This article is basically about right-wingers getting angry about The Odyssey while the film has done very well at the box office.
Maybe some right-wing people just like getting angry when there’s really not much reason to get angry.
This article is basically about right-wingers getting angry about The Odyssey while the film has done very well at the box office.
Maybe some right-wing people just like getting angry when there’s really not much reason to get angry.
If we’re going to be pedantic about the historical definitions of whiteness, than it should be noted that the concept of race (and especially of “whiteness”) didn’t exist back then. You were either Greek (preferably from one of the more respectable city-states), or a barbarian.
Cleopatra was Greek, and would’ve looked roughly like a Greek person today, which people do generally consider white in America today. Hell, even plenty of Turks call themselves white these days, and it’s not like you could tell the difference at a glance anyways.
Exactly, that’s my point. Race is a stupid concept.
White people are typically shocked that there are ethnic groups in Africa, and it’s not all just “assorted blacks.” And that they don’t really all get along.
Meanwhile, I once explained the Balkan wars to people I worked with in West Africa. One of them genuinely asked “What? Why? They’re all white!”
Or rather, it did, sort of, but it had very different baggage than it has now. The ancient Greeks knew about Ethiopians, and described their physical appearance. They also distinguished Greeks from one another by hair color and skin tone: Achilles was blond (or maybe red-haired-- classical Greek color terms are unclear); Odysseus dark-skinned (for a Greek). “White-armed” (famously applied to Helen) was a desirable womanly attribute, more because it implied the woman wasn’t doing work outside in the sun. But we don’t know if “white” meant like milk, or just not tanned as much as a peasant.
Turkey’s unusual, since the urbanites are mainly Mediterranean-looking, but some of the peasants from the hinterland look lighter-skinned and sometimes blond and blue-eyed.
If you look at old paintings, the orginal generation of Turkish invaders looked very much like Mongols (there are quite a few portraits-- the Turks back then were Muslim but didn’t observe the modern prohibition on making pictures of people-- the Sultans liked to hire Venetian portrait painters). Since then, they’re intermarried with the locals to such an extent that their appearance is just like the pre-Ottoman-invasion population of Asia Minor.