Dr. Webster – here in America and European countries, people do NOT self-identify. Instead, identity is determined on the basis of physical characteristics. For that reason, the only Americans who can answer your question are white Protestants – for they are the deciders.
If white Protestants think you look black, or Asian, or Jewish, or Mexican, or whatever, you will be treated according to the identity they assign you.
In America, white Protestants do not identify all Ashkenazi Jews as white. For example, one of my grandfathers was identified as a Jew (based on his nose). As a kid, I was identified as a Jew based on my “Jewfro” and eyes (an out-of-date derogatory term that referred to curly hair and slanted eyes common among Sephardic/Iberian Jews). My Jewish friends have been identified as South Americans, Caribbeans, and black – and more recently Indian (the country).
Again, our identities are determined by white Protestants – not us.
Since i have also observed non-white and non-Protestant people identifying “others” – including me – on the basis of physical characteristics as well – I suppose identifying others has become an American thing.
As James Baldwin wrote in 1967:
“All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads. One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads. And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.
If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated. I learned this from Christians, and I ceased to practice what the Christians practiced.
The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.”
