Inventing the Idea of White People

I have remarked on the absurdity of race denial, and here is an example.

Ed Simon writes in Aeon:

The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of ‘white people’ on 29 October 1613, ...

prove ... that ‘race is an idea, not a fact’. ...

Since Europeans didn’t always think of themselves as ‘white’, there is good reason to think that race is socially constructed, indeed arbitrary. If the idea of ‘white people’ (and thus every other ‘race’ as well) has a history – and a short one at that – then the concept itself is based less on any kind of biological reality than it is in the variable contingencies of social construction. ...

whiteness ‘truly exists only when posed next to blackness’: so the concept of ‘white people’ emerged only after constructions of ‘blackness’. As binary oppositions, ‘whiteness’ first needed ‘blackness’ to make any sense.

So White people didn't know that they were White, until they met Blacks.

Back then, the vast majority of people in the world would have never met anyone outside their local village or area. So they would not know about racial differences. So yes, Whites did not know what was distinctive about Whites until they met Blacks and other non-Whites.

Race can be determined by simple DNA tests. Forensic anthropologists write scientific papers on objectively determining race.

In the interest of showing diverse opinions on this subject, consider this:

Our topic today is “Is race an important topic or a fiction?” And so, I’d like to begin our discussion of the concept of race with a reminder that historically race referred to ethnicity as well as physical characteristics. ...

In an obit on Sam Francis which appeared in the American Conservative, we were told that Jared Taylor wanted to do for white nationalism what William F. Buckley did for conservatism. And what is that? Well, to subvert it for the benefit of Jewish interests. One of the entries at the SPLC site claims that “It is well-known that the American Renaissance does not allow anti-Semitism; it is uptown, 100% clean WN [white nationalism].

So some people consider Jews to be White, and some don't. I always considered Jews to be White, until I discovered that many Jews do not consider themselves White. As the article notes, Wash. Post columnist Jennifer Rubin looks White, but she identifies with Jews, not Whites, and writes anti-White columns.

It is not up to me to define White; I am just reporting how people use the term.

In fairness to Taylor, he is concerned about a lot of things like non-White immigration bringing in a lot of crime. I am sure he sees discussing Jews as a distraction to bigger issues.

Those forensic anthropologists are encouraged to get more woke:

Centering Transgender Individuals in Forensic Anthropology and Expanding Binary Sex Estimation in Casework and Research

Due to disproportionate violence impacting the transgender community, ...

To dismantle rigidly binary sex categorization, we propose the adoption of a biocultural and queer theoretical approach to forensic sex estimation and in sexual dimorphism research that challenges heteronormative assumptions, questions typological two-sex categorization, and combats the presumptions that gender and sex are stable, independent entities that convey universal meaning.

I think this is trying to say that if you find a dead body with a penis, the investigators should not assume that it was a man.