Great response!
I am Norwegian and that is primarily how I identify. However the idea of my as a white person is something I have noticed Americans love to push on me.
I started noticing this from my wife and her family who are American (non-White). They would refer to things that I ate as "white person food."
To me it was simply Norwegian food. A Greek person or an Italian would not have eaten the same food.
This is what I see as a problem with the American racial debate. Americans with their 330 million people, Hollywood, Netflix, Google and what not total dominate global culture and they get to define how people should be categorized and think about themselves.
The problem is that Americans insist on racializng everything. Instead of being people of different cultures, values, natrionalities, ideologies and mindsets we are simply reduced to skin colors. An Indian is no longer Indian. He is just a brown person.
A Nigerian does no longer get to distinghuish himself from a Rwandan. They are both just black and thus in American worldview they are now supposed to have all the same values, ways of thinking and ideological adherences.
The American racial lense is applied to everything in an extreme fashion. I remember hanging out with two Americans a white and a black girl. They would remark on keep in trash bucket on the kitchen floor or under the sink as a black or a white thing. I could have distinguished it as a Dutch or a Norwegian thing. Dutch people keep it on the kitchen floor, Norwegians and Swedes keep it under the sink.
The problem I supposed is that black and white people in America really happen to belong to different cultural groups or ethnicitie due to history. Yet these groups don't really have any names. Americans have thus come to call these ethnicities or cultures for black and white.
That might work in America to some extent. But it breaks apart as soon as you join the global culture that exists online. I am not an ethnic white American. I dont' belong to that culture. But that is obsured when words like "white" is used.
But it also doesn't really work in the US. Nigerians, Kenyans, Gambians, Russians, Polish, Swedes, Finns etc who come to the US and settle don't fit into these predefined cultures.
The American defined "black culture" is not the culture of a Kenyan. Just like American "white culture" isn't the culture of a Finn.
I think older terminology such as WASP made more sense. It focused more on the cultural aspects of a group of people and less on their skin color.
The problem with defining culture in terms of skin color is that when a say a black person joins "white culture" they get judged as doing something unnatural. That somehow they are a sellout.
But a culture should never belong to a specific skin color. It should be open to people of all skin colors.
