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greenwich26 | 4 years ago

I was responding to his lengthy diversion on the commutabality of British and Italian actors, which seems to be rooted in the delusional American notion (dating back to the late 19th century, recently revived by lefties who deny the existence of white native European nations) that Italians aren't "white". In reality, Italian and British phenotype variation overlaps significantly.

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simias|4 years ago

The concept of whiteness, and even more the USA concept of whiteness is a very recent construct, I'm not really sure I understand the point of studying ancient Rome through that lens.

I'm from the South of France and now live in Portugal, it's not rare to find people who have a rather dark complexion despite being what I'd call "white", especially if they spend a lot of time outside. But maybe Americans would consider them "latinos"? Or is that more of a cultural adjective? I don't really know and I don't really care.

At any rate if we ignore these modern semantic arguments and return to the point of the article, I would agree with them that I highly doubt that the Roman senate looked that much like an offshoot of the British parliament: https://i0.wp.com/acoup.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Sena...

notahacker|4 years ago

Considering that the author does extensively discuss what he considers to be ahistorical British diction in the Latin speaking, and that Romans (even those that were from Italy!) were much more visibly ethnically varied than modern Italian regional groups, and doesn't at any point raise the 19th century politican position that Italians were insufficiently white to deserve prestige in or even admittance to the United States, that seems to be rather a lot of projection on your part

imbnwa|4 years ago

And all of your ancestors were at some point dark-skinned like many Africans but with light-colored eyes (paler skin would come later IIRC)

zozbot234|4 years ago

I thought the "dark skin" bit was widely misinterpreted, and with better evidence it was more like olive-colored or brownish, but not really black. Of course many (Northern!) Africans have brownish skin.

foldr|4 years ago

'White' is an arbitrary category based loosely (but not solely) on appearance, so it's not as if 19th century Americans were objectively wrong to classify Italians as non-white. It's just that the categorization scheme has changed somewhat over time. (Obviously, this does not excuse the racism directed at Italians at the time based on the perception that they were not white.)