that the GOP is so much the "white" party as the "settler" party. This is to say that if your ancestors were around to fight the Civil War on either side, you're a lot more likely to vote GOP. One could argue that this is a distinction without a difference (and I believe that liberals mean "settlers" when they think of "white", and that settlers are most strongly conflated with Southerners because they most strongly embraced that identity/were late to urbanize) given that the settlers were white and that Yankee descendants of settlers are well represented in the liberal camp, but roughly speaking I suspect that this is A. true, and B. most of the culture war in American today, aka. a contest between two blocs of whites with highly divergent views as to what the founding was and what the country should aspire to in the present. White liberals are a minority of white Americans, but white settlers struggle to gain support of non-whites. Hispanic Americans can be either one (given that most are descended from both natives and white settlers), and the black American experience can likewise be viewed from either lens. The latter is especially true given that in the liberal north/west, black Americans arguably were immigrants, with mostly black Southerners having served as a substitute for immigrants from the 1920s-1960s (The white Southern Great Migrants were more likely to move west, as settlers.).

Conveniently, this is something agreed upon by both the woke left and paleoconservative right, the only bone of contention being whether the settlers were good or bad/whether they have a unique claim of ownership upon America and what it means to be an American, and perhaps a secondary front concerning which groups of Ellis Islanders have more room to claim credit for civil rights or dodge guilt concerning the white supremacy question. Broadly speaking, "but my ancestors were Irish or Italian, not those damned Southerners" doesn't count for much these days, and being Jewish comes with more flexibility in that regard.

White descendants of settlers (This is something of a choice of identity, most strongly espoused by those white Americans who put their ethnicity as "American" on the census.) would be the ones who don't share negative in-group bias with white liberals. Much of their gnashing of teeth as of late has come from the belated realization on their part that they themselves are a minority among the American populace (albeit the largest plurality), and while the white settler ethos has historically had high capacity to assimilate non-English settlers (see the Germans of Cullman, Alabama ) this ability has declined along with rural America's cultural power. While not all descendants of settlers are rural/exurban/suburban, the more rural in America one goes the more likely it is that the entire population consists of settlers (some of them of Mexican descent in places like rural Texas). Given their limited ability to court outsiders into their coalition, their future consists of being the largest but continually shrinking plurality with limited elite patronage and ever-growing political irrelevance.

They (and Republican Party officials, stuck with being the settler party in most of the country whether they like it or not) may cope about Hispanics turning right, or even more fantastically toward the prospect of flipping the black vote, but I have my doubts. The GOP may convert enough settler-adjacent Hispanics in places like Texas along with Cubans in Florida to hang on in those states, but results elsewhere (the west coast and southwest in particular) have been discouraging. It's very hard to assimilate new voters into your party when it doesn't even win with the local whites, and the GOP's high water mark with the Hispanic vote, W '04, was still a 9 point loss. Other relatively pro-immigration Republican tickets fared even worse, as did Bush in 2000. Reagan '84 lost Hispanics by 32 points and Bush '88 by 40. Trump 2020 was the usual over 30 point loss.

Relating to your frame of identifying as white, the number of Hispanics and Asians who identify as white (the latter likely for college admissions purposes) will be outnumbered by the number of mostly white Americans who discover some non-white heritage, and the latter will be wealthier and more important than the former.

I think the settler and immigrant distinction is still not precise enough in this instance. The descendants of New England Puritans and of Southern Cavaliers have been on opposite sides of pretty much every single political dispute in this country since its founding, which splits the settler population right down the middle. White immigrant groups are also split between those that embrace a liberal, socialist ethos (e.g. Scandinavians in the upper Midwest) and those more amenable to conservatism (e.g. the more devout Catholics among the Irish, Italian, Polish, and most recently Cubans and other white Hispanics).

As the famous chart shows, white progressives are the only demographic in the entire western world (possibly the entire world) with out-group bias.

This has always struck me as heroically missing the point. white progressives are simply prioritizing the progressive identity over the white identity. White progressives are the only group whose co-ethnics are more-likely-than-not to have voted differently from them in the 2020 election. Every other ethnic group is most likely to find someone who shares their political beliefs by finding someone who shares their skin color, except white progressives.

