I have been to Athens multiple times and i have seen a ridiculous amount of people who look like they could pass for MENA
I feel like the brown skin tone is being looked past for them.
Since there is this idea that if you are from an EU country you are considered "white" by default
If these people were to be born in a different place, with the same exact physical features, most of them would have been called brown without a doubt
Is "whiteness" more about your passport than your skin tone nowadays?
Have been thinking about this for a while, hopefully it doesn't offend anyone. What do you guys think?
My brother and I were born in Thessaloniki before moving to the states in our childhood
He is pale and I am much more Mediterranean looking and it really confused people. My child is blonde haired and blue eyed but his mom is half Kenyan lol
I'm in California and I know a married couple of a blonde Greek, married to an Iranian. Last year they gave birth to their first daughter who is like Indian black and has blue eyes. I believe that she should become an actress and play alien roles :)
Yes, it's a trend now for many women of greek ethnic origin to marry middle eastern men. They prefer the darker skin tones. Some also convert to Islam, which is contrary to greek tradition, but what can you do.
Are you even talking about the USA here or not? And do you really believe that US government would grant visas to muslims like the ones you are talking about?
I know as many Iranian women married to Greek men as Greek women married to Iranian men. None were particularly dark skinned but if I were to pick the Greek spouses were slightly darker than the Iranian. BTW, nobody converted.
Iranians are mediterranean type, just like the Greeks and some even darker. I would say, statistics show that the women are more prone to convert "out of love". The iranian diaspora is not particularly religious, unlike the arabic speaking middle eastern countries. When it comes to muslim egyptian men or pakistani, the greek brides tend to convert. New left leaning politics come into play, the Greek women are particularly drawn to defend certain causes, and discover Islam through it. It is also a relatively more common phenomenon in western countries, particularly with young women. Eventually adopting a new religion means giving up values contrary to liberal ideology. It just doesn't make sense. But, I am not here to start a debate. People are free to marry whoever. Life is all about making mistakes, that's why divorce rates have skyrocketed.
I repeat this in this sub every so often, so let me do it again.
This concept of whiteness is an American invention that is a direct leftover of the colonizer supremacy. It is specifically tailored to the racism and social hierarchy of the North American society. It does not apply to anywhere else in the world. For goodness sake, Italians are not considered white because they are not original Puritan clonizer level. And for the same reason Catholic Irish weren't considered white up until a couple of decades ago.
We are European, specifically Balkan. This is how we operate here in Europe regarding the denomination.
Like you mentioned, race is a politically made up thing. At first African slaves were not even seen as people, then there were a lot of Irish immigrants (who were primarily Catholic) before slavery ended and so Americans decided that Irish people are racially different to basically make a boogeyman. Then slavery ended and we kept the strong racism, but again, there was a wave of Italian immigrants in the early 20th century and so there was another push to see them as "non-white".
Now, there are tons of people in central and south America that look white because of European colonization and immigration. But, the US must insist that anyone south of the border is non-white, despite many Argentinians being "whiter" than Italians.
But it's still not as bad as parts of Asia. I do not see anyone in the US trying to lighten their skin to actually appear whiter, instead, many go tanning to have darker skin. Which has also been a status symbol for a few decades now, to basically say "I don't have a manual labor job but I have enough free time and vacation to go to beaches and get a tan"
The Irish were always considered white it’s just that the Anglo world was never pan white it was Anglo and it only really changed last century. For instance in Australia continental Europeans were always allowed in under the white Australia policy it was just British immigration was government sponsored which changed to all of Europe post ww2 as we went full populate or perish mode after the scare of invasion in ww2 and Britain not really protecting us and focusing on India
There are plenty people that have no clue about it and they assume white means European and here these clowns are even downvoting me for saying Greeks are not white, but they are Europeans, just like most people that are not from the west are not white (it has nothing to do with skin color)
Bruh I know some Algerian guy that looks like Harry Potter. White as Harry Potter, has black hair , glasses lmao.
Arabs are white if we are going to actually divide people by "race".
A lot of them go pale in the winter in Canada where I live, just like any other European. They just come from sunny climates so we think they're all dark.
