Did the Greeks see themselves as white, black, or something else? | Hacker News Reader

Did the Greeks see themselves as white, black, or something else?

aeon.co

69 pointsdiodorus93 comments

Greeks didn't care for black or white -- they cared for cultural ties (language, religion, customs, etc).

Their word to collectively describe foreigners is literally "those who speak in an indecipherable language": "barbarians", where "bar-bar" was meant to be a vocalization of a random foreign language (like we would say "blah blah").

That said, they were white in the sense that modern Greeks, southern italians, and middle easterns (Egyptians, Lebanese and so on), eastern turks, and so on, are white. And modern Greeks still are closely related to those ancients according to studies [1][2], so you could look at George Stephanopoulos (both parents Greek-American immigrants) for a quick example.

There weren't however "white" with a modern European and American conception of "whiteness" which restricts it to anglosaxon populations.

In fact when they started immigrating to the US in the late 19th, early 20th century, they were considered decidely "non-white" material, and were subject to abuse and racist attacks (including being a major target for the KKK) [3][4]. At the time, the same was true also for Italians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Jews, and so on -- even Japanese and Chinese immigrants.

Generally, "white" then was whatever fitted the WASP look and worldview. So it wasn't just about skin pigmentation.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do-have...

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-analysis-sheds...

[3] https://ahepa.org/about-us.htm

[4] https://www.thenationalherald.com/171404/no-greeks-need-appl...

> There weren't however "white" with a modern European and American conception of "whiteness" which restricts it to anglosaxon populations.

I don't know what era is referred to as modern, but southern Europeans, some Middle Easterners, and eastern Europeans are considered white in the US today.

>I don't know what era is referred to as modern, but southern Europeans, some Middle Easterners, and eastern Europeans are considered white in the US today.

That wasn't the case for much of the 20th century -- and you'd be surprised even for today if you speak to them about their experiences re: racism.

I agree with your comment about much of the 20th century, which is why I prefaced my comment the way that I did.

I'm in one of those categories and I've experienced extremely minimal racism in the US. I think the UK has more racism against my category.

I think that "some Middle Easterners" is the most controversial category in my list. I have a hard time imagining that Bashar al-Assad would experience very much racism if he were a normal private person.

Arabs are considered white according to U.S. law, but a "visible minority" according to Canadian law. So yes, they're out on the fringe of the radial category of whiteness.

I should have linked to this in my original post, but here is a photograph of Bashar al-Assad. I'm not familiar with Canadian or even US law, but I have a hard time imagining him as a visible minority in the colloquial sense.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Bashar_a...

I have no doubt that Mohammad bin Salman would experience racism in the US if he were a normal private person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_bin_Salman#/media/Fil...

This is also why I said some Middle Easterners rather than all.

You're right, in that it's much milder (and not violent) in the 21st century. No discriminatory laws, publicly acceptable hate speech, beatings, etc anymore -- which all use to be for those groups.

That said, an e.g. Egyptian, or Middle Eastern or a Greek etc with darker complexion, can and do get "soft racism" -- people swearing at them, communities feeling uneasy about their presence, and so on, have heard several such stories from first person accounts when collecting information for a project. They simply don't look like clean cut all-American boys and girls.

Not sure how it's in the UK though.

I'll add another article to your list:

https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/the-making-of-th...

The idea of race is much newer than people realize.

I was talking to a (modern) Greek friend of mine[1] the other day about Giannis Antetokounmpo, and whether he would be considered "Greek". The cultural ties were certainly more important than skin color (or even recent ancestry).

[1] Hi Stavros!

He could be considered Greek by nationality (he was born there and was a citizen of the country), and Greek by culture (he was raised there, spokes the language, etc), just not Greek by ethinicity (he doesn't share a generational lineage or has shared history with the ancestors of most people living in Greece).

This is often difficult to be understood in a place like the US, where everybody is from somewhere else and only came there recently-ish (even the arrival of Columbus is not much in European, Asian, etc historical terms), and thus there's not much of any collective ethnicity -- and people soon learn to shred their prior (pre-immigration) ethnic traits and norms in order to fit.

> Their word to collectively describe foreigners is...

No it's not. bar bar is not directly similar to bla bla, except for the repetition. The phonetics can't be glossed over.

bleh- is a reconstructed proto-indo-european root (also bhle) meaning to swell, and if that isn't clear enough on its own consider the descendent to blow, German blasen and compare that to bubble, german Blase or to bubble, German blubbern in the sense to swall, blurb, bla blah. Surely that seems sound immitative anyway.

I don't know a root for "bar", but consider German brabbeln in the same sense, which looks to have a semitic influence. This might be sound immitatitive for all I know. Anyhow I find more interesting barde (the singer) compared to persian barde (slave), if you think of enslaved eunuch singers as a semantic link. And then consider that foreigners became enslaved often enough.

