I agree, but I don’t think that he was clinging to or defending his whiteness, in fact on multiple occasions in the past Shrike has made his displeasure and hatred of being lumped into the “white” umbrella as he does not view himself as white.

If I’m reading why he’s trying to say correctly, I feel like he was more so exasperated of being lumped under the white umbrella with everyone else including Americans, and by extension he is now responsible for history and crimes that his ethnicity doesn’t have a sliver of connection to. That could definitely be extremely frustrating and almost erasing to a degree. It’s just extremely American-centric, and just lumping everyone under the same umbrella because they’re “white” in the American view.