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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

> Just two of them are not white—both hailing from South Asia—and none is black.

"Whiteness" is a US concept, which doesn't make much sense in a German context. That sentence only tells me that some South Asians are neither white nor black.

I have no idea how they'd classify e.g. Turks. I think Greeks are considered white in the US, so maybe Turks too.

The other big immigrant group in Germany are Vietnamese, but they're kind of hamstrung by mostly having moved to East Germany. (East Germans in general are economically disadvantaged.)

I think statistics about ethnicity would be more useful if they were based on easily interpretable categories like own country of birth, country of birth of parents, grandparents, etc.

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>"Whiteness" is a US concept, which doesn't make much sense in a German context.

This is true, unfortunately the supremacy of American culture over the last century means that all of these concepts that do not fit very well into other contexts have been exported, I often run into situations in Denmark that would be horrifyingly racist in the U.S (not to say that Denmark doesn't have it's own racist traditions, but the grafting on of the American viewpoint does not exactly fit).

Of course when the concept is exported it in some way becomes the thing over time, and then people try to import the solutions to the problem.

Wait... how could Greeks not be considered white? I’m afraid to ask, but what would a “white” European consider the race of Greeks to be?

I'm pretty sure these racial categories are American abstractions, whose names have only reflected their composition in recent decades. The Irish, for instance, were long not considered 'white'; they were just 'Irish'.

So, white and off-white (I.e., lesser whites)?

And white-adjacent.

I live in the US, but was born and raised in France and Greeks are considered white there. If the 1998 football team described as "black-blanc-beur" had included players of Greek descent (and maybe it did?), they would have been part of the "blancs", just like Youri Djorkaeff.

Take what you read with a grain of salt. I'm certainly very skeptical of the implied claim that Germans wouldn't consider Greeks as white.

Note that being considered white doesn't preclude Greeks from being discriminated against, just like some people discriminate against e.g. white Poles.

Greeks, like Armenians in USA are kind of a tossup case, see for example the YA novel "The Westing Game" where a black character compares themselves to a Greek with darker skin

Depends on the place and the person, but some certainly are racist against Greeks.

The point is that Germans are not in the habit of classifying people by race unless they're racist, and even then they don't tend to think in terms of Whites vs Blacks. For Nazis, it's about Aryans vs Jews, where the "Aryan race" is considered to consist of tall, blond, blue-eyed people. Most Greeks would not be considered Aryan, as would most Germans, for that matter.

I find it quite telling that you are surprised Greeks might be considered anything but white, while not showing any surprise about Turks. I don't think there's any difference in skin color, so that confirms my suspicion that "whiteness" isn't just about looks.

> I find it quite telling that you are surprised Greeks might be considered anything but white, while not showing any surprise about Turks. I don't think there's any difference in skin color, so that confirms my suspicion that "whiteness" isn't just about looks.

There are many more people of Greek descent than of Turkish descent in the USA. It's very possible that the person you replied to is simply not familiar enough with people of Turkish descent to express surprise at your claim.

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