Whiteness" as a concept can indeed be described as a social construct. There are people with white skin but they haven't necessarily always viewed themselves as one white race, and there's people with white skin like Hasan who do not read as white people. And naturally there's people at the boundaries which is why there's often surprise at Lebanese and Arab people who "look white" or Spaniards and Italians who are assumed not to be white.
This essay covers it better. Also I love how the same leftist that say that deer gender and non binary are totally heckin valid are the same ones saying that the White race isn't real and it's an illogical concept. I love how the idea that a Slav and a Frenchman could be the same race is just an alien concept to them but the idea that a Korean, an Indian and a Hawaiian are all the same race is totally real.
It's obvious to anyone that this idea that "the white race is fake" is what is known as a "convenient lie." A convenient lie is something that a political figure or group says that they know isn't true, but they say it anyways because it's convenient rhetoric. As you can probably tell, it's derived from the phrase (inconvenient truth." It is clear that this whole "the Irish weren't considered white" narrative is an attempt to sabotage white political consciousness and unity. Another figure of not all convenient lies is that they contradict other aspects of the figure or group's stated stances on other issues or have just as bad implications. In this case, specifically, the idea that the Irish weren't considered white means that, according to leftist logic, Irish people were oppressed in much the same way as black people. The problem is that though the majority of White Americans are Irish, "whites who weren't always white," such as Slavs, constitute a really big share of whites. So it really makes discussion of white privilege a harder sell when, according to them, so few whites actually had it. Obviously, these Hasan types know what white people are, and they hate white people. Many black people also take issue with "the Irish weren't considered white," as it essentially allows Whites to buy into their oppression and essentially steal valor. I think Blacks were fine with this back when they were an even smaller minority and could only build coalitions with ignorant Whites, but now that this is not the case, they don't care what Whites think.
This makes me think of white dudes for Kamala.
So there were white dudes for Kamala and white women for Kamala that were well groups trying to get current VP and president candidate Kalama Harris elected. It is obviously semi-ironic, but it also made waves.
Another group took notice of it and praised it, as you might not expect, on the far right. I know this sounds odd, but it actually makes a bit more sense if you think about it. There are two levels to why they liked this, despite it not seeming to be the case. The more surface level is that they liked being included and being acknowledged. Everyone likes to be heard, even if it doesn't amount to much. There is also a deeper level; the white right took it as an acknowledgment that white people are real and that the left was conceding the argument that they weren't. I know this sounds a bit odd, but it does kind of take the cat out of the bag. By saying this, the Kamala campaign and its supporters can't say, "But what is a white person?" anymore because they clearly know what a white person is.
There is another person it vindicated: social scientist Eric Kaufman. Eric Kaufman is a liberal, and as you can tell by his name, he is Jewish. He seems like the last person who would be sticking up for white identity politics, but he did just that in his work. I personally dislike Kaufman, but I am going to be as objective as possible here. Kaufman, like many others, was afraid of a white right. So he looked into why people joined these movements in the first place, and what he found is that many of the whites who supported these weren't necessarily bad people; they just had concerns as a group that the mainstream wouldn't acknowledge. His solution was to normalize white-identity politics.
To essentially allow white people to say, "We are not a blank slate person that exists to mediate what every other group wants; we are a group with interests of our own," because think about it.
