"White" is an interesting concept.

Most people assume that racism follows race, but in this case, it's the other way around. Oh, don't get me wrong, as long as there have been cultures, those cultures have clashed, but the idea of "white" as an overarching meta-culture really only goes back as far as the Age of Exploration. The people with the big boats and the big guns needed some sort of rationale for why they should be allowed to enslave and exterminate the people who didn't have the big boats and the big guns. What did the British and the Spaniards and the Portuguese all have in common? Sorta light-coloured skin! Booyah. There you go, manifest destiny, right there on the epidermis. If God didn't want me to shoot that guy in the face, He wouldn't have made it brown.

Of course, white is never really just white. Keen ethnographers will have already noted that the as-yet unspecified location of Leftover Soup features a preponderance of British and German surnames, and that Protestants outnumber Catholics.

Some whites are whiter than others, and who is and who isn't in the club can change. Fifty years ago, if you were telling a racist joke about stupid people screwing in lightbulbs, who were you talking about? Polacks. A hundred years ago, if you were talking about immigrants coming over, taking our jobs, causing trouble, who were you talking about? Micks. These days, who the hell is racist against Polish or Irish people? No one. We whitened them. They're us now.

We're probably doing the Latinos next. Their technological and cultural distinctiveness will be added to our own. Lookin' forward to it, honestly.