this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Levantine people don’t have very dark skin, they definitely aren’t as white as Western Europeans though
All the applying of modern ethnic categories here is making my head spin.
I mean, rendering Jesus as a blonde guy is weird, but the way the pushback is parsed is just about as weird in the exact same way.
Modern Levant and Levant people three thousand years ago are both different in appearance. You can thank the Romans and Crusaders from Europe for changing this.
Ancient Romans weren't even really white. More olive toned.
There aren't any white people in the Bible.
All Europeans are white... You mean to tell me Italy is not in Europe or that the amount of melanin in their skin is inconsequential?
What about the Greeks?
I could give two shits about the Bible, but what you are saying is dumb as fuck.
Italians and Irish weren't considered white just 100 years ago. Haven't you seen the photos of signs posted on US shops that read "Help Wanted, Irish and Italians need not apply!" ?
Like I said, more Olive toned. Sorry it offends you but ancient Europeans, especially people in the Italian peninsula and Greece didn't exactly look like the Europeans of today, being as most of them came from a different part of the world
They weren't white people who left the middle east, they were middle eastern people who eventually turned white due to the different climate conditions of the area.
Not dumb as fuck, nuanced. History is neat like that
The Ashkenazi Jews seem to have bred with people in the area of Russia/Ukraine millennia ago and that's why you have more Eastern European looking Jewish people. It isn't because of climate per se.
Good info. Looks like I'm the one here who is dumb as fuck.
Even relatively recently, Italians weren't really considered "white", especially by Americans. The KKK considered them "coloured" people with their olive skin and dangerous Catholicism. There was a big wave of "italiapobia" in the late 19th/early 20th century.
The governer of Louisiana in 1911 described Italians as "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in their habits, lawless, and treacherous".
People can be pretty terrible when it comes to race and ethnicity.
Sicilians weren't seen as Italians by other Italians because Arabs had held Sicily for centuries. This is also why some did not see the Spanish as white.
My grandmother's mortgage paper from 1955 had a clause to check to see if the Italian quota had been hit before offering the home for sale to Italians. Of course you couldn't sell to black or Jewish people. This was in Northern NJ.
Got any further readings for this? Thank you for sharing that knowledge. Yeah racists are going to racist
Sure! I stole the quote from the wiki article: Anti-Italianism
This article was also pretty interesting: https://accenti.ca/jim-crow-and-italian-immigrants-in-the-american-west/
There's also an interesting series of short US LIbrary of Congress sources for history classrooms on immigration that has a section on Italians too: https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/italian/under-attack/
I can't vouch for the veracity of any of these since it's not really my field but it's interesting to see how how stuff like this has shifted over time and where the parallels to modern racism and xenophobia are.
You're not dumb as fuck.
It's a common misconception. Wasn't even really until around the time of Queen Isabella (Might have the wrong queen as it's pretty late here) that fair skin was considered preferable and a sign of religious purity.
Humans are a weird species.
To expand on this with some small context albeit way older than the Romans. Egyptians gave the Peleset land in the Levant. Theorised that they were warrior peoples of the sea and the Philistines of biblical text somewhere in the late second millennium BC before the bronze age colapse. There is an incredible documentary by Pete Kelly (History Time) on youtube. Well worth the watch. Another great video he did about the Akkadians called The first Empire. He also did a great video about the Hittites. His whole channel is a goldmine of knowledge of the ancient world.
Any way the ancient world is filled with peoples from all over, moving around. Trade was a major factor. War was another. People from all over the Mediterranean and beyond mixed knowledge, their trades, their crafts, blood on battlefields and likely genes. Probably long before there was a written word pressed in clay.
Were all muts.
Sure, but we all know you're a liar, who tells one truth per dragonbreak. Where did you get a potion of eternal youth anyway?
M’aiq is very practical. He has no need for mysticism.