Nonwhite people aren’t a monolith because they think they are, they’re a monolith because the concept of whiteness and the way white people relate to them has made them one, regardless of their own relations to one another.

The difference between historic ethnic discrimination and modern racism is the arbitrary drawing up of racial lines around groups of people who form heterogenous clines of different genetic groups and cultures. Racism against “middle eastern west asians” functionally includes Arabs, Indo-Iranians, Sikhs, Tuareg, Kurds, Palestinians, Algerians, Moroccans, Turks, and Kazakhs and a bunch of other cultures who don’t exactly identify with one another but are lumped together in this mixed bag of convenient colonial categorization based on their relation to colonial production. Like a Moroccan person and a Pakistani person would more than likely be offended if you counted them as “the same”. And for good reason, their histories, base forms, and superstructural forms are distinct and erasing that distinction is meant to open them to commodification and exploitation. For another example, in the western mind, latin america is “that place where fruit and coffee comes from,” which erases local cultures to conform them to the global role capital has assigned to them. It’s in-part the sort of thing the Zapatistas are fighting against in their cultural war against Mexican liberalism.

These modern lines began to form during the colonial period of western history. During the medieval period, discrimination was based on religion. Laws and cultural norms targeted muslims, lutherans, calvinists, catholics, etc. Slavery laws were formed on the basis of religion, where adoption of christianity could buy the freedom of a black or indigenous person (or their children) after they’ve fulfilled their contract. Then in the 17th and 18th centuries, something shifted in the Caribbean. Creoles were beginning to form communities where locally born whites, blacks, and indigenous people started to have more in common with one another than with the “metropole” of the European power exploiting their labor. They began to form coalitions to overthrow the colonial government, and often freed slaves (who could form up to 80% of a colony) to gain the proper mass line.

This spooked the Europeans immensely so their response was vicious. They rewrote slavery laws to no longer be religious, but instead be based on skin color, making the caste of slave immutable and heritable. The mixed-race creole bourgeoisie were destroyed and scattered, some even enslaved, and lost all their status to white immigrants.

Whiteness was invented at this point, a camraderie between europeans based on shared heritage in order to separate themselves from the slave class. It became illegal to enslave or indenture whites. It became illegal to intermarry with whites. It became illegal to show aggression toward whites. And this change in status consolidated the previously differentiated creole whites, lower class colonist whites, upper class colonists, and the gentry under one unified group. This white supremacist group still exists today, and has come to allow or deny various cultures into its ranks based on its political goals.

With the theory of white supremecist racism (as an important tool of capitalist imperialism), it becomes easy to see why the distinction of Ukrainians as white and Russian/Baltic slavs as nonwhite has a chilling effect on the entirety of white culture. It justifies the acceptance of Ukranian refugees into the “cilvilized” imperial class and demotes slavs to the enslaved/colonized class (as all GZD users have pointed out with news articles). When we say “you can’t be racist to white people”, what we mean is that you can’t reverse this relation just with words or behaviors, especially as an individual. Racial discrimination toward white people doesn’t carry the same class distinctions. Say, for example, a Palestinian landlord denies housing to an Israeli. This is discriminitory, but it doesn’t have the same class character as an Israeli landlord denying housing to a palestinian. The former is technically anti-colonial and the latter is distinctly colonial.

TL;DR: In order to be racist to white people you have to change global class relations and dismantle Eurocentric neocolonial imperialism.