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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   32014 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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So yeah, unless Ben Franklin was a very weird outlier, I would say there's been an "expansion" of "whiteness" over time.

He's claiming Swedes aren't white. Swedes are obviously completely maxed out on whiteness genetically like all other Northern Europeans. We know Swedes, Germans and Russians are pale as can be and Franklin is an outlier and just plain wrong here.

I believe Sweden at the time included parts of Finland, the native inhabitants of which I am given to understand actually aren't all that white. (Regardless I don't think the Swedes are maxed out on whiteness genetically, I believe that is the Irish.)

Similar deal in Russia, too, which has groups that don't exactly code as "white."

I don't think his is entirely a minority view, at least as regards Italians, Spanish, etc.

Sweden had lost Finland to Russia relatively recently, and both Sami and Finns are extremely northern euro looking. Russia had also not expanded as much into Central Asia and Siberia as it later would.

Just from Wikipedia, the older photographs of Sami people often look a bit like the Inuit to me (of course, they are black-and-white photographs!).

I found one article that says it used to be common to suspect the Sami were of Mongol extraction, and some of them do appear similar, but (at least according to one theory) this is because the Sami were not an agricultural people and so they retained facial features that largely disappeared in other Europeans.

That seems sufficient to me to explain why, despite the Sami often having pale skin, Race Enthusiasts tended to classify the Sami as non-white.

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