Having not been a part of the original debate, but realizing that there are a lot of good points on both sides, I'll say this:
There is a problem when "white culture" is assumed to be, well, WASP culture. I wrote a piece about ten years ago about this - going into toy stores and seeing the Asian doll, the African-American doll, the Hispanic doll, and the blonde, blue-eyed white doll, over and over again. As a child, I sincerely believed I was ugly because I had green eyes and all the "pretty girls" in storybooks have eyes that are either blue or brown. We are all judged on the basis of physical ideals.
My Polish-American family had similar experiences to your father's, and even as recently as ten years ago, I went to college with a group of young women who would never have considered telling racist jokes, but who thought "dumb Polak" jokes were perfectly A-OK, even in front of my Polish immigrant friend.
I agree that race matters, and it matters a lot more because of its visibility in people's day to day lives (it's pretty hard to hide one's race, after all, and impossible for most people), but I also think that lumping a bunch of very different cultural groups together under the banner of "white" does everyone a disservice.
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There is a problem when "white culture" is assumed to be, well, WASP culture. I wrote a piece about ten years ago about this - going into toy stores and seeing the Asian doll, the African-American doll, the Hispanic doll, and the blonde, blue-eyed white doll, over and over again. As a child, I sincerely believed I was ugly because I had green eyes and all the "pretty girls" in storybooks have eyes that are either blue or brown. We are all judged on the basis of physical ideals.
My Polish-American family had similar experiences to your father's, and even as recently as ten years ago, I went to college with a group of young women who would never have considered telling racist jokes, but who thought "dumb Polak" jokes were perfectly A-OK, even in front of my Polish immigrant friend.
I agree that race matters, and it matters a lot more because of its visibility in people's day to day lives (it's pretty hard to hide one's race, after all, and impossible for most people), but I also think that lumping a bunch of very different cultural groups together under the banner of "white" does everyone a disservice.