It was, to put it mildly, foolish of the veteran Democratic party strategist James Carville to say the other day, when asked about the pro-Israel position of the great majority of Republican voters, “It’s really about the racism that drives the thing. . . . The reason I suspect that most of these people describe themselves as pro-Israel is because the Jews [in Israel] are whiter than the Palestinians.”

As was pointed out in the wake of Carville’s remarks, Israelis are not demonstrably “whiter than Palestinians”; nor, since both groups vary greatly in skin color, would it be feasible to come up with a metric that might enable a comparison to be made. There are light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Palestinian Arabs, and light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Israeli Jews—and while Israelis and Palestinians can usually tell at a glance which of the two groups one of them belongs to, they do not do so on the basis of skin color. What they instinctively look for are other indicators, such as body language, facial expression, hair style, clothing, and head garb, and sometimes they guess wrong.

It is commonplace to observe that, when applied to skin color, white and black are as much sociological as physical categories. Many so-called whites are far from white; many blacks are not at all black. Nor does it necessarily have to do with ancestry. As we all know, Barack Obama’s mother was white and Kamala Harris’s was a native of India. If both Obama and Harris are considered, and consider themselves, black, this is because they identify with the African American community and because this seems natural to most Americans. As the Columbia University linguist and New York Times language columnist John McWhorter noted in a recent column: