Thank you for your feedback, Mike. I agree that it is a pejorative term and linguistic fallacy, and also that people sometimes use it to refer to western civilization in general. The Washington Post recently published an article that makes far-fetched arguments connecting that with whiteness. Another article, also published in the Washington Post, makes what I think is a good counterargument to the fourth point made in the first article. Constitutional lawyer David French wrote a piece for the National Review in which he described his experiences on the admissions committee for Cornell Law School, which is in the Ivy League. Among the things he observed about Ivy League admissions was this:

"...there are times when admissions committees will actually ideologically cleanse the minority applicant pool of minorities who are seen as 'less diverse' because of expressed interest in 'white' professions such as, say, investment banking."

So yes, "whiteness" as a social idea gets applied to things that racial justice-focused people associate with it even though the association with white people is merely coincidental.