It's funny how people, especially Americans, talk about race as if it were an unchanging construct. You see swathes of scientific literature classifying people into races even though the classifications are inconsistent. So you get whites and blacks and asians and... native Americans I guess? Sometimes Hispanics count as separate, sometimes they don't. Arabs were white until 9/11. As for Pacific Islanders, well they're probably too far away to matter. But even the classification, the very concept of 'whiteness' changes across time - as the article suggests - and space - you may be considered white in the US but not in Europe, white in Brazil but not in the US, etc. It's almost as if one's racial identity only made sense insofar as it was percieved by contemporary society. It's almost as if - and this should be the 'aha' moment - race was a...social...construct.