I'm not the author of that comment, but going by the HN credo that we should steelman (assume the most charitable interpretation of) their remark, "whiteness it

I'm not the author of that comment, but going by the HN credo that we should steelman (assume the most charitable interpretation of) their remark, "whiteness itself" has nothing to do with people's inherent genetic makeup, but with the creation of "whiteness" (and other modern day races) as a category. In other words, that a lot of problems started when people in the 15th-16th centuries developed philosophical, moral, and religious (and centuries later, scientific) frameworks under which racism could be formalized as a part of the political economy, justifying the horrors to come, such as genocide, chattel slavery, anti-miscegenation laws, lebensraum, apartheid, etc. Perhaps it's debatable as to whether philosophical racism is responsible for later atrocities, or if it was more of a post-hoc excuse, a way to resolve the cognitive dissonance resulting from humans continuing to treat great swathes of other human beings like scum even while our understanding of universal human rights developed in leaps and bounds.