@Invictus,
Salt-and-pepper in light brown or blond hair looks pretty bad. But I've got dark brown hair (almost black). It shows up faster, but I'd say it looks downright distinguished.

Yeah, graying darker hair adds a touch of class and distinction to a man. I remember those days before I was full on grey. Now I have the totally grey distinguished look going on. Too bad I have the fat slob who doesn't take care of his body look going on below the shoulders. :-)

I was blonde as a child, and it switched suddenly over about six months. Hopefully the same will happen, but I should have at least 10 years left if Pappa Invictus' hair is anything to rely on.


But yeah, Jesus and Santa are white and it doesn't matter.

@Invictus - My hair turned dark around 7th grade. All my elementary pictures have me with blonde hair. My dad was the same. In fact, if you look at pictures of him at 10 and me at 10, you have to either notice the fact mine are in color or look at the surroundings to realize his was taken around 1953 and mine around 1976 (I said when we were 10, not born, so that should tell you both of ours age).

Well, Santa's fictional, and every culture and every generation seems to add to or change the lore as they see fit, so whatever shit people want to make up about Santa, I'm cool with it.

As to Jesus, the one think I know is that the painting they had of him in my Sunday School class where he had blue eyes and blond hair... that's probably not accurate.

I think everybody wants to picture their god looking like them. Maybe this is why early Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, had prohibitions on creating images of their gods. Islam goes one further and prohibits images of people and animals, too. There was a big split over that question in the early Christian church, too, with Coptic Christians saying no to images and Roman Christians adopting a lot of Greco-Roman traditions. It actually came up again during the reformation, Protestants sacking Catholic churches to destroy the icons and statues, accusing them of idolatry.

I think that, because we're so surrounded by TV and print imagery, we sometimes overlook the psychological power of images as well as they did.

^ Lost my train of thought there... I meant to say that we overlook the psychological power of images, or don't appreciate it as well as they did.

Blonde hair Jesus? I always saw him with dark brown or black hair and a strong hawkish/Jewish nose (so much a stereo type, I know) but soft facial features showing compassion. I guess the picture in Sunday School had some blond highlights which were actually reasonable considering how much time he would have spent in the sun.

Blonde Jesus! New band name! Called it!

And their first song could be Santa Penguin (sung to the tune of Santa Baby made popular by Eartha Kitt).

On the olive-toned thing again:

Perhaps I have a different shade in my head for "olive-toned" than everyone else here does, since everyone seems to associate that with he Greeks and Italians...

Which I'd call very tan, but not quite "olive-toned." Maybe very tan IS olive-toned for some...but...

I don't know--at what shade to you cease being a white person and now become "black," or "olive-toned," or whatever else? It seems shades of grey--or tan--to me, and it probably doesn't help I'm red-brown colorblind (red-green and blue-purple, too) so if there's a striking difference regarding those two colors or how they mix in what people consider olive-toned, maybe I can't see it...

So it's probably just me seeing the color slightly differently or something, buy yeah...the skin tone for the Greeks and Italians isn't what I meant, so if that was in error, I'll take that back.

"What are you even talking about? Semites are "white," according to the ultimately meaningless racial categories people create. White people aren't only pale wraiths like Conan O'Brien."

Again, I look at Middle Easterners today...even the Semites...

They have what I'd consider darker skin.

Granted I--despite my sunny So. Cal location--AM a white wraith a la Conan (albeit not quite that pale, but I used to be just as pale or pretty damn close) so maybe I have a different idea of whiteness than others.

To me, Semites don't fit in neatly, white or non-white, there are pale folks like me, but unless Jesus stayed indoors all the time and had housing that was 2,000 years ahead of its time, chance are he wasn't pale like me, and then there are the darker-skinned folks.

That was always part of the problem with the Semites/Jews in Europe, besides the whole, you know, charge of deicide and first the Catholic Church and then Martin Luther acting like an asshat--

They didn't neatly fit in.

Shylock doesn't neatly fit into Venice...
Roy Cohn doesn't fit in with the others in "The Sun Also Rises"...
The Jewish Count doesn't quite fit in in Djuna Barnes' "Nghtwood"...
T.S. Eliot wrote about the Jews not quite fitting in...

I dunno how where they fit in as "white people"...

But maybe I'm conflating people with culture...but then, isn't that how we define people?

To me, "white" today means Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, with Israel counting a bit because Europeans came there two and settled but they were European Jews so maybe not or maybe so and Israeli Jews are definitely darker-skinned and I don't know...

I just thought it was stupid to hate on people wanting a Black Santa...

Again, if he's a fictional character, and his race doesn't matter--and I challenge you to say it does--who cares? We can have a black Hamlet, why not a black Santa?

And as for Jesus...

I can only say I don't think of a Greek/Italian skin tone but an Israeli/Palestinian/Middle Eastern skin tone, and for me, those are two very