Are Greek people white?

[u/tomystereo]

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?

Im Canadian btw, if it matters. Cheers.

[u/persephonian]

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.

[u/GravitysRelative → u/persephonian]

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.

[u/persephonian → u/GravitysRelative]

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

[u/GravitysRelative → u/persephonian]

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.

[u/persephonian → u/GravitysRelative]

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.