We can argue chicken or the egg about it, I guess. But it seems like the skin color bias is downstream from the politics, that the ethnic nationalism game is a card trick to try to cover up the far more important economic/religious/political/cultural lines at play here. A white Biden-Voter walking down the street in a purple state who sees a white person and a black person, all else being equal, the black person is more likely to have voted the same way in the 2020 election. A white Trump-Voter, walking down the street will obviously be more likely to find someone who voted the same way by picking the white person.

Which brings up the obvious failing of the "famous chart;" THEY DIDN'T BREAK DOWN OTHER ETHNICITIES BY POLITICAL PERSUASION. So when we get the take over and over that "White Liberals are the only group, maybe in all of human history, to prefer their out-group..."; well yeah, we didn't fucking check the other groups.

How did Asian conservatives do? A lot of Asian liberals, both at home and abroad in places like Singapore, will accuse Asian conservatives of White-Worship. How do our Uncle Toms view their own race versus whites? If we break out Hispanic Republicans from the group, are we just getting white Hispanic immigrants who hated blacks in Cuba and Venezuela before moving to America and keeping right on hating them? Hispanics almost universally come from countries with racial politics that, besides a sometimes larger admixture of indigenous bloodlines, more or less exactly resemble the USA, only to be amalgamated from David Ortiz to Messi as "Hispanic."

I strongly predict that subsets of ethnic groups that vote against the majority of their ethnic group will all show the same "out-group bias" that is seen as such a shocking fact of American liberalism.

For Hispanics specifically, Hispanics and red tribers get along quite well culturally and it’s extremely plausible that your local Mexican prefers pickup truck driving gringos to same ethnicity Hispanics(the Mexican/Caribbean vs centraco feud is near-legendary) with Priuses(I guess that’s teslas now, but whatever), even when they vote differently.

Large percentages of the Hispanic population, when they assimilate, assimilate into red tribe culture. It’s very probable that their children will eventually start voting like it.

Every other ethnic group is most likely to find someone who shares their political beliefs by finding someone who shares their skin color, except white progressives.

This isn't true. What about black trump supporters? For every ethnic group it is true that if you choose the minority political orientation for that group members of the intersection of the ethnic group and minority political orientation wil be more likely to find people politically aligned with them in other ethnic groups.

White progressives are the only group whose co-ethnics are more-likely-than-not to have voted differently from them in the 2020 election. Every other ethnic group is most likely to find someone who shares their political beliefs by finding someone who shares their skin color, except white progressives.

I'm very confused. You can't say "every other racial group" when talking about white progressives (who are not a racial group). Otherwise I can say this:

White progressives Black conservatives are the only group whose co-ethnics are more-likely-than-not to have voted differently from them in the 2020 election. Every other ethnic group is most likely to find someone who shares their political beliefs by finding someone who shares their skin color, except white progressives black conservatives.

You're making hay over a semantic difference but my reading is that FiveHourMarathon is predicting your second paragraph is true. The point is that they didn't split up black liberals and black conservatives on the ingroup/outgroup preference test. We don't know if black conservatives might exhibit anti-black sentiment against those still trapped on the "Democrat plantations" and a pro-white outgroup bias because the authors didn't test for that.

This framing describes pretty well how many American liberals see things, but my understanding of the conservative point of view is that the division is between those who wish to be "colorblind" and resent being categorized in racial terms at all, and those who embrace racial identity politics as a way to gain power. To them, what the woke left would call "white" characteristics are simply aspects of American culture that do not belong to any particular race. This is of course different from the typical dissident right/white nationalist framing, which is to just take the woke liberal framing, invert it, and make it even more restrictive.

In America the GOP is the white party ... But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white,

Dunno about that. Most white nationalists/strongly identified white people I know consider the Republican party as too philosemitic to be the party for Whites.

it’s entirely possible that largely native third-generation Central Americans might one day ‘identify as’ huwhite for the purposes of political alignment

Yeah, but they won't be White.

But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish,

White.

Italian

White

Cuban, Mayan,

Not White.

WASP

White!

Jewish, Armenian

Not White.

or whatever else.

White means European derived people. Everyone knows what it means. It doesn't matter if you identify as being European derived if you aren't. You won't be white.

Tim Scott was effectively raised by a neighborhood white businessman who owned the local Chick-fil-A franchise, Candace Owens is married to an English hedge fund manager and son of a peer, Clarence Thomas has a white wife etc

If your ancestry can be (reasonably recently) traced to a black person, you aren't White.

