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I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.
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Notes -
Of course ethnic categorizations relating to race has been influenced by more than past centuries white culturally right leaning westerners being prejudiced. And relate to actual real cultural spheres, and differences among groups and biological differences. There is a relation between race and broader ethnic groups and civilizations.
Italians, Irish, etc qualified as white.
Obviously, other non white groups and progressives have been part of this and created categorisations like Hispanic. Blacks obviously support the black categorization. Progressives of course support various categorizations relating to race, including whites being treated as a different category to non whites. Plenty of non whites support non only non progressive categorisations of race, as a way that makes sense for them, but even to an extend the progressive categorization for self serving reasons.
The narrative of Noel Ignatiev of evil white racists conspiring to create the concept of race, while his faction is just trying to deconstruct racism and prejudices, by destroying whiteness is inaccurate. On basically every claim he is making.
I do think that certain categorizations that make sense in an American case, and as a non American I am adamant in promoting them even when arguing with Americans, make some less sense in other contexts.
For example in the case of USA, white is more of a primary ethnicity while in the case of Europe, being European is more of an aspect of your primary ethnic categorization. Same with blackness and black Americans, in relation to Africans.
Anyway, I don't see why social constructs are illegitimate things as a result of prejudice, rather than categorisations based often in valid and important things, including biology. Not always, I would like to undermine the progressive way of seeing race without going full in opposite direction. And there is some validity in opposing the most hardcore white supremacist way of categorising the world, with again not going to the opposite direction which is the antiwhite supremacist categorisations done by progressives. Where these progressives also associate being indigenous with being non white, or Europeans existing at all as a group with prejudice and white supremacy.
I've never disputed the usefulness of it, merely pointing out that others seem to conflate this as an easy argument to win against. It doesn't change that it is a social construct. To add from my previous comment, I was also pointing out that this is just one mode of thinking that dominated racial categorizations because I am sure you know already that different cultures do not have the same conception of race as the western system does.
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