I mean, they literally cut young boys balls off, like with cattle. Because of taboo and social stigma, I think such a connection would not survive very long. But I know very little about Persian, so this is entirely speculative. The singing barde sense has an entirely different root in PIE, but beyond that, who knows? There's no timeline for PIE and internal reconstruction is, well, I'm not going to try it here. Anyhow, a semantic relation between slaves and praise, or at least a positive connotation can be observed in persian. Slavery like racism really seem to be deeply ingrained in culture.

There's also barb as in barb-wire, cognate to beard, with a different root given by scholars (celtic bardos, < PIE gwerhd), but who knows. I find the bearded, unshaven ones* as description for barbarians kind of entertaining. In the same sense, incivil ruffian in allusion to slavery I have to guess that a barbarian might well be a slaver, slave trader.

Do I need to mention "Babel" related to incomprehensible language?

Also, I cannot find a root for brat beyond Old English, but I wouldn't find a connection surprising, compared to the etymology of Ger. Mädchen (girl, compare, maid, house maid, maiden) and also perhaps boy, girl, garcon (I am not quite sure). Consider that by archaic social norms, women were treated as slaves of the patriarch, father or brother, e.g. literally sold of if money was tight, in the worst case.

So, the etymology of bar bar is inconclusive from where I am standing, but "sound immitative" is hardly ever convincing for words with a long history.

PS: to the b/w question, compare that to dark or shiny, considering some supposed etymologic theories of aryan (e.g. golden or noble), and that the Median Empire reached into the area of modern greece, or that it's not even clear where the Persians came from before they reached mesopotamia.

>No it's not. bar bar is not directly similar to bla bla, except for the repetition. The phonetics can't be glossed over.

I didn't say that bar-bar is "blah". Just that bar-bar is a vocalization of foreigners speaking, like blah itself is a vocalization of someone speaking.

The rest of the details are not really relevant to the more specific (and less about the word barbaric or blah and their etymology and phonetics) thing that what I was saying -- which was simply that "barbari", the ancient Greek word for foreigners meant literally people speaking a different language (whether the vocalization was formed in Ancient Greece or PIE is not really relevant. It was still understood as "foreign speakers" by ancient Greek and only later took the "culturally foreign or not as developed" as a connotation).

>I don't know a root for "bar", but consider German brabbeln in the same sense, which looks to have a semitic influence. This might be sound immitatitive for all I know.

It is "sound imitating", as a vocalization.

"The term originates from the Greek: βάρβαρος (barbaros pl. βάρβαροι barbaroi), which in turn originates from the incomprehensible languages of early Anatolian nations that were heard by the Greeks as "bar..bar.." In Ancient Greece, the Greeks used the term towards those who didn't speak Greek and follow classical Greek customs" (Wikipedia)

Yes, you are right, there was a non sequitur as my mind raced ahead. The point is: neither is bar bar the only term, nor is your rather neutral translation "foreigner" very apt -- minor inconsistencies that never the less prompted me to respond.

I simply find it very unlikely that an onomatopoeia would spontaneously achieve word quality with suffixes, inflections and all that jazz. Classical Greek and Latin are preceded by a long pre history of fractured dialects and, well, disputes over territory. By the time they became somewhat standardized, a lot of meaning was ignored and conflated. I don't understand how you can find that irrelevant to the origin of a word. I do understand that you feel somewhat overrun. I didn't mean to discount the theory, just noting that it is (likely) not the full story.

By the way I found that ''to boil'' is derived from a root bher-, rather close to bhel-. Certainly boiling creates bubbles. All the while warmth is a positive term. Also, to bear'' comes from a similar root. And those d not seem to be purely PIE innovations.

Compare for example

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AE%D8%B1 (Arab. "karra" - 1. ''to murmur, bubble, gurgle''; but also 2. ''to fall, sink, prostrate oneself'' ... "to fall at somebody's feet?") (Pers. "xar" - 1. ''donkey, fool''; 2. ''idiotic''; 3. ''big, great'')

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AC%D8%B1 (Arab. "jarra" - ''to pull, draw, stretch, rob, cause, drive slowly, pasture freely'' and then some)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AD%D8%B1 (Arab. 1. "hurr" - ''free, unimpeded, set free, born free, noble, unmixed''; but also 2. "harr" - ''heat, burning'')

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AC%DA%91 (Urdu: root, foudation, but also stupid, lifeless)

Interestingly, I found ''donkey'' and ''big, great'' are supposed to be near homophone in old Egyptian as well https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EA%9C%A5%EA%9C%A3#Egyptian.

The way I heard the story of ''barbar'', Germanic Vandals called the folks on the African north coast Barbarians, also because of the language. Today still called Berbers. I am aware that Slavic languages follow a similar paradigm, Czechs call Germans "nemcie" - ''mutes''. At the same time, the origin of the word slave from Slavs is contested, so what do I know.

