It displays a gross ignorance not just of the world around them, but of their own selves as well.
First off, "white" needs definition. It's a bad classification. Much like "Hispanic" or "Jewish," it's not so much a valid ethnic classification, as a container for several ethnicities. Though the Hispanic "container" and the Jewish "container" are both based on cultural features common to those ethnicities - language and religion, respectively - the "white" container is based on a feature that really has no cultural bearing whatsoever - skin tone.
Which brings us to the next question; how dark do you go before you are no longer "white"? I've known people who classify themselves as "black" who are in fact lighter-skinned than people who consider themselves "white." What's the cutoff point? Is there a cutoff point? If the container of "white" is based on the melanin content of a person's skin cells - and it clearly is - then surely there's some sort of limiting factor, right?
Which brings us to ancestry. Assuming we play fair and leave the door open for a variety of skin tones, should the question be drawn by "white" ancestry? if so, shouldn't many important figures generally considered "nonwhite" be included? Like oh.. .Barack Obama, who is about as close to 50/50 Afro-European as it's possible to get? or Martin Luther King, Jr.? That family tree surely took a detour to Western Europe at some point. Osceola, the Seminole chief who was almost certainly more African than Indian and more "white" than either? pretty clearly if "White heritage" includes everyone with "white" ancestry, that history book is probably going to look pretty darn brown.
So is it a question of European culture or European ethnicity? Well again, that's a fuzzy place; How does one define "Europe?" It's a very recent invention itself, and like "white" was so devised mainly as a way to separate Europe from "everyone else." Europe very distinctly lacks any sort of unifying culture, and is populated by very many ethnicities and languages and histories. So if we're trying to equate "white" with "European" we still fail, because there is pretty much nothing in common between a "white" Irish person and an equally "white" Finn, who both have just as little in common with a "dark white" Sicilian or a "reddish white" Bavarian.
Also if we try to shoehorn "white" into meaning "European," that does actually leave several white groups out; iranians tend to class themselves as "whites" and do in fact have linguistic and cultural commonalities there. There's also the people of the Caucasus - Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Kurds - this is where the term "Caucasian" comes from, right? There's also a lot of Siberian and steppe people who are "white" by the general definition.
if we're going purely by genetics, then of course we have to include the Central Asian nations, the Arab world, and most of North Africa as "white" too...
Bottom line, when people talk about "white heritage," just roll your eyes, they have no goddamned idea what they're talking about. And a "white history month" is redundant - hell, black history month is mostly about people with "white" ancestry interacting with a white world. It's still white history, just given the perspective of people whose skin is too dark to be considered "white" by standards of the United States (but not Brazil, interestingly...)
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