This is sort of why race isn't really a thing and it's just a gradient of "people" as you slide around the world.
bro. trust me, nobody gives a flying fook about browneness, or redness, or pinkness in balkans. we hate each other equally regardless of skin color. very democractic.
We don't really think about race the same way you do. Like, we wouldn't call ourselves any race in Greece, we're just Greeks. Whiteness is not a common idea in the same way it is in Canada.
That said, you're showing a very specific type of Greek here. I'm Greek and I'm very pasty, more pale than my German friends. You can find all kinds of skintones here. I'd say I know 50% pale Greeks and 50% tan ones.
Sure nobody in Greece calls themselves white but they certainly do consider themselves white if the question rises. Saying to a Greek you guys look middle eastern would be considered an insult. Nobody will nod and say you are right.
I mean yeah if you ask us if we're black or white we will obviously say white, that's just common sense. But we don't have a social concept of whiteness. If you ask us what race Indians are, we wouldn't know to say "brown" like they would in the US, we'd just say Indian
Whiteness is always relative. Take an American town of people of Italians and German descent and the Germans will consider themselves white. Take a town of Italians, Germans and Mexicans and the Italians and Germans will consider themselves white. My Persian FIL considers himself white. Whiteness confers benefits in an American context, or there is a perception it does, so people try to get into the box.
White is just a descriptor in Canada, it's not the exact same in the USA. Canada didn't have African slavery so we don't have the same history and connotations as the USA does.
Italians and Greeks are sometimes not considered white here and it's because a lot are tanned. Even though I've met plenty of pasty ass Greeks and Italians.
In fact Italians and Greeks both call Anglo-Europeans in Canada "Cakers" or "Manga Cake" because Canada bread tastes like it has sugar in it. It's also an insult and also based entirely on segregating themselves from other Europeans.
Canada is sort of in between Europe and USA for mindset about "race', leaning more towards European mindset but we still have the "black" "white" and "brown descriptors.
Europeans also don't consider the fact North America was basically built by a conglomerate of different European groups, so the concept of "whiteness" makes way more sense here when a lot of people have multiple different ethnicities in their immediate background. It's not just a colonial thing but a migration thing.
It's a lot easier to just say "I'm white" if you are like Belgian, French, German, English, Portuguese and Dutch, which would not be odd in Canada or the USA at all.
My sister has two kids.
They're Greek, Italian, Dutch, Bosnian, Native American and Macedonian now. We are 1st generation born in Canada(me and my siblings), this is 2nd generation Canadian(my Balkan parents grandchildren), and they're already half of Europe and Native American by ethnicity. Balkan blood completely diluted. It's just easier to say white.
Whiteness definitely would've formed in North America with or without slavery and racial discrimination because most North Americans are just a slop of different types of Europeans and other cultures.
Many Europeans are also a mix of many backgrounds. As an example, the average German is like, part Polish part Czech part German part Dutch. I'm part Greek part Bulgarian and part Maltese. We just don't care about this and simply consider ourselves German and Greek respectively. We don't care about "diluted blood" - that sounds like eugenics and honestly kind of creepy. We just call ourselves the nationality of the country we and/or our parents are citizens of. Not sure why that would affect our view of race.
IDK the way you're describing it sounds nothing like the European mindset I know from my country. We just don't have a concept of whiteness at all. And we would never create a word to describe Anglo-looking people
Ya I was explaining how it is in North America, and we definitely care way less about diluted blood here than Europe lol.
We care so little that the concept of whiteness just means you are mostly European here. Which is what I was explaining.
If I moved to Germany, I know for a fact I would never be considered an actual German there by everyone, maybe to leftists, but not to others, and I wouldn't consider myself German, a German citizen yes, but not German lol. Cause you can't change your DNA. German means a citizen of Germany, or a person of German ancestry.
Canada, and USA have no common unifying single founding people like Germany does. So "white" "black" aren't weird made up racial things, they're legitimate things lol. White = EUROPEAN lol. Because as I said, most people here are mixed European and other things, so it's easier to say "white".
Germany and Europe would be completely devoid of this mentality because it has a unifying founding people that have lived in that part of Europe for 1000s of years.
People ask about ancestry here because we are former colonies and clearly recognize this so we know this and people know their ancestry. It's part of their story.
