I prefer the term “Dominant Culture” to “White”. |
There's no need to invent new terms. The word is "in-group". People in the in-group look out for each other over people in the out-group.
Race is a social-construct that changes with place and culture. |
Sorry to use such a tired formulation, but: that depends on what you mean by "race".
The idea that one person or another might have about what a "white person" is is certainly as arbitrary as the delineation between red and orange. The same is also true of the idea of species, incidentally. In fact, I recall the controversial case of one biologist who goes around "speciating" snakes which are all basically the same just to say he's discovered so many species of snakes.
That said, you can take the genomes of all living black bears, "average" them out, and the result will not be the same you'd get if you did it for brown bears. Likewise you could do the same for Italians, French people, and Spaniards, and you'd find not only that they're all slightly different, but you might also find that some more alike than others (if I had to guess I'd say Spaniards are more closely related to the French than to Italians, purely going by geography).
Some people have argued that these differences are not enough to call them races, but the fact is that words don't have intrinsic meaning. Take the example I gave above for the snakes. There's a definition for "species", but even with that there's argument about which groups are new species and which aren't. Why would it be any different for race, when that word has no formal definition.
So yes, "white person", "black person", "asian person" don't mean anything intrisically, but some people take that a step further to say that there are
no races (i.e. at the very least physically and genetically distinguishable people), which is obviously not true.
My grandfather would never eat with an Italian, he considered them lazy, predisposed to criminal behavior, and definitely not “white”.
That they would be considered “white” in US culture today would be difficult for him to grasp. |
It would not surprise me if your grandfather could name specific incidents that were the genesis of that idea, that made him distrust Italians more than the other immigrants in the US at the time. It would also not surprise me if othering them like that made it easier for him to justify that treatment to himself.