> That's because "whiteness" is an invented category.

This is a common narrative now, and it seems malicious (or at least, misguided) to me - it's an attempt to deconstruct the generalized European identity as formed through ethnogenesis on the North American continent as different groups of Europeans intermarried. Can someone who hails from sixteen different European countries really make any claim to "belong" to any one of them? Doesn't it make much more sense for such a person to look at the superset of shared values, history, and beliefs that their ancestors had and make a synthesis of them all?

> There are no historical threads that bind together just the people you think of as "white" that don't include many others that you exclude based solely on a modern historical understanding of "white".

This is like saying there is no such thing as a puddle, pond, or lake because nobody can tell you exactly how many litres of water makes up the dividing line between them. Of course this is a clinal sort of division - it's not just genetics, it's also culture and outlook, behaviour, and whether or not a person has the desire to be identified as such. Expecting there to be some perfect formula that determines on-paper whether someone is white or not is an unreasonable expectation that nobody holds except to deconstruct it and diminish it as an identity. Such an attack would be horribly racist if applied to any other group.

From the article:

> For Schama, Jewishness comprises anything Jews have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived. The boxer Dan Mendoza was a Jew, and so was Esperanza Malchi, the confidante of a sixteenth-century royal consort in the Ottoman court—just as fully as canonical figures like Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher, or Theodor Herzl. Schama offers an appealingly democratic and humanistic approach to Jewish history.

If this is fair and inoffensive to write (and I think it's fine), then why would a similar paragraph about "Whiteness comprises anything White people have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived" not be fine? It's not like Jews are a unified racial group - there are a number of different groups within there, as we can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions

And yet, Jewish is not an "invented category" by any stretch of the imagination. Why would a different set of rule apply here?

> Write a history of the Irish diaspora, Sweden, the Balkans, or Russia and nobody is going to call you racist.

I don't know if that's necessarily true, it's going to depend heavily on the content of the book. I think that it's wise for a critical eye to be applied to any history book, it shouldn't particularly matter what's on the cover.

> Claim some sort of tribal group that incorporates all of Europe and the Middle East except excludes people of a skin color or specific religious history you don't like, and you'll find that you're racist.

Claim that an entire people doesn't exist, and deny their right to self-representation, and you may not find that you're a racist, but you may find that conflict is inevitable. This is not a line of thought that leads towards productive discourse, this is a line of thought that leads towards dividing society into opposing camps of enmity.