Whiteness was never really about skin tone or physical features. Remember that the Yanks didn’t consider the Irish white and the Germans didn’t consider Slavs white. Line all those 4 different nationalities up and you’d have a hard time telling them apart, but racism is dumb.
Honestly the use of “whiteness” as a social construct is not helping. People not neck deep into the terminology just don’t understand it, and it’s also not consistent with others.
Let me get out my chart here
A lot of east Asians do fit the upper half so meme needs some addendums.
Whiteness was never really about skin tone or physical features. Remember that the Yanks didn’t consider the Irish white and the Germans didn’t consider Slavs white. Line all those 4 different nationalities up and you’d have a hard time telling them apart, but racism is dumb.
Honestly the use of “whiteness” as a social construct is not helping. People not neck deep into the terminology just don’t understand it, and it’s also not consistent with others.
You can tell them apart, but Slavs and Irish are frequently paler than Saxons.
The addendum is
*only after nationality/ethnicity is known
Otherwise they’ll just shoot us if we speak because they’ll all assume we’re Chinese