Nevertheless, you might know the words ''Habiru''. Consider that in context. Also, "hurr" above reminded me of "Hurrian", but that's barely a hunch.

>I simply find it very unlikely that an onomatopoeia would spontaneously achieve word quality with suffixes

Why would you say that? There are countless directly onomatopoetic words (names of animals, natural phenomena etc) in all languages, including English, and I suspect that the deeper you look the more you'll find. How would word roots be invented in the first place if not through onomatopoeia or at least as ideophones?

I say this to justify a theory. Hence I focus on the theory and not to discredit another theory as a strawman. But I noted that I would if called on, so here goes:

* We know that anciently transmitted etymologies are unreliable. They were prone to folk etymology as much as we are, if not more so.

* I guess the most prolific onomatopoeia are simply way way older than this word. And they proliferate because a cuckoo really doesn't make any other sound than that. Whereas language is a lot more diverse. It might have frequent recognizable features, even ones sounding like "bar", I don't even doubt that. After all we have them too, argh. I can imagine that it is a word pronounced in allusion to the foreign language, even a foreign word.

* I also hear the theory that some sound imitations pop up all over the place, independently. At least that is obviously highly unlikely to have happened here.

* There is very little chance to actually experience a foreigner, which would be needed to reinforce the perception as sound imitation. So it's more likely this was told as a joke for reference. That invites the thought that the joke was just that and outweighed the etymon. Most people don't really care about etymology anyway.

* Ideophone fits the idea much better.

* It's childish; foreign policy is not.

> I say this to justify a theory.

Well then your theory is wrong, there are numerous onomatopoetic words that have suffixes etc. Why wouldn't they? No matter what you think about this specific word. I didn't really understand the rest of what you wrote.

>There is very little chance to actually experience a foreigner

Would this be referring to foreigners in Ancient Greece? Then it's just factually incorrect.

I said "spontaneous". see the sibling comment two levels up.

> I didn't really understand the rest of what you wrote.

We know that anciently transmitted etymologies are unreliable

What's so hard to understand about that? I think that's a fact, too.

>I don't understand how you can find that irrelevant to the origin of a word.

No, I meant irrelevant as in that the origin of the word wasn't relevant to what I was discussing: just it's meaning and use by a particular group of people (ancient Greek) over a particular period. The subject, that is, was their attitude towards race and foreigners, not the word "barbarian" per se.

>I simply find it very unlikely that an onomatopoeia would spontaneously achieve word quality with suffixes, inflections and all that jazz.

That said, and entering this (different) discussion, why would it have to achieve it "spontaneously"? You start with the onomatopoeia, and as it's integrated into a language, it gets the standard treatment of "suffixes, inflections and all that jazz".

Greek are very dynamic in adding new words, as they can just add their standard set of suffixes and inflections to a new word and it will fit right in with the rest of the syntax. You just have to decide a few things about the word (e.g. whether it's a male, female or neutral noun for example) and it you can easily make it fully compliant with the rest of the vocabulary.

> why would it have to achieve it "spontaneously"? You start with the onomatopoeia, and ...

Exactly, you don't spontaneously start with suffixes added to a sound imitation. In other words, evidence for the first step is missing. And I claim it doesn't exist, because the derivation was perhaps different.

> standard set of suffixes

-os, as in barbaros, supposedly was nominalizing suffixed to verbs. Is a verb in that sense attested? "brabbeln" (to murmur) as I mentioned? I could also imagine "bare"-naked to describe uncivilized folk. Or consider "bear", because carrying, drawing is what beasts of bur-den frequently do. Indeed, wiktionary has Lithuanian "bernas" (“young, unmarried man; child; boy; servant”) from ... from PIE bʰer-no-s (carrier). I don't know the root to persian "barde" (slave), I suppose this is it. The regular development of PIE bh* is to Greek ph, but to b in avestan (percursor to persian), so I'd assume a borrowing. There is more argument in favour, but also many inconsitencies and arguments against it. Just speculation.

> irrelevant as in that the origin of the word wasn't relevant to what I was discussing

I'm sorry that I had to go off on a tangent but propositions such as this are always difficult to explain because of the inherent uncertainty. And because "No, it means slave" would need an explanation. Certainly though, slavery was very topical. Dumbness is a mild slur in comparison.

Another topical theory of mine is that "Aryan", in one of many semantic levels, if meaning golden, referred to skin color. The meaning noble then would be in contrast to other kin.

>Greeks didn't care for black or white -- they cared for cultural ties (language, religion, customs, etc).

The first part is trivially true, since those concepts only make sense in an American context. They did however know about race, they were certainly aware of the racial difference between themselves and say the Egyptians or Nubians.

I think what confuses modern Americans is that many Ancient peoples (just as many peoples today) lived in ethno-states, or at least ethno-societies. Biological race was so highly correlated with language, culture and religion that there was little basis for the kind of purely biological racism that exists in America.