Conversely, white progressives, even if they are literally as Nordic huwhite as it is possible to be under a Madison Grant-esque racial designation from 1890, do not ‘identify as’ white.

Well, they are.

My grandfather, born in the 1920s, would never describe himself as a Jew

Well, he is.

Muslims voted largely for the GOP (and pre-9/11 American Muslims were more Levantine/North African than they are today), they too identified as ‘white’, like my grandfather.

That was a misleading lie. They aren't white. It's a shame people feel the need to lie on census forms.

Man, I could do this all day. White: Overwhelmingly genotypically European, overwhelmingly phenotypically European. Everyone else ain't it.

This is low effort, consensus-enforcing, and a bit antagonistic. Don't post like this.

Cuban

Not White.

Ok, so I understand the rest of these. I disagree with some of them, but I understand.

But do you think people born in a place colonized by the Spanish won't have a bunch of European genes floating around in their system?

Pretty much everyone who hasn't specifically convinced themselves otherwise is going to look at, say, Mark Zuckerberg and go "he's white" on the basis of a basic "just look at that guy" test.

Also, even elsewhere within my example, there are plenty of unambiguously white Cubans.

So, as one of the most vocally white-identitarian (I don’t use the self-descriptor “white nationalist”) posters here, you might imagine that I agree with your simple “white=European ancestry” model, but I actually believe it’s woefully limited and does not capture the complexities of the world as it is rapidly becoming.

I have laid out my expansive concentric-circles model of whiteness before, and as far as I’m concerned, several of the groups you ruled out as absolutely-not-white are, in actuality, either already white - at least conditionally/contextually so - or are approaching the transition to whiteness.

For example, you state definitively that both Jews and Armenians are non-white, but I don’t think that actually captures the way that the vast majority of Jews and Armenians are perceived. After all, Scarlett Johansson is fully 50% Ashkenazi, and it’s the correct (maternal) half to be considered halachically Jewish. Not a single person on Earth does not believe that Scarlett Johansson is white. Johansson’s ancestry is fairly bog-standard for the Jewish diaspora, and as non-Orthodox non-Israeli Jews continue their massive levels of out-marriage, the gentile percentage of their ancestry will only continue to cascade upward until more and more Jews look every bit as pale and indistinguishable-from-gentiles as Scarlett Johansson does. Similarly, Shavo Odadjian, bassist for System Of A Down, is fully ethnically-Armenian and was born in Armenia, yet his skin and (beard) hair are lighter than mine!

I’m slightly more sympathetic toward your stance that someone cannot be white if they have a black ancestor - I’ve commented elsewhere on this site (it already took me forever to find my past comment that I linked to, and I’m not going to go searching again for this one) that the ultimate criterion for Whiteness in the future will be “people who have no significant African/Negrito ancestry” - but I do think you’re not taking seriously enough the complicated question of just how significant and how recent the black ancestry needs to be. For example, during the Obama presidency, amusing commentary was made about the fact that Obama was, contrary to popular perception, descended from at least one American slave, but it was through his white mother’s side! Apparently she had some black ancestor 150+ years back. Again, not a single person would clock her as anything but fully white, and this obscure revelation about her distant ancestor does absolutely nothing to change that.

So, given that basically everybody accepts that if the black ancestry is far enough back that your phenotype doesn’t show any signs of it - and after all, all of us have African ancestry if you go far enough back, assuming that the Out-Of-Africa theory is in fact true - at this point we’re haggling over the definition of how to define the cut-off. I can easily imagine a Castizo Futurism that embraces people with 25% black ancestry as white, provided that such an individual also accepts and embraces that identification. And such a model could even embrace people of 100% East Asian descent as white, like I did in my concentric-circles model. This model of whiteness might strike you as eccentric and far-fetched now, but you may want to consider that things might like very different in even less than a century.

If largely genotypically and phenotypically European counts as white then many Ashkenazi Jews are white unless you take a one-drop rule perspective for haplogroups.

It's rather weird that you can't decide whether a person is white or not just by looking at his photo. You need to know his genealogy in some cases, and it's not even about mixed race people. Muricans!

I fail to see what the galaxy-brained take here is. It's not wrong, but it's a repackage of two, not one, not three ideas that are already well established among those of us who observe the CW with a rationalist? lense.

  1. The famous bar chart.

  2. "White" is actually proxy for "Classical Liberalism" or more accurately "PoC" is proxy for Leftism && NOT ClassicalLiberalism. You need to get the sub/super sets right here.

