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Binding dictionary definitions are pointless here. Normal human beings can make a judgement with human wisdom on whether someone is white. You can look at their physiognomy (African Albinos aren't really what we mean by white), their skin colour, their diction, dress, language, bearing... You can distinguish ultra-white 'I love Trollope novels' Jared Taylor from the kind of youth seen here: https://x.com/MythoYookay/status/1882007121266717151
You can judge a continuum of whiteness between the Swiss watchmaker types to the Tibetan tribesmen or Amazonian indigenous tribes. People might disagree on the ranking and the metric but there will still be a spectrum. And because language can't handle continuous spectrums very well, we use words like red, green, yellow and white not as rigid formal tools but to gesture at a cluster of properties.
No they are not pointless, and any one who sincerely desires a system of "white advocacy" is going to have to grapple with that fact for all the reasons @Hoffmeister25 lays out below.
We live in a world where nobody outside of academia and weird autists pays any attention to physiognomy. When people like Taylor Lorenz, Nancy Pelosi, or Karen from the Atlantic talk about dismantling white privilege they aren't talking about dismantling thier own privilege, they're talking about dismantling the privilege of a certain sort. The sort who isn't with the program, the sort who likes sports and country music more than he should, the sort who will put cheese and steak sauce on everything but wont put his pronouns in his email. It turns out that the catagory of "white" includes a lot of blacks which is how a this man ended up as "the face of white supremacy" on the West coast despite being darker than most of the youths in your picture.
Nancy Pelosi is white and finds political advantage in being against white privilege. Joe Biden for instance used to say 'we already have a nigger mayor, we don't need any more nigger bigshots' and 'I don't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle'. He now talks about how it's great that the US is going to be minority white, how 'it's the source of our strength'... These people sway with the wind. Their words don't necessarily have any sincerity behind them. They say what they think will help them (or what they are given to say).
The existence of defectors doesn't disprove the existence of groups.
Anyway, HR doesn't need to come up with a foolproof definition of white or Asian or diversity if they want more diversity. They just do it. In Australia there are statutory declarations of aboriginality that people need to get affirmative action jobs. But no such thing is strictly necessary. There is no definition of 'culturally and linguistically diverse people', the unwieldy phrase positively defies definition. Yet it works. And so does white, for the very same reason.
You're missing my point. Race in the US is not a physical phenomenon it is a cultural one. We all recognize this on some level which is how people like Pelosi are able to talk about "whites" without including themselves or refer to Kenti-Jackson as the first "black" supreme court justice without a hint of irony. Its the background assumption behind Biden's bit about how you aren't really black if you vote rebublican. We know that when people talk about "black" they aren't talking about people of sub-Saharan ancestry, they're talking a bout a specific sort. Do you follow?
Black is both physical-genetic AND cultural but the genetic level is most important.
You can be ethnically white and act in the most black ways, that makes you less white than you would otherwise be in a holistic sense. But even so, you wouldn't become black. Elizabeth Warren isn't Native American even if she does a few rituals, whereas an actual genetically native american who acts like Elizabeth Warren could still be native american. People might say 'she's not acting like a native american' because she has all this money and poise and prestige and a certain kind of status.
The specific 'sort' you're talking about are MORE black than other blacks but other blacks are still black. Joe Biden is talking about precisely this, he means 'you're not acting black as you should be' if you vote Republican. But voting Republican doesn't automatically make you white, they still get classified as black Republican voters.
Likewise certain east-asians (Koreans and Japanese) are more white than others, so they don't get as much affirmative action and people call them model minorities. But they're not fully white, just more white.
Not to the vast majority of Americans it is not. That is my point.
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I have literally never heard anybody do this, because no matter what anyone thinks of Clarence Thomas, Thurgood Marshall preceded him on the Court by more than twenty years.
Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and multiple mainstream news outlets have all referred to her as such at one time or another. Most recently NBC and the Huffington Post when reporting on the big necklace she wore to the Inauguration. Im still not clear on why exactly the necklace was newsworthy but there you go.
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IIRC, several journalists have made this error. Example
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