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Comment by personalityson | Hacker News Reader

If not white, what are they?

"White" in USA means "Anglo-Saxon Protestants + some groups we accept as close enough".

Makes no sense, but the whole idea of races is dumb from the start (same skin color is a very bad proxy for DNA similarity), so it's pointless to correct them.

> very bad proxy for DNA similarity

It's actually a remarkably good one. If we continue to mix for several hundred years more then it won't be. For now, it is.

Because of the founder effect, white people have way lower genetic diversity.

It's like we've split the encyclopedia into three books: A-S, T, and U-Z.

> white people have way lower genetic diversity

This isn't true.

Indeed really not true. For example: I am quite mixed, declared my own race on an unclaimed spot of non-scientific identity-formation, and despite what some would say and discounting any possible future irradiation, my genitic diversity is absolutely zero ;-)

Africa's higher human diversity is mainly in low-population groups like the Khoisan. The big groups are not nearly as diverse (although they do carry some Khoisan genes, for example).

White has always meant European in the USA.

It didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Slavic_sentiment#United_S...

At various points in time Italians, Jews, Slavs weren't considered "white" in US.

See the above joke. It's seriously how many Americans think even now.

There was obviously negative sentiment towards various European groups, but they were always considered "white".

Quote from the article:

> Slavic peoples were considered to be people of an "inferior race" who were unable to assimilate into American society.[4] They were originally not considered to be "fully white" (and thus fully American), and Slavic peoples' "whiteness" continues to be a debate to this day, but most people consider them to be of Caucasian culture

The citations for this are horrible if you follow them.

edit:

One of them is just some 24 minute movie.

The other is false. The Immigration Act of 1924 did not establish any category of "inferior" races or countries.

Wasn’t being “white” legally required to vote in federal elections for most of US history? Were any of these groups ever prohibited from voting on the basis of not being “white”? I have never heard of that happening, have you? I think that would answer the question, since the government was actually in the business of determining “white”-ness at that time, and unless I’m mistaken, all of those groups were determined by the federal government to be “white”.

In the 1940 US census, "white" included anyone of Mexican descent.

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted a Good Neighbor policy that sought better relations with Mexico. In 1935, a federal judge ruled that three Mexican immigrants were ineligible for citizenship because they were not white, as required by federal law.

  Mexico protested, and Roosevelt decided to circumvent the decision and make sure the federal government treated Hispanics as white. The State Department, the Census Bureau, the Labor Department, and other government agencies therefore made sure to uniformly classify people of Mexican descent as white.

  This policy encouraged the League of United Latin American Citizens in its quest to minimize discrimination by asserting their whiteness.

  The race category of "Mexican" was eliminated in 1940, and the population of Mexican descent was counted with the white population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

What started as Slaves OR Free Whites OR Other Free People later granulated in fair arbirtray and often political ways: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/USCensus...

The entire "science of race" in the US was fairly arbitrary phrenology adjacent quack science.

Calling anyone in the US "Anglo-Saxon" is already buying in to a mythology about ethnic origins. Even in England I doubt you'll find many people whose ancestry is derived mainly from the Angle and Saxon tribes as opposed to being a mix of pre-Celtic British, Celtic, Norman, other Germanic, etc.

And Protestantism didn't exist until centuries after the Anglo-Saxons stopped being identifiable groups, if they ever were

"white" is a racist label that does not take into account the complexity of world history. It may be reasonable to use it in contexts of historical racism, e.g. in America (where many Slavic people were almost absent) or Sub-Saharan Africa (zero Slavic presence during colonial times), but it just does not make much sense elsewhere, e.g. it's absolutely irrelevant when describing ethnic tensions between Slavs and Caucasians or Central Asians.

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