American, but in an area with a lot of militant rightists.

You can overhear them at the bars arguing over whether Italians are white. It’s their favorite thing to talk about and there are almost no Italians around here.

Pretty much every European nationality has its own self centered definition of “white”.

Really, you’re just creating arguments over which of these absurd definitions is the real one.

Humans have been prejudiced against eachother for as long as there’ve been humans, but it’s always been along much smaller ethnic groups than what we’re used to today. The modern idea of grouping loads of ethnicities into races (seven races for seven continents) traces back to the 1600s, a mix of the Spanish being very concerned about who did and did not have Moorish heritage, and everyone involved in the Atlantic slave trade needing a justification for their atrocities. The justification for the groupings themselves changed over time too, for example climate-based race (people from hot climates are strong but idle and stupid and need people from cool climates to guide them) being a popular one, until with the discovery of genetics it settled on a bogus version of that, which it remains until today.

These groupings are created to justify systems of exploitation, so they’re pretty flexible. When the conditions that say who can be exploited change, so do the races. So, in the US, Irish and Italians were considered non-white (though the Irish are pale-skinned enough that they’d be called out separately; “No N*****s or Irish” signs), Slavs were considered Asian until the 1920s, and (light-skinned) Arabs were considered white until the 2000s, then lost their white status. I thought northern Asians were going to be next to gain whiteness, but lately the chuds I keep tabs on are trying to push for Mexicans getting it (not that they phrase it in these terms).

So what HKBFG is doing is trying to reopen old splits in who was considered white.