Geeze, I'm glad I checked in here with the question. I guess I should explain some of it. I do sound incomprehensible and like "the one friend who's too woke".

For starters, I wouldn't target a stranger for the color of their skin and introduce myself saying "white people don't exist". It took me 1400 words to think about how to express the idea on an internet forum where people already knew me. But I also live in an academia-dense city now and if I did introduce myself that way, they might already be on board with the statement, before hurriedly adding distance between themself and me.

This isn't an original thought of mine, and it's not an argument I'm reading from 'white people'. It's the opposite of "colorblindness" (because believing in white people and identifying as such allows you to insulate yourself from engaging seriously with matters of race and racism, but that's a lot of words to justify).

The short of it is that 'white people' is something that can't be defined, it has malleable borders, and those borders are defined by a culture of white supremacy. And white supremacist ideology does exist, and so does white privilege. But 'white people' as a concept never existed, until that identity was constructed to invent a hierarchy for the purpose of the Atlantic slave trade.

Like, if someone identified with "white culture" then you'd reasonably suspect they're a nazi, because who else would think about the characterizing parts of their upbringing and ancestry and think being white is the most salient descriptor? Not "American" or "my family is Polish and I was raised near San Diego" or whatever? Only people who believe in and subscribe to white supremacy would say their culture is "white culture". Triply so for "white pride".

Like, to the extent "white culture" is a salient idea, it's intentionally constructed by white supremacy to produce a world that privileges white people, and it needs to be understood as a not-legitimate concept and destroyed before it becomes a real thing. (Again, this is not a unique take of mine, people were saying this well before I was born.) If I were trying to be funny, I'd say it's kind of like Santa Claus in movies, where he draws his powers from people believing in him.

It's also why we capitalize the B in black but not the w in white (and for which there were like 1000 essays on the matter since 2020, and about the differences between Black American identity and African American identity, etc.)

Good reading to this end are the book Racecraft (which is tangential but similar thinking and I am only part of the way through), but also this idea has been repeated pretty often. This interview with Walter Mosley, this essay (from someone who is very Christian mind you), and this recent Code Switch podcast are the more salient things on my mind, but you can probably find dozens of other essays and posters on the matter. I can scrounge up more sources