this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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That is simply not the way that "white" is used. The skin color is a convenient excuse, but being pale skinned is not ever sufficient to actually be white. For example, if you're an albino child of black parents, very few people will consider you to be "white". Similarly, there have been times historically where, if you're ethnically Jewish, no matter how pale your skin is, you will not be considered white. Other times, they get to be white.
There are incredibly pale skinned Indian and Chinese people who, despite being whiter than most "white" people, would still be excluded from being "white".
There is no definition of "white" that you can guarantee a person will be white simply by looking at their skin color. Skin color can only exclude people from being white.
My example included black jewish people (Ethiopian jews are NOT white in any sense of the word) and white jewish people.
Exactly.
The point is that you said "Some jewish people are white", but since we're talking about the definition of "white", that can't be true. They aren't white because they cannot be defined as white by looking at their skin color. If you simply meant "Some jewish people are pale skinned", then I'll just say that your phrasing was unintentionally misleading.
We can look at this from several ways, I like the more societal way of it, instead of "whiteness" being whatever someone wants it to be. Is someone treated in the same way as other people from a certain ethnicity? How people perceive them in everyday life (like going to the supermarket or how a cop will see them)? This is more reasonable to argue, as society is always over whatever bullshit some racist invented. With this we can argue from a sociological standpoint, like colorism, etc.
Did Richard Feynman receive treatment like a brown latino, an indian, an asian, a black person or a white person?
This is intrinsic to the question of racism and whiteness, not some vague "pale skinned" thing, and more in line with academic work, because IT'S MORE MEASURABLE, it's based on real things people endure, and on this sense, the "pale skin" makes a complete difference, from the middle of the pacific to Idk, the moon, not some random thing. If you want, I can recomend some very good books about this topic, because arguing based on definitions that aren't good starting points can't go anywhere, we need to define things not based on some common sense deffinition, but on observable and logically sound things.
Angela Davis (for an anglisized point of view) is a good starting point, because she talks about gender too, it's all related.
Edit: good starting point to understanding race and racism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/