Thus while on the one hand they would certainly consider most foreigners inferior to themselves, some even subhuman, that wasn't based entirely on biological race, and definitely not on the modern and rather arbitrary white/black distinction.

It seems to me that the modern concept of race is one of the most ingrained illusions in our culture. Discussions of whether some person or some group is "white" or "black" or whatever have no more rigor than asking whether someone is a "jock" or a "nerd". First, there is no clear definition of "white" and "black" or anything else, and even if we take the most common conception of it, most people don't fit neatly into either category. For instance, by US census standards, both a Norwegian and a Yemeni are "white". What about the racial gradient in the region of the Isthmus of Suez? Where do people stop being white and start being black?

Furthermore, most racial conceptions obsess with superficial features that may not correlate with large differences in DNA. There may be two people that look more similar but have wider differences in their DNA than two people that look different.

The funniest thing about this whole ethnostate crap you see being pushed by the alt right is that a lot of these people don't even realize Europeans don't see themselves as one big ethnic group of "white people" - and they literally never have. Hell, they even spend some time in grade school teaching kids about the discrimination early Irish and Italian immigrants faced in America where they weren't considered white or white enough by WASPs.

While technically true, this way of looking at the world feels a little pedantic.

Yes, all words and objects and categories are only leaky abstractions. Our universe is a shimmering swirl of unique patterns, all boundaries ultimately fuzzy.

At the same time, there is observable structure. Words and categories emerge and are judged by their usefulness, how they help us in everyday life -- despite being leaky abstractions. They're never bulletproof descriptions of reality, or you wouldn't be able to say much.

"Jock" vs "nerd", "white" vs "black", "tiger" vs "rock"… Among the infinite axes of how to slice and conceptualize reality, which ones are worth giving a name to? Who decides?

Maybe it's pedantic for you, but it's not pedantic for me and others that are precisely the ones who are stuck in the middle of these vague definitions. I'm called both white and colored in different contexts. It often feels like I get many of the disadvantages of being "colored" while also losing out on opportunities due to my supposed "white privilege".

No doubt. Being uncomfortably stuck in the middle propels action, which is the only thing able to bring about change.

What I was trying to say is that uncomfortable, leaky abstractions are absolutely standard. Is a virus alive or inanimate? Are physics and chemistry distinct disciplines? When does an embryo become a human being?

I wasn't being snarky with my "who decides?". If your actions to change established concepts and words manage to overcome the perceived utility of these concepts and words for others, people will change their vocabulary and the way they view the world. It's happened before. It is an elaborate dance of utility, so keep fighting.

A fascinating look at race and color among the Ancient Greeks, and well-contextualized.

It's as if the author is trying to exonerate the ancient Greeks from the pervasive ideological racism (I really wish there was a more specific word for this phenomenon than "racism" as ot is a complex result of many things) of modern European history by demonstrating that "white" and "black" races did not exist with them, or at least not in any form we would recognize.

But white + black != racism. Even if the categories came later, Aristotle did introduce the idea of the "natural slave," or the claim that certain races of people are only fit to be subjugated in forced labor to others. That's pretty much the essence of racism. The priests Christianized it, while the merchants learned the practice of transoceanic slaving from the North Africans. It's more like a pasta salad of evil with ingredients from all over the world.

Does the term racial identity fit? It's feeling a belonging to a race but without racist implications.

>It's as if the author is trying to exonerate the ancient Greeks from the pervasive ideological racism

Well, they didn't have "pervasive ideological racism". Even making someone a slave (which they did practice) wasn't about considering them inferior -- just considering it just spoils for them having lost a war.

And they could care less if those were black or white or whatever. They could (and did) make slaves of people in the nearby city-states as well.

Aristotle's idea of a "natural slave" wasn't really widespread as a cultural norm them. That would happen much later, especially with later Christianism, and would find it's ideological justification with colonialism and writers like Gobineau.

The author just posed questions, arguments and opinions but nothing substantive. The subject of race has always been fluid. For instance, in the US Census Arabs, Turks and Italians are considered white yet neither resemble a Russian, Finn, or Swede.

If one looks to Egypt, Italy, Greece and Turkey circa 3,000 years ago, or all those countries within the Mediterranean basin, there is substantial evidence that the average "racial genotype" is much like it is today. (a mixed race hybrid between shades of beige and vey dark brown.)

Visual evidence can be seen when Comparing "Miss Egypt 2006"... http://www.santabanta.com/photos/miss-universe-2006/619218.h...

...To the Egyptian wall paintings of King Tutankhamun's tomb: https://www.timesofisrael.com/secret-tut-chamber-egypt-calls...

Both representations above have straight hair, medium brown skin and awesome physiques.