    I have noted in the past that even though I am not white, I still have a vested interest that there not be any "white genocide or replacement or whatever". Because of the people who share my ideologies in the utility and superiority of free speech, free markets, or free anything at all && meritocracy, lack of identity politics, and rationalism; are all white.

    Now you take the complement of all of the beliefs I listed out you get wokism. It's adherents are not all PoC, but the adherents of its complement are practically all white. And since the woke really have a fetish for placing an infinite weightage on race as an attribute... you can see how the "white" vs "poc" distinction materializes.

The "Conservatives" who try to be more "white" are playing into the enemies framing and are idiots. But that's a different story, I think the ship of conservatives not being idiots in the CW or actually introducing their own framing/narratives has long sailed.

"White" is actually proxy for "Classical Liberalism" or more accurately "PoC" is proxy for Leftism && NOT ClassicalLiberalism. You need to get the sub/super sets right here.

The dominant "White"* political factions are religious conservatives and protectionists. "Classical liberals" (i.e. libertarians) are a rounding error in a breakdown of American political views.

*scare quotes are necessary because I think 2rafa's paradigm is wrong. Firstly because it places too much emphasis on "overly online" weirdos who are not representative of the average normie democrat (or republican) voter. Secondly because I think it overestimates the importance of White Identity to conservatives/Republicans (especially outside of the South). Most white Americans will affirm they are white if asked, but it doesn't really mean anything to them. Even fairly racist white people will generally balk at explicitly white nationalism/white supremacism and are more likely to resent being racialized than they are to embrace white identity. One could more appropriately call it a metropolitan/non-metropolitan division or a merchant/professional division.

Can you link to the famous bar chart.

Otherwise I agree with this.

I mean... maybe. But only because woke types have decided "Whiteness" has nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with encouraging pro social norms like stable marriages, property rights, staying healthy, rational thinking, etc. Which means "Blackness" is left representing anti-social norms that are being "oppressed" by causality "Whiteness".

When such a framing of race is being forced on the discourse from nearly all institutional mouthpieces, if you are still capable of forming a coherent thought in your head, it's probably gonna be "Well, I guess I want to be white then."

staying healthy

I need to nitpick this slightly, because I think the NYPost is being deliberately dishonest in their framing. Yes, there's some wokeish language in the body of the AMA report they're referencing and mocking, but that really isn't the punchline. Here's their actual conclusion:

  • This report evaluates the problematic history of BMI and explores other alternatives to BMI. It outlines the harms and benefits to using BMI and points out that BMI is inaccurate in measuring body fat in multiple groups because it does not account for the heterogeneity across race/ethnic groups, sexes, and age-span. The recommendations recognize the issues with the use of BMI clinically, and highlights the need to use other methods. This report also acknowledges that AMA did not participate in the development of the “Indications for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery” guidelines and therefore cannot endorse these guidelines. recognize the significant limitations and potential harms associated with the widespread use of body mass index (BMI) in clinical settings and supports its use only in a limited screening capacity when used in conjunction with other more valid measures of health and wellness; and support the use of validated, easily obtained alternatives to BMI (such as relative fat mass, body adiposity index, and the body volume index) for estimating risk of weight-related disease; and amend policy H-440.866...

Go read the whole thing for both the woke nonsense, but more importantly to get the sense that woke nonsense is emphatically not what they're hitting on, and they're especially not saying that it's racist to consider obesity a health risk. I've defended BMI as a decent enough starting metric, but more fine-grained distinction of looking at body-fat and other metrics really are superior, and there really is considerable heterogeneity across height, gender, and ethnicity.

That said, I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of more extreme people claiming that health is just a social construct promoting whiteness, since I've read such ridiculousness myself, but I find this example to be pretty weak.

Ok, how about this clip covering a woman of color, and equity director, who does not believe obesity has any health consequences, or that nutrition is real at all, to the Nutrition Council?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cd-VnRofGcU

In another edition of the woke are more correct than the mainstream, I have to admit that slavery really was America's original sin and there is nothing we can do to cleanse it. To be fair, the whole black-white thing wasn't really that much of a thing in the North until the Great Migration ensued and the conflicts were more along traditional ethnic lines, but once black Southerners moved North, the eternal American racial conflict was fully metastasized and shows no signs of slowing down. Nearly every political issue I can think of includes at least some gesture in the direction of racial justice. Even the conservatives feel the need to do it - abortion isn't just bad because they think it's genociding tens of millions of infants, it's especially bad because Margaret Sanger was a racist or something.

