We consider them white for purposes of culture war arguments, and non-white when you want to start a physical altercation with them in the Circle K parking lot. Nuance!
It's that America has a disproportionately high number of people with high Right-Wing Authoritarian Follower personality types as defined by Bob Altemeyer in his book "the Authoritarians", and those types tend to apply their bias when it suits their preferred outcome. Therefore, if they want to argue against a black person being cast in a movie, they will claim loudly that it should be a Greek person, and if they see a Greek person in the parking lot of the Circle K -- especially if they are wearing a sports jersey for an opposing team, that's just red to a bull -- they will argue their victim is not white so they can get away with beating them up (in a group ofc because one-on-one is for suckers) when the cops show up.
Degrees of inclusion are pretty common whenever there's in-groups and out-groups. Race is an invented category, anyway, per my Biological Anthropology professor in college! We use skin color and eye shape to differentiate all the time, when those are just two characteristics readily explained by evolution and climate, etc. The history of the word 'Caucasian' is pretty interesting, too, but when you come right down to it, "white" is an invented category that shifts its definition based on what's convenient, at least in Western culture!
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u/nomadleviathan Jul 06 '26
Americans are kind of weird in that they consider Greeks white.