Maybe I’m getting cynical, but I feel like The author just posed questions, arguments and opinions but nothing substantive. is basically Aeon in a nutshell these days.

> US Census Arabs, Turks and Italians are considered white yet neither resemble a Russian, Finn, or Swede.

It goes to show how silly these questions are. Would a Greek Byzantine frame himself as the same race as an invading Ottoman? Assuredly not. Race being purely a matter of skin color is a modern idea.

The thoroughly unscientific construction of “race” doesn’t correspond to phenotypes or genotypes. Saying “racial genotype” is an oxymoron.

"We might add that modern geneticists too find classification by skin colour unhelpful, and indeed avoid the term ‘race’ (a meaningless category in biological terms)."

But it's good enough for government work...

"There is relatively little genetic difference between the human populations of different continents"

There is relatively little genetic difference between dog populations on different continents...

"and levels of skin pigmentation are a very poor proxy for general genetic relatedness. The distinction between ‘black’ African and ‘white’ European peoples, then, is not just unGreek: it’s also unbiological."

Completely wrong... if you're judging just between black Africans and white Europeans then it is a pretty good proxy for general genetic relatedness. It is absolutely insane to think otherwise.

Color of skin is a completely unhelpful concept, which can only be the product of a culture create by extremely white people. Just consider for example the fact that in India people in the same region vary considerably is skin tone. Similarly, in Africa there is a huge diversity of skin colors. The same can be said of the nations living around the Mediterranean. Skin color is a stupid way to classify people, and is a sub product of northern European cultures.

> Completely wrong... if you're judging just between black Africans and white Europeans then it is a pretty good proxy for general genetic relatedness. It is absolutely insane to think otherwise.

Skin color is not a good proxy for genetic relatedness because it's only one of the many different traits that make up a human.

You would surely agree that two humans with different skin colors but all else equal are more closely related than two with the same skin color but nothing else in common.

And it turns out that is exactly the case. Africa has the most genetic variation since it's the origin of humans so a black African can very well be much more related to a white European than to another black African.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation

In computer science terms it would be trying to do a dimension reduction by only naively comparing the first coordinate. That would work only if skin color is the principal component of genetic diversity but it's pretty unlikely and insane to declare that a priori.

Your link directly contradicts the paragraph that precedes it.

What? I just read the link and one thing it says is that

> In general, however, an average of 85% of genetic variation exists within local populations, ~7% is between local populations within the same continent, and ~8% of variation occurs between large groups living on different continents (Lewontin 1972; Jorde et al. 2000a). The recent African origin theory for humans would predict that in Africa there exists a great deal more diversity than elsewhere and that diversity should decrease the further from Africa a population is sampled.

Which is literally what the GP said.

You should put up or not make drive-by comments.

Same quote stated more directly (emphasis mine):

> It is often stated that the fixation index for humans is about 0.15. This translates to an estimated 85% of the variation measured in the overall human population is found within individuals of the same population, and about 15% of the variation occurs between populations. These estimates imply that any two individuals from different populations are almost as likely to be more similar to each other than either is to a member of their own group

Please see my post here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17055327

In your paragraph “similarity” refers to looking at just one genetic locus (essentially one gene) at a time.

>But it's good enough for government work

Government racial data is intended to reflect culture and has nothing to do with genetics, it's not intended to be scientific nor should it.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/note/US/RHI425216

>The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.

Most racial stereotypes we have now are a modern construct. In the ancient world, it was well known that empires/races were powerful or advanced independent of the color of the skin. Many nations of Africa were feared and admired, while many nations of north Europe were simply considered barbaric.

The idea of multiple races of humans existing is post-darwinian (correct me if I am wrong please). I would imagine most humans that lived in the time of the ancient greeks saw different tribes and ethnicities. Even when they see someone from asia or africa, wouldn't they simply see a strange looking human from a strange land and tribe?

The modern view of race that categorizes other ethnicities as almost an entirely different species requires ideological flexibility which to the best of my knowledge isn't compatible with the world view and beliefs of most ancient people.

I am no history buff though, I would be interested in hearing a contradictory point of view.

The concept of "white" is very new, I think it was invented by the Americans. The Greeks definitely didn't think in those terms, their racial consciousness was much more fine grained. They wouldn't have seen much affinity with say the barbaric Germanic tribes of the North just because both peoples were Caucasian.

For them everybody else, with the exception of the Egyptians, where uncouth brutes or at best upstarts, but this was more of a cultural thing than a racial.

"The modern view of race that categorizes other ethnicities as almost an entirely different species"

On the contrary, people have never been less prone to dehumanise others than now. In the Ancient world every civilisation relied heavily on slaves, which definitely where considered less than human. Today it's hard even among hard core Nazis to find someone claiming that other races are non-human. Inferior perhaps, but still human.

According to this wikipedia page, it seems like this idea of race is a few hundred years older than Darwin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_race_concepts#Early...