Even the conservatives feel the need to do it - abortion isn't just bad because they think it's genociding tens of millions of infants, it's especially bad because Margaret Sanger was a racist or something.

I always assumed this was a failed attempt by conservatives to use a lefty weapon against lefties. Master's tools, master's house and all that.

I think you are trying to be more provocative by using the term “white” as some sort of pure German/English bloodied white when the term you are looking for is supporters of western civ. And in America and the last carrier dominant strain of that outside of America was the English. Other European powers played that game and its lineage dates all the way back Egypt, Greece, and Rome. All threw up some bricks for the building you are calling “white”.

It breaks down to “the culture developed in Europe is better than all other cultures”. Which I agree with. There are different specific ethnicities that carried western civ at different times.

Breaking this down as a “race” thing seems to be to accept the lefts terminology. When it’s never been a race other than this thing being born on Mediterranean and hence mostly people with white skin.

Terming it “white” also poorly explains the Jews who were a bit like occasional consultants to western civ who currently exists outside the “white” you describe and historically maintained their own culture and existed within and outside both culturally and geographically of western civ. This also explains Russians who you didn’t claim as a people that try to be white as their civ development has never been a full card carrying member of western civ but had a much different development path despite being often fully visually white. Versus Hispanics and Cubans who fully participated in western civ.

The Proud Boys get it right when they call themselves a pro-western drinking club. It seems almost like a slur to describe people in a way that they don’t want to call themselves especially when a better more accurate word exists.

It’s a cultural package of western civ that is being fought over. Most whites do trace their lineage in western civ but some don’t like Jews and Russians. Some non-whites bought into the cultural package.

(1) I think you mean "White" versus "white". Years back an online (what would now be termed) progressive lassie, who by her photo was as milky white as me, was claiming not to be white (in the White) sense because of some attentuated Jewish ancestry way back

(2) No more clickbait about "Them versus Us what do you think, fellow rats?" from anyone, please! Race is about the one thing I'm not fighting about yet, and I'd like to keep it that way.

I don’t think it’s “them” versus “us” at all, I think it’s an interesting look at the way that ethnic identification in American society is often rather arbitrary in an absolute sense, because it relies on a strange internal logic of its own.

Is "ethnic identification" really the right way of framing it though?

The progressive white may not be happy about the fact that he's white, but he nonetheless acknowledges that he is white. In fact it's a crucial tenet of the progressive religion that whites acknowledge their original sin of whiteness and atone for it. A white person who tried to evade their responsibility by claiming to "not really" be white would, like advocates of "colorblindness", actually just be reinforcing the existing racist hierarchies.

Similarly the progressive man may like to think that he doesn't really take part in "toxic masculinity", but he nonetheless acknowledges the fact that he is male.

"Not Like Other X" is an interesting self-description though. Are you saying "I'm one of [group], but different" or are you saying "I may look like [group], but I'm actually [other group]"?

When a woman says “I’m not like the other girls”, she’s not saying that she’s actually a man.

She’s not saying she’s a man exactly, but she’s also not making a purely biological comment. “I may appear to you as just another woman, but in fact in my head I am better in [this] way”.

So what exactly is the relationship between this notion of "white" and skin colour or Caucasian lineage? Is it purely cultural continuity (like how Left and Right may become unrecognisable to historical users eventually), an aesthetic thing (your "white" := positive affect towards bio-"white") or really something like the progressive sex/gender distinction (which I guess raises similar uncomfortable questions about whether the identity's features are supposed to be based on some biological reality and, if not, why the homonymy)?

It’s neither strictly biological nor strictly civic, it’s a more traditional identity that incorporates aspects of both civic and lineal identity into an ethnos with room for personal or familial identification . So certainly, Rachel Dolezal had her children with black men and Candace Owens has her children with a white man, but at the same time a swarthier Guatemalan might well still see fit to check the ‘white hispanic’ box on the census, just as someone of half-white, half-light-skinned-Pakistani descent with light brown hair and green eyes indistinguishable from many a European might identify as POC.

Literally everything is about race! (C) the pinnacle of American political thought, 2023.

Stop making low effort comments that add nothing.