Perhaps if some of the critics defined 'white', it might help to place this argument on a more objective foundation. Are Arabs counted as white, for instance?

The irony here, of course, is that so many are quick to quite rightly call race a myth, and yet here we are, with people talking about the whites in quite essentialist terms, as if it were still 1920 or so.

Nor has white always been the ideal skin colour in Western civilisation. The Romans, said by some to dwell at the root of whiteness along with their Mediterranean neighbours the ancient Greeks, used to say that the ideal colour was "inter negrum et pallidum," which in free translation means "not too black, not too white, but just right."

In other words not like the sub-Saharan Africans, but not like the pasty-faced northern barbarians either, whom the Romans condemned for their fondness of beer and hooliganism (I suppose: some things haven't changed that much).

But rather, like someone from the Mediterranean world (they would, wouldn't they?)

Apart from that, though, and more seriously, the Romans cared little for a person's colour, and enslaved everyone.

On the other hand, precisely because there was no born underclass of slaves whom one could identify by looking at them, a Roman slave could often entertain a reasonable expectation of being set free sometime.

By contrast, a person at the bottom of the Indian caste system could not, unless they were reborn into another life.

Which brings me back to my original point. To speak of caste begs the question of whether whiteness and the original sins of slavery, or semi-slavery and serfdom, which it is accused of bringing into the world but which are perhaps rather more in truth aspects of pre-industrial civilisation in general, extend to cover the inhabitants of India (its northern, linguistically Indo-European half at any rate).

Or, whether we are starting to stretch things to breaking point, with the real arguments more of the Bernie Sanders type, concerning the utter anachronism of the survival of pre-industrial (and colonial) brutalities common to many past societies, in the present age of science.