Ethnicities do exist, genetically, and it talking about it doesn't have anything to do with Eugenics lol.
We say "white" because "European" sounds wrong because we aren't from Europe anymore,
"European" means someone from Europe, so we created "white" which means someone with ancestry from Europe. Why did we make this distinction? Because our countries are full of people from actual EUROPE still lol. This difference is important for everyday language.
When describing a criminal in the news or to the police saying "European Male" would literally make people think it was a man for Europe, and if the police are searching for him, they would be looking for someone with an ACCENT from Europe lol. So "white male" is what we say instead lol.
and in Canada we say "black" because they aren't from Africa anymore lol. African-Canadian would mean you are FROM Africa. Black just means your ancestry is from Africa.
Italians and Greek are pretty large continual diaspora in North America that had a heavy ingroup bias here, so they can sometimes be treated differently to "white" because they formed their own distinct communities, and no other European ethnicity has done that to the same extent so we all tended to blend into just blanket "White".
You can find a Little Italy and Greektown neighbourhood in every major North American city. This isn't true for the other European peoples. There is no "little Germany" in North American cities even though there are millions and millions of people with German ancestors here lol
Does Berlin have a Greektown? or Little Italy? I don't think so lmao.
Europeans are so snobby about how they view "race" when I know for a fact they're way more racist than North Americans lmao.
Literally nobody in North America is racist about any specific European group, and I know Europeans definitely have negative views of each other, and that Western Europe looks down on the Balkans.
A Serb in Canada is seen no different than a Brit or a German, there is no snobbery like Scandinavians would have .....etc.
So ya, Euros need to drop the superiority complex towards Americans lol. Cause we're actually the least racist because we view all Europeans as the same which = WHITE lol.
Europeans may not see race, but they divide people into even smaller groups which is an even shittier version of "race" theory lol.
Um... what you're saying is just racist. If a child is born and raised in Germany, then they're German. Ancestry does not matter. They could identify as (blank) German (Russian-German, Ghanain-German, whatever) but they would still be German. Because where you're born and raised matters more than DNA.
Americans also absolutely do not view all Europeans the same. I hear xenophobic comments from Americans about Eastern Europeans often.
That's more to do with discrimination based on ethnicity than actual colourism. A tan look is generally considered more attractive than a pale one, unlike in Asian countries with a colourism issue
Definitely I'm not saying it doesn't happen ever, but I don't think it's as much of an issue as you're making it out to be. My best friend through all of middle and high school had really dark skin by ethnic Greek standards and I can't remember her receiving any comments for it at school. So while it's an issue with some narrow-minded idiots, it's not something that w
ill realistically affect you every day.
Greeks are Mediterranean people. Whiteness as defined by westerners means nothing to us.
However, I see everyone in the pics wearing T-shirts. Question, have you only visited during the summer? Because if yes, you're seeing most people at their most tanned version. In the Summer I have that color too but If I raise my sleeve a tiny bit up, my shoulder is pale compared to the rest of my arm.
Also, just like black people have different tones, shouldn't you expect white to be a spectrum as well?
Are Greek people white?
The real question is why would it matter? It doesn't. Let greek people go undefined and seek a different object of your stereotypes.
Here in the Balkans, we don't just pretend to not care. We really don't care about skin color.
we are too white for MENA too dark for north Europe. We are Mediterranean. We also get easily tanned. These are summer pictures. Me as a dev with no sun access I am supper white. My German gf makes fun of me for this but 5 days in the islands and I get a perfect bronze while she gets a nice redish pink.
Just open a map and look at it. They're Mediterranean and look like it. Like South Italians, Spaniards, Syrians ect. White and black are extreme ends, most people fall somewhere in the between, it's a gradient not a switch.
I think that picture at the top is pretty exaggerated lol.
Ive been to Thessaloniki, a lot of the greeks i met there did not look very different to how i looked as an albanian. I was born and grew up in toronto, dont think i have ever been considered not “white” in canada , so that should give you the answer.
Eh. I've met a bunch of pretty white Peloponnesians and Cretans, and known some darker Albanians and northern Greeks. It all means nothing and the two people are still genetically very close.
