actually, i'm tired of pretending that whiteness isn't harmful to white people or that it's entirely frivolous for white people to want to call themselves irish-portuguese or whatever. obviously the line between recuperation and appropriation is quite thin but every regional characteristic that could distinguish between different people was essentially smothered in the name of conformity to "the great american melting pot". you think being a scottish american boils down to kilt cosplay, bagpipes and haggis? that's the problem in action. when black or indigenous people want to look into where they came from we don't see that as frivolous. it's time to admit that america has stolen the cultures of europeans too
Assimilation into whiteness has been devastating to autochthonous1 European peoples, especially minoritized ones (Irish, Slavs, white Jews) whose assimilation into whiteness was a) predicated on acts of antiblackness, and b) contingent on abandoning several aspects of their own culture to do so.
Part of deconstructing white supremacy has to involve allowing people currently classified as white to rediscover their own cultural and ethnic roots outside of the project of whiteness.
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Used instead of the term indigenous, which carries its own implications in modern sociopolitical discourse.