I don’t think Darwinism has anything to do with racism, except tangentially. Modern racism and the idea of some races being superior was the direct result of colonialism, and evolution was perhaps only one of the tools used to justify white supremacy ( another was Christianity).

It is fascinating to see the dynamism of race in India. The early British (pre 1800s) didn’t seem to hold racist views of the natives, in fact many of them had Indian wives and children, and adopted Indian clothes and culture. Some even converted to Islam, many were fluent in Persian, the language of elites at the time. But that begins to change markedly when British supremacy is assured in secured in the 1800s after many successful wars.

I mean, this isn't exactly a new idea. If you go back to the Roman occupation of the British isles and the slaughter of it's peoples and the enslavement of the Judaic peoples and the Christian cults, based on Judaism. Hitler named his movement the third reich, meaning empire, modeling it after the Roman empire because he was a delusional nutbag but, again, unoriginal. But subjugation or slaughter of different races/tribes/peoples is certainly not a modern white person invention. The Romani have been singled out, more recently, I guess, if you want (they used to be more commonly known as Gypsies, but this is an Eastern European slur, so I've been told).

The whole "colonialism is to blame" is a new argument, to me, though. I do hear a lot more of these, "the past was a utopia, and modernity has screwed things up" statements of late and I can't figure out how..... maybe that wasn't your intention and I totally misread your statement. I apologize if that's the case.

You're mixing different things. "Subjugation or slaughter of different races/tribes/peoples is certainly not a modern white person invention". No, it isn't. But at least in the case of the Romans, there was no racism component in it (I'm not knowledgeable enough to say if other cases were racism related and therefore if it was or wasn't a 'white person invention').

The Romans were quite liberal, once you have let yourself be conquered by them. As long as you recognized the state and paid your taxes, you were free to do what you wanted.

There are very few recorded persecutions of religion cults in non-christian Roman times because of this. Christians, Jews, druids and the followers of Bacchus, they all were considered a threat to the state and that's the reason they were persecuted, not because of some form of racism.

Fine, but Romans aside, no one mentions Japanese, Chinese or Nepalese history. Central African history is whisked away (you ask them if they're the same race, and see what answer you get). The whole conversation is clouded is a horribly eurocentric manner, and put towards a narrative.

I sincerely don't believe you have researched your history well enough; and I'm trying to sound as nice as possible when pointing out this fact.

You don't just throw in entire civilizations as having racist views (at least in the terms that we think of today, according to skin color). AFAIK the Chinese did consider anyone living outside Mainland China as "barbarians" but to a great extent, it was true (Turkic, Mongols living on the border etc.). They considered Ancient Indians in high regard (specifically I believe due to the Buddha being born in India) and the many Chinese travelers through India have left a well documented account of their travels which are one of the most important sources for historic event during this time.

Japan has mostly been a self-contained country, occasionally fighting with Chinese until the Meiji Restoration and the Rise of the Japanese Armed Forces, which was late 19th century. One could credibly argue the racist views they picked up were as a direct result of aping the Western Powers that held similar views during this time period.

I'm not familiar enough with Nepalese history to even know what you are talking about.

Modern Racism is certainly a European invention, specifically brought about by European colonial interests.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_China

> Greeks simply didn’t think of the world as starkly divided along racial lines into black and white: that’s a strange aberration of the modern, Western world, a product of many different historical forces, but in particular the transatlantic slave trade and the cruder aspects of 19th-century racial theory.

Exactly. The theory was developed to justify the prejudice and subordination, not the other way round. The idea of viewing Europe as a single ethnicity labelled "white" is extremely modern-American too.

The black/white thing is an artifact of US slavery. Everyone else has historically allied by religion or national ID.

I'm not sure that's true. It was after all the French and Spanish that had separate names for the 'races' all the way down to at least 1/32nd black with the Mulato, Quadroon etc. distinctions. If you're differentiating between people 5/8 black and 3/4 black it shows you care quite a lot.

Then perhaps it's an artifact of European slavery, spread in modernity through American and British cultural influence.

The French well earned their reputation as running the most barbaric slave plantations in Caribbean history in Haiti, where they explicitly instituted a race based society, where the color of a persons skin determined their social value. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

I don't have anything interesting to say about this, except I loved reading it. I tend to follow a lot of tech stuff, so I don't get outside my tech bubble as far as reading different things goes.

I just really liked it.

What a silly article. They saw themselves as greek, or macedonian, or athenian, or citizens versus slaves. Everywhere in the world people saw themselves and other as where they were from, their culture, etc. Travel was very difficult and most people didn't read, so chances are you'd never see someone from somwhere else with different color or fashion sense.

