Open to this argument. But every definition of race I’ve seen constructed to exclude caste seems contrived. The system has imprinted itself as far down as hair shaft diameter [1].
> Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism
Sympathetic to this. It’s like saying all white people are racist. It’s ingrained in the Indian culture, and I think anyone coming from India should be sensitive to the issue, but e.g. their kids born and raised here are obviously less susceptible. (This is true of all immigrants and their biases, though.)
There are some correlations between phenotypes and caste (and there is a lot of genetic stratification when you look at ancestry), but caste really cuts across race - there are lower caste groups in North India that look more "white" than upper caste groups in South India.
Many people from the Mediterranean and the surrounding areas are white-passing people of color. They've been flattened by the official US race forms into "white", but that's not the same thing as actually being white in terms of day-to-day lived experience.
Genes which are responsible for white skin were introduced to Europe by “immigrants” from the middle east. It’s a very diverse region due to groups of people moving in/out for thousands of years.
So whatever label you try to attach to them you’ll find plenty of people for whom it makes no sense (e.g. there are groups of people whose ancestors lived in the Levant for at least thousands of years and amongst whom red hair and blue eyes are more common than in most “European” populations)
Someone who is truly white-passing should be considered a person of paleness, not a person of color, no? Like sure they're an ethnic minority but racial minority?
I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to draw that distinction, but what I can say is that several people close to me fit that description and look at themselves as white-passing PoC, due to the ways they've been treated as a separate group from European-origin white people.
Steve Jobs is ethnically Syrian. Most people would call him white. The fact that some e.g. North Africans may fit the classic conception of whiteness better than many Europeans doesn’t dissolve every racial boundary therebetween.
Middle eastern and north african people are generally considered white here in Europe. Using 'white' just as synonymum for 'european-ancestry' is some recent US quirk.
If Jobs had grown up in (say) New England rather than California, there is no way he would be have been treated the same as white people there. He would have clearly stood out.
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Open to this argument. But every definition of race I’ve seen constructed to exclude caste seems contrived. The system has imprinted itself as far down as hair shaft diameter [1].
> Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism
Sympathetic to this. It’s like saying all white people are racist. It’s ingrained in the Indian culture, and I think anyone coming from India should be sensitive to the issue, but e.g. their kids born and raised here are obviously less susceptible. (This is true of all immigrants and their biases, though.)
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/29542824