By the way, a lot of progressives share blame in creating this state of affairs.
Not the fascism that's taking over the US government, oh god no, but the general state of ignorance about the conditional nature of whiteness.
When, for example, Irish people talk about the troubles, and how there was a racial component to the tyranny and genocide that they suffered under, you will absolutely get well meaning but misguided progressives who will turn out in droves to chastise them for this. For far too many people, the knee-jerk reaction to seeing an Irish person - someone generally treated as white by today's standards, in most places - talking about experiencing racialized oppression and violence is to treat this as somehow appropriating or taking away from the struggles more obviously non-white people, and that mindset only serves to reinforce this notion that somehow whiteness is a strictly delineated monolith, and not an arbitrary club with rules that change every year according to the whims of the people most served by those rules.
You need to let Irish, Poles, Italians, Slavs, etc talk about their experience of racial discrimination if we want to break people out of this mindset. You need to let Jewish people talk about their experiences of discrimination without throwing around terms like "white-passing". You need to stop playing these "I know all the correct ways to be anti-racist" games where you've convinced yourself that there's a clear and simple set of rules to follow and that it's your job to bully anyone you perceive as breaking them.
This shit is complicated and weird and arbitrary, and you need to accept that if we're going to be able to have meaningful conversations about it.