The first mentions I know of people based on their race in when talking about "the negroe", but it is still implied as being people from Sub Sahaaran Africa, but by virtue of ignorance about individual tribes/regions, a common name was used. I remember a famous criticism to the constitution created after the French revolution that talked about "the rights of men"; instead of the rights of the French, the Englishman, the Turk; which were seen as completely different groups of people given the time and difficulty of travel.

Plus, I dislike the confusion between slavery and racism. People used to take what they wanted by force, and when allowed, they'd take human beings. I doubt it was because they hated other people, instead it was because they were allowed to subjugate other people; motivated by financial/power motives. Enslavement was a common practise until the ideals of humanism won over the super powers of the time; humanism won over human greed.

> I doubt it was because they hated other people, instead it was because they were allowed to subjugate other people

This describes modern racism too.

Since we're at linguistics of colour you might want to know that in modern Greek, the word for "tanning" is "blackening". I don't disagree with the article but I just want to make sure we all know ancient Greeks weren't actually black. You can argue that they weren't "white", at least with the modern American definitions, but there has never been any indication of them being black, you know, like Africans. It's not like their only difference with Caucasians is skin colour, you'd expect the morphological characteristics to show on sculptures too. The idea that Greeks were somehow black is purely the result of revisionist tendencies of modern African-American movements.

I'm not sure what you're criticizing but it's not the article since the article didn't say ancient Greeks were black.

What a silly article. How could they possibly see themselves as white given such limited contact with other peoples? Their entire world was the Mediterranean. You can't shoehorn ancient Greeks into today's ideologies.

Could you please substantiate those claims?

One obvious counterexample is that Alexander the Great's empire reached northwest India. The idea that Greek society would be so isolated from the world – not coming into contact with travelers or traders or captives from beyond the Mediterranean – seems ridiculous to me.

But the overwhelming majority of Greeks would have never seen a Indian or Ethiopian person in their lifetime. Why would they define themselves based on the differences between them, especially superficial ones?

Again: can you please substantiate that?

Speculation isn't worth much. Your intuition is clearly that someone wouldn't define themselves along those lines, but intuitions are often wrong. And it's not obviously and unequivocally true that the overwhelming majority of Greeks would never see someone distinctly foreign looking.

How does one substantiate something that didn't happen? The Greeks made very little discussion of their own skin color and we have no archaeological or literary evidence of Ethiopian or Indian people actually living in Greece. Look at the stretches the author had to make when discussing skin color.

That's frankly rubbish. Chapter 2 of the Acts of the Apostles tells how the Apostles speak in tongues and Acts 2,9-10 lists the nations that were in Jerusalem for Shavuot: Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome.

Given, this is early 1st century AD Jerusalem, not Greece, but classical Athens was no less cosmopolitan, and the gymnosophists were well attested in Alexander the Great's time.

I'm not sure I understand. The places listed are all parts of the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and the Middle East which were largely white by some definition -- at least more-so than people from Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia.

> but classical Athens was no less cosmopolitan

Now this is actually rubbish. The Roman Empire was orders of magnitude more diverse than Ancient Greece ever was.

> the gymnosophists were well attested in Alexander the Great's time.

Sure, they were -- as people who lived in India. There's a huge gulf between knowing of the existence of the outside world and developing modern conceptions of race.

Here's an overly simple example: if I told you there was a race of three-legged Martians would you immediately start defining yourself by your bipedal nature? Probably not. What if a small number of Martians moved to your country and you saw one on the subway one time? Still, probably no. It's not until you're faced with a deeply-connected universal society that includes bipedal, tripedal, and quadrupedal humanoids that you might start thinking that way.

North Africa is right there. And they knew lands beyond:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aethiopia

North Africa was largely populated by people ethnically similar to the Greeks (Carthaginians et al).

They knew about the existence of other races, sure. My point is there was nowhere near enough contact or integration with them for the Greeks to begin defining themselves in relation to them.

Well, the Romans ( a little later but not that much) had no issues with white vs. black, to the point that several empoerors were black:

http://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/rome.htm

>Interestingly, at least ten Africans became Emperors of Rome. They are listed on the historical record as the following: Macrinu, Firmus, Emilianus, Septimius Serverus, Pescennius Niger, Aquilus Niger, Brutidius Niger, Q. Caecilus Niger, Novius Niger, and Trebius Niger who was a proconsul in Spain.

Racism of the white vs. black kind came out much, much later.

There were many prominent Romans from North Africa meaning Carthage (now Algeria/Tunisia) and Egypt. Would you call those people black?

I think there's a credible argument that, to Romans, they were not any more foreign-looking than Celts or Gauls.

The Romans in Britannia thought of the Celts as pale headhunting painted savages. The definition of foreign-looking has shifted over the millennia.

Just because certain Roman officials were from Africa does not mean they were "black" as it would be understood today. Roman Africans were from North Africa. They were either descendants of Roman colonists in North Africa and thus still lighter-skinned, or they were Berbers who had assimilated to Roman culture and ideals. While Berbers can sometimes be swarthier than Europeans, they are not usually considered sub-Saharan-African "black".

