Note that broad phenotypic resemblances are taken to be the relevant racial markers, both when the word is used in its broadest and its less broad and more common senses.
In the broadest sense, a lot of brown people are white, skin color not being among the markers considered definitive.
A somewhat narrower usage relies more on skin color and so leaves out the darker brown caucasians of the Indian subcontinent, but still covers many more people than just the eurowhites, including, for example, peoples on both sides and at both ends of the Mediterranean as well as peoples speaking Turkic and Semitic languages.
Hitler's use of the term "Aryan", by the way, to refer exclusively to Germanic eurowhites was a very narrow departure from that word's older use to denote all the Indo-European peoples, a subset of the caucasians that includes lots of brown people of the Indian subcontinent but excludes (for example) whites who speak Turkic languages.
In these latter days, anyway in the US, both "caucasian" and "white" are commonly and in defiance of both history and phenotypic facts taken to refer exclusively to eurowhites.
It does not seem to me to recommend this usage based on nothing but bigoted and narrow-minded politics that, though drastically narrower than any of the historical uses of the terms based on physical traits and too broad to match up quite to Hitler's use of "Aryan", it suits American race politics and many of the racists of America, both white (the Klan might like it) and anti-white.
Except when it is pointed out that this usage plausibly and quite absurdly does imply that Jesus was not white, and maybe neither are America's Jews, and certainly neither are America's Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Armenians, and many others.
Should we really accept a usage that with egregious idiocy entails that Danny Thomas wasn't white?
That would have surprised the hell out of him and out of all Americans of the time.
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