How does whiteness as an ethnic group differ from other racial groups as in differences in ancestry language and culture?

Answer 1

First of all, no racial group is an ethnic group. A racial group is simply the color of one's skin and is composed of dozens if not hundreds or thousands of different ethnic groups. Ethnic groups have specific historical origins, languages, and cultures. Since a race is composed of a multitude of ethicities, sometimes stretching over areas larger than continents, to make any ancestral, linguistic, or cultural claims about one race or another is pure folly that fails to take into account the diversity of humanity. The only thing that can be said about Whites as a race is that if the clock were rewound a thousand years, almost all Whites would be found in Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East. Since that point, though, Whites have expanded to all corners of the world, developed hundreds of languages, and have an expansive cultural diversity from the West Coast Californians to the East Coast Quebecois to the Germans to the Albanians to the Russians, to the Lebanese, to the New Zealanders and Pitcairn Islanders.

Unfortuantely, in society today, it is commonplace to find people who incorrectly believe that "blackness", "yellowness", "redness", or "brownness" creates some type of ancestral, linguistic, or cultural connection between the members of that race. Anyone who takes the time to meet African-Americans, Haitians, Black Brazilians, Kenyans, Zulus, Angolans, Nigerian Hausa Fulani, Beninian Yorubas would quickly tell you that "blackness" indicates nothing about ancestry, language, or culture other than a common ultimate origin in the African continent. However, the more recent travails of these distinct groups are more indicative of their identities, ancestries, languages, and cultures than what happened centuries ago. The view that race and culture are tied together is a holdover from the imperial period when people genuinely believed the different races to be something more than skin deep (e.g. Whites were genetically superior to other races and were more intelligent than other races) and has returned in anti-imperialist and morally relativisitic rhetoric that used the implicit argument of a race-culture connection to make unreasonable and absurd arguments to achieve decolonization (see below). The centrality of this incorrect and fallacious connection between race and culture is a black mark on modern society and cultural discourse; cultures and languages belong to all of us a single humanity and we can choose those languages and cultures that suit us as individuals, not those "chosen" by our skin color.

(While decolonization is a reasonable aim, the idea that colonization should be disbanded based on the racial differences between the colonizer and colonized is nonsense. Would the colonization have been desirable had the colonizers and the colonized been the same race? Rather, decolonization was reasonable because of local aspirations and the poor treatment of the locals by the colonizer.)