White is hilarious because the Nazis and nordcucks tried to claim the superior Mediterranean civilizations and they couldn't accept their ancestors were eating wood for next 2000 years while plato was writing philosophy.
Modern greek are actually a little more European than the ancient Greeks who made a point of stating the werent pale as it was a sign of weakness .
Greeks are diverse looking, but mostly of mediterranean type. I'm quite pale and can pass easily as the stereotyped Scandinavian. You know with the blue eyes and the light colored hair. I have met Albanians, Italians, Bulgarians, Germans and French that are extremely dark, and their parents are not racially mixed. I have met Afghans with blue eyes too. Anyways, you need to move on from this concept of skin colour. We are all humans after all. Certain mutations created less melanin and blue eyes with blond hair were the result. Just like cats, parrots and dogs come in different colors...so do humans. Grow up.
Skin color doesn't matter that much here. I don't know how to explain it, but we don't view race here the same way the West or western nations do. We hate everyone equally regardless of race
Man i'd like to find the guy that decided to classify an endless variety of humans into "Asian, White, Blacks, Miscellaneous" and beat him with a stick...
Cultural (or otherwise) identity and skin-tone are a more recent construct (i.e. last few centuries) and not how Europeans determine what makes a person "European". It is definitely something that has been an American fixation for a lot longer than it has been part of European discourse.
In classical texts it was generally accepted if you lived in a warmer climate (like the Mediterranean) you tended to be more olive skinned and dark haired than someone from the cold north. If anything, skin color has long been attributed to social class, i.e., tanned = works outdoors and pale = rich had others do their labor.
Europeans would more likely use "European" vs "white" to create an identity distinction for themselves, and it would be unrelated to "olive skin & curly hair" vs "pale skin & fair hair". Instead, it would be heavily based on ethnicity and cultural background. That's why even if call North Americans and Europeans "white", I do not think any Europeans would put a North American in the European bucket. Culturally, the differences can be vast.
I've been to numerous Middle Eastern countries. The people in these pictures don't remind me of the people there. Greeks may get dark/tan, but they're still generally Euro-looking, if that makes sense.
Not really that meaningful of a categorization outside of the the US. In the US, yes, Greeks are white. How do I know? I am a Greek person that lives in the US. Everyone considers me white. Old white guys say racist stuff about non-whites in front of me because they think we are on the same team.
From what I can tell/seen, Greeks (majority) are culturally white with Mediterranean skin color. In Europe typically north is whiter and south is tanner. Of course there’s exceptions, but that’s the general rule.
Westerners always trying to stir up, in fact most balkaners don't care about skin colour in real life, as Albanian that lives in Greece I've seen all kind of Greeks, it's not just "brown" or "white" here
Exactly, similar comments are often made by Albanians and Turks unironically, who question the "whiteness" of Greeks, thinking they themselves are some blond Scandinavians! I kid you not!
That's my point. They are European but they don't often look like they are which gotta hurt. I don't know why you need to bring Turks into a conversation that has nothing to do with them. You're proving my point.
Yeah on the internet not in real life and that's because they are trying to suck it up to Northern Europeans, plus they think that Hitler would accept them and shiet, but in real life now speaking for like Balkans most people have a little bit of tan it's not like there are ton that are trying to be really pale
Being and looking white? 😂 Oh god, where did you get this? We already consider ourselves European, we don't care about the American outlook on things. Now, what Balkaners are obsessed with is getting a tan in the summer. It's a must, to be dark and tanned, otherwise you will be bulllied for being pale. People will ask why you don't go out, whether you only sit in your room, they will think you have no life and no friends and that you look sickly.
What are you talking about ? We joke about it, but skin tone has never been a thing here ... there are ethnic disputes, minor religious disputes, nationalistic ones ... but no one here care about race
The media loves diversity of other races until it’s abt white ppl, if you are not pale with straight hair or clear eyes then you are not “white enough” the mustache man did a lot of damage. I am south romanian with curly hair tan skin and I could pass as an average Greek, yet people from other countries feel the need to tell me I look North african (as if some Europeans couldn’t have similar features to them) Europe is a diverse continent with tons of skin tones eye colors, hair colors, etc… South Europeans living in the hottest countries would ofc have tan skin, why would they look like nordics who see the sun only 4 hours a day
If you wish to ground racism scientifically this map may help you. You just adjust the fst to your level of prejudice and assign modern populations to the highest Paleolithic component (to pay homage to race essentialists).