And with regard to that website, I would strongly encourage you to get all your information on ancient history from university-press publications instead of amateur websites. There is just too much a risk of encountering crank material on websites, but as that website itself notes, there has been plenty published on this theme by actual scholars.

>And with regard to that website, I would strongly encourage you to get all your information on ancient history from university-press publications instead of amateur websites. There is just too much a risk of encountering crank material on websites, but as that website itself notes, there has been plenty published on this theme by actual scholars.

I pointed to a given list and provided the source I got it from (nothing more, nothing less).

Anyway:

https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/V1N4/thompson.htm...

The Aethiops while not "common" did exist in Rome, different from "dark skinned" North Africans, and characterized by:

>Petronius and the elder Pliny offer crucial information on Roman perceptions of Aethiopes and on the Roman concept Aethiops or 'black African' (Pet. Sat. 101f.; Pliny HN 7.51; cf. Mart. 6.39.6-9): first, mere blackness of skin did not suffice to ensure categorisation as Aethiops, for the categorisation depended on possession of the concomitant characteristics of black African hair, lips, and (according to Martial) nose;

How many Aethiops emperors there were?

I'm not a fan of Taleb, but he has a point:

https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-ge...

Classicism pro tip, if someone says Mary Beard is wrong about Rome, they should be a very accomplished classicist.

Taleb in particular would need a lot of study of history to understand in which way he is wrong. Beard's argument is, that the question of Caesars's race is as perfectly useless as the question if he was a Republican or a Democrat. Sure, we can try to construct something we claim is essential about Democrats and Republicans and then project that back to build something that resembles an argument, it is just that the entire building takes place in the present and therefore does not tell us anything about the past. (The big difference between Republican/Democrat and race is just, that the entire west spent the last 200 years insisting very loudly that race is really, really present in nature.)

> Beard's argument is, that the question of Caesars's race is as perfectly useless as the question if he was a Republican or a Democrat

That's why so many people disagree with her. Yes, she knows a lot about Rome but that doesn't stop her from politicizing her knowledge.

The two sides are talking past eachother: on one hand we can't talk about Caesar's race from a modern standpoint. He wouldn't have framed whiteness (or Italian-ness) in the same way we do. That does not mean we can't talk at all about Roman ethnicity: he was biologically light-skinned.

The trouble is, there are things that are easy and things that are hard. That people lived in the past in what is essentially a different Kuhnian paradigm is one of the really hard things to understand, it takes quite a bit of reading primary sources to develop an intuition about that.

It's quite funny actually that Talib tries to defend himself by quoting Tom Holland, the thing is, Holland is a pop-history writer, that is he specifically works hard to write in a way that these issues are not important to his books.

> That does not mean we can't talk at all about Roman ethnicity:

True, but...

> he was biologically light-skinned.

Ethnicity is shared cultural identity. Biological traits may be important to some ethnic identities, but that is one of the things that changes with cultural context.

If we are going to talk about ethnicity of late Republican Romans, we need to first talk about the nature of ethnic identity in late Republican Time, but once we do that, we'll realize that the whole discussion is probably irrelevant to any current political/ethnic/etc. discussion except by way of providing analogies about human behavior wherein the actual identities involved are largely irrelevant other than for background color.

Maybe accomplished classicists use "accurate" and "typical" differently than other people, but I find surprising that her first comment on the BBC's depiction of this "typical family" (their words) in Roman Britain https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/08/Scre... was that "this is indeed pretty accurate". Apparently she meant just that it was possible, but then how was it "pretty accurate" to describe it as "typical"?

If Taleb’s point is “Taleb doesn't have even a basic understanding of race”, than the point is made very well, if never explicitly stated, in the work you cite.

If it's something else then, I'm going to have to say, no, Taleb doesn't have a point, at least not one which is made well.

It's definitely a silly article, of course the Greeks didn't see themselves as "White", that's a modern concept. But that doesn't mean they saw the world as one big happy family of equals. They disdained almost everyone who wasn't Greek and had no problem at all with slavery.

They also probably knew more about the world than the average American today. Greece was a bustling center of trade and the Greek peoples had numerous colonies. Not to mention, as someone did, Alexander the Great that conquered basically the entire Ancient world.

The author is pulling people's legs. Or very young and truly ignorant to make these suggestions.

Referring to blackness had nothing to do with race, they're talking about people that went outside and worked. That's why the women were "white". Think antebellum south, holding an umbrella.

Even in my own family when someone would come in from working outside in a garden with a tan, my grandma would say their skin was black. It just means tan or darker.

The younger generations born in the last 25 years didn't even experience this world when people commonly left the laptop or phone and still went outside and worked. It's not surprising as a result that we're seeing such gross misinterpretations pop up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com