"Certainly"? I don't think that's the case. Can you expand on what you think I'm missing? There are countries outside of Europe--entire continents, really-- that speak a European languages. Do you really think Chileans have less in common with Spaniards than Lithuanians? I'd even guess that African-Americans and white Americans are more similar than white Americans and Danes in terms of language and culture.
What you are missing is that you are focusing entirely on edge cases. No sociological category is so airtight that you cannot "deconstruct" it. E.g. it is also true that Jewish Americans have more in common with non-Jewish Americans in terms of language and culture than Jewish Israelis. Does that mean that, like Whiteness, Jewishness is simply a category that has been invented to serve some political purpose?
> What you are missing is that you are focusing entirely on edge cases.
Am I? I could name half a dozen other cases, but you're the one who stated your point without actually providing any argument for it so I feel like it's your turn rather than just throwing around words like "certainly" as if they're a proof of anything.
Here's the basis of my counterargument: no one, other than a fringe group of crypto-neo-Nazis, takes "white", to be defined as "European", seriously as an ethnic identity. This is certainly not the case with "Jewish". Jews have identified with other Jews for centuries. You can't even go back a single century before your pan-European notion of "white" identity breaks down. English-descended people refused to consider Spanish and Italian-descended people as "white". Even German Nazis didn't consider themselves the same race as Slavic people. The entire notion of ethnic identity is based on a shared history, and there's no shared history between Bosniaks and Basques that would meaningfully exclude any non-whites.
So I ask, why do people try and advance this ahistoric "white" identity out of nothing? My contention is that it's motivated by antipathy if not outright hatred towards races considered as "non-white".
Both of you are correct. "White" as a political signifier does find plenty of usage in pre-20C writings and discourse (stuff like Thomas Carlyle's "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" for example), but it was hardly a point of primary ethnic identity -- Europeans were far more likely to identify as "Anglo-Saxon", "Spaniard", "Swede", etc. And there was certainly a good deal of ethnic strife between various White groups, both in Europe and in the European diaspora in the USA and elsewhere.
However, "White people" do have a legal definition, one that has been used in Western legal language and exacerbated by post-1960s ethnic grievance politics. "White" is simply the contraposition to "person of colour" or "minority". I don't think it matters that "white" identity is not historical - Whites today are an actual group with loose ethnic relatedness and what should be strong shared political interests.
See for example Canada's definition of a "Visible minority": "persons, other than Aboriginal people, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour." That's pretty clear.
> You can't even go back a single century before your pan-European notion of "white" identity breaks down. English-descended people refused to consider Spanish and Italian-descended people as "white".
