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Notes -
The rule for white in American history is that you look around the room and figure out what is the minimum number of people you need to classify as white to have a sufficient (loyal) white majority in numbers/money/power to oppress the non-white, then inventing the rule that will deliver this majority with the minimum number of extraneous inclusions.
That's how you get from ilforte's quote from Ben Franklin excluding most of Germany to "idk, maybe we count the Jews and the Japanese and some Indians and throw in Persians too and see how the math comes out?" You go from needing only the English/Scots/some Germans to have a supermajority, to needing all the Germans and the Swedes and French, to needing the Irish, to needing Italians, etc. That's why Mexicans went from being considered white in Texas before sufficient quantities of outside European immigrants had shown up, to Mexicans briefly "Losing" their white status after enough European immigrants made Texas majority non-hispanic white, to now having their white status "restored" as white Texans need the numbers.
White has no functional definition outside of that algo, everything else is backwards rationalisation to justify and give credibility to what the rule spat out as the line that would give "whites" a majority and exclude someone else. OP's concentric circles of whiteness are just different solutions to the same problem.
I think whiteness is about not standing out because of your appearance to euro-americans. Under this definition there are large swathes of south european people who would not pass because you could tell them apart based on their appearance but its fuzzy because race is not a discrete thing.
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'White is the minimum number of ethnic groups needed to do racial oppression' does not seem like it would pass the ideological Turing test, at all.
How about 'white' means 'assimilated into Anglo-American culture'?
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