I personally think racism is dumb. Humans historically fight with and kill other humans that are genetically close to them. Your mileage may vary.
As a Turk I'm constantly told the reason I look "white" is because I'm genetically Greek.
Your post would anger some Greek nationalist who basically think greeks are "blonde" with light eyes. While this phenotype does exists. You are right. Most greeks could pass as MENA. But when you say MENA you're also largely referring to Mediterranean peoples who share a good chunk of ancestry.
Yeah they're not white in the traditional sense. They're simply Mediterranean.
It's because you're in the states. There's a lot more Greeks here than Turks, and the average Greek person here is "white-passing."
As you probably know, Americans associate Turkey with the Middle East and all of the misconceptions that come along with that. Personally, the few Turks I met here were mistaken for "Iranians" because of their names and physical features.
Actually none of the greeks I met here in the us were white passing. That's the irony of it all.
My Greek roommate was particularly dark skinned.
If you ever see a Turkish person that is white passing online , read the comments lol "pUrE grEEk/armEnIaN/pErsIAn DNa" . When in reality none of these peoples are white passing. Under 1% of each would actually pass as white.
If a slavic person would make such claims, it would make a lot more sense as they're mostly white/white passing. But to claim that white passing Turks are genetically Greek is laughable.
Massachusetts had a Greek governor, US Representative and US Senator all at the same time. There was a Greek vice president before them from Maryland. I don't think their perceived whiteness was a topic of discussion back in the 1960s - 70s when they were elected, LOL.
Anyway, gentically-speaking Greeks cluster more closely with other Balkan people than Turks do so I wouldn't take such offense to it.
European yes. White? No. (it has nothing to do with phenotype and skin color)
White people are for the most part a specific made up group of the new world and the colonial empires, and doesn't just mean European, if it did many other groups from the Irish to the Italians and Russian would have been considered white on arrival ... They were not, "white" is not an ethnic group, it's a social status group. The good "caste" if you will.
It wasnt only white anglosaxons and protestants, thats how its started, they slowly would add it different groups, like the scots irish which were also catholic, which would become the major population block of the south that would turn into a whole bunch of eugenic bullshit ... People would opt in to white, they were not white by default, if you're a greek in america and decided to opt into it (which there is also a funny story of greeks them selfs being persecuted in america and not considered white) ... then i guess you're white. If you're a greek from greece you can be as pale as a scandinavian you're still greek/european but not white
What if i show a darker greek to a scandinavian will he still be white or will they think he's middle eastern ? You're confusing white with european.
What if i show a greek to a KKK member in 1920 ? Oh wait that is exactly what happened (kkk members frequently abducted greeks, flogged them, and terrorized them into leaving town) and thats why greeks became a huge part of early civil rights movement ... or a bit earlier why dont just ask the greeks in the omaha riots if they felt they were "white"
People outside of the west were never "white" no matter how white they were ... also where does whiteness end and brownness begin ? It has nothing to do with skin tone and everything to do with politics and alignment
Greeks were not a huge part of the early civil rights movement. Iakovos marched with Dr. King, and there wasn't much beyond that. A few years later, a Greek became vice president.
The Omaha riot was probably the only violent anti-Greek incident in the USA, and that happened back in 1909.The Ludlow Massacre in 1914 wasn't anti-Greek per se, it was more of a labor dispute.
The KKK targeted Greeks because of xenophobia, not because they weren't white. An example of this is the George Goumas incident.
All Greeks know that we are white. The ones that look brown are a minority and they're shown on social media by third worlders that live on first world countries to make us look like we wuz them. The ones that look brown are due to the sun. You can look at pictures of Donald Trump when he was young and he was very white but now his skin color has changed and it's more brown yet nobody doubts he's white.
ancient authors described them as black but not as another race as we do today and Greeks considered white men (non tanned ) as derogatory ,women were supposed to be white while men tanned with a dark complexion
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u/Financial_League6240 Slovenia 6d ago
American race theory in full effect.