> There's no good reason to assign the sweeping and inherently-fuzzy category "white" to mean "prejudice + institutional power".
“White” is the name established by those with institutional power for the group their prejudice favored, other racial identifiers were ascribed to (and, through shared experience of racism from the White group, became identities for) various groups that their prejudice operated against, whereas White became an identity for those whose shared experience was being the beneficiaries of that institutionalized prejudice.
Yes for various periods of time there were various efforts to construct such an identity, to serve various ends of the people doing so. This kind of process has taken place all over the world, throughout history, in various societies as well.
In the case of "white", "black", "brown" and so on, those definitions also changed considerably over time. Then, at some point, the efforts to intentionally draw hard lines around petered off and lost support.
Those labels are still used because they do have some kind of descriptive capacity, even if solely because of momentum from old habits.
Crucially: none of this is responsive to my point. There's no good reason, today, to assign "white" to mean "prejudice + institutional power" in a general sense. It's not necessary to do so. Doing so is not sufficient to address and unpack all the dimensions of prejudice and institutional inequality as they take place today. But doing so does incur all the imprecision-based racist harms that I described in my post.
> Yes for various periods of time there were various efforts to construct such an identity, to serve various ends of the people doing so.
No, I'm not talking about some vague various-periods-of-time generality.
Every concrete identity current in American society, including “White”, is a product of White supremacy, and currently reflects identification with shared experience under White supremacy, which, for those the White, is being on the side of prejudiced institutional power.
Whiteness as a racial identity (not as an ancestry, not as description of skin color, but as a racial identity) is, entirely, about prej5 plus institutional power.
You're repeating yourself and ignoring arguments already made.
"White" has changed in definition over time. English expanded to include French, expanded to include Irish/Scottish, expanded to include Germanic/Nordic, expanded to include Slavic, expanded to include (some) Hispanics... it's pretty much always been changing.
And for a good 50 years, it's just devolved into a term of convenience. We haven't had concerted "racial construction" for decades.
You paint a totalizing picture that's dusty, faded and old. It's not a relevant stance in today's America, except insofar as it enables these totalizing activist narratives (for political and economic purposes, every time).
“White” is the name established by those with institutional power for the group their prejudice favored, other racial identifiers were ascribed to (and, through shared experience of racism from the White group, became identities for) various groups that their prejudice operated against, whereas White became an identity for those whose shared experience was being the beneficiaries of that institutionalized prejudice.