I shouldn't talk since I am not really white. I am more of a orange-ish pink/ pinkish orange [o.p.p.o aka p.o./o.p.]. My group, usually identified by skin color has a problem. Well, maybe problems. It has its good parts, too, I think. But just looking at the negatives, I put "white inferiority" into Google and got a passel of results. Turns out both the phrase and the idea is not original with me.
What is the claim sometimes made of white, that is, Caucasian, I hate to say it, supremacy? We got to this continent 12 to 15 thousand years after the visitors from Asia, the ones we often refer to as native Americans. We are currently a small part of humanity. Both the Indians from India and the Chinese from China outnumber the Oppos, as I understand it.
I see in Wikipedia that there wasn't much drive to name those of European descent until my group started sailing here and there, often showing up with guns and pushing people around. It is possible, in my view, that becoming a colony of one European country or another had some benefits for an area, directly and immediately, or indirectly and eventually. I have learned of capturing people, buying people, and enrolling people into slavery or indentured servitude and I imagine it was easier to distinguish the "up" group from the other group with labels and attempts at physical markers, such as skin color.
I have read that scientists have not found identifiable genes that support what is often called 'racial' distinctions. A friend recently noted that we have arrived a time, in some places, where we think it is polite to refer to a person's gender using the person's preference for reference. He thought that if we can do that with gender, maybe we should do it with "racial" or ethnic classifications, too.
I know a little of my wife's family history and it mainly concerns Finns, Swede, Spaniards and Cubans. When we received results from the Genographic Project, Lynn was shocked. She has blonde hair and blue eyes and looks like she is of Finnish descent. The results of DNA analysis said she has a strong line of Native American descent. At first, she thought her results got mixed up with somebody else. She has been contacted by other American descendants of the Taino Indians and now believes one of her more recent grannies was a member of that tribe.
This can be a loaded subject, one that tempts a person to feel superior to another because of ancestry. Take a look at "An Inconvenient Inheritance" by Wade and "The Invisible History of the Human Race" by Kinneally.
