Though I live in the US, I grew up in Central Europe. As such, I have never thought of myself as "white". I mean I have always known I was white, but it was never an issue to me. Everyone around me was white.

For that matter, I have never thought of myself as European either. My first real contact with Americans was when I lived in Rome, Italy. I became a very good friend with an American (in fact, it was this friendship that resulted in my move to America), and his parents came to visit.

His mother was observing Romans and then would say things like "Europeans do such and such things."

To that, I would react, "Whoa! Wait a minute! All you've seen is a small part of Italy. Please don't generalize!"

The truth is, in Europe, which is essentially where most "whites" come from (or their ancestors did), there are so many radically different cultures that it is hard for me to think of myself as a European (again, of course I know I am a European, but all that means to me is that I was born in a country that happens to be in Europe - a geographical identity, not a cultural one).

If I have any "identity" in cultural sense, I am a Slovak because that is where I was born, where I grew up, and that is the language I spoke for the first 29 years of my life. I also identify myself as an American, because that is where I have lived for the last 16 years, that is what I am a citizen of, and that is where I intend to spend the rest of my life (at least, I intend it now) — and, boy, you should have seen how green with envy everyone was for me being an American when I went to visit Slovakia ten years ago (and a hundred times greener when I flashed my badge as a deputy sheriff — they all love cowboy movies there), hehehe.

So, if I feel any ethnic pride, it may be a Slovak pride and an American pride. But I feel no particular call to a white pride. I am neither proud of being white nor ashamed. It is just the level of pigmentation in my skin as far as I'm concerned. (If anything, being a redhead is something I'm happy about <grin>).

The only time I hear anyone talking about white pride is from white supremacists—and those people I just plain don't understand.

So, what difference does it make that the computer was thought up by someone white? It was not his skin color that made him smart. There are smart people in every race. And there are not so smart people in every race. The achievements mentioned in the original writeup are not achievements of the white race, race had nothing to do with it. Perhaps the relatively mild weather of Europe helped.

On the other hand, things like slavery in America were related to the stupid idea that we are somehow superior to others. As a direct immigrant I can say quite straight that my personal ancestors had nothing to do with it (indeed, my ancestors were quite oppressed in 19th Century just for being Slovak - we were destined for ethnic extermination, but that's a different story). But I can see how some white Americans can feel ashamed. And I certainly can fully understand how many white Americans feel the need to right the wrongs of the past (and, alas, the present).

So, I suppose, the difference is cultural, at least to a point. I suspect most Europeans do not think of themselves as whites but rather as German, or French, or Swiss, or Slovak, or Hungarian, or Irish, or ... you name it (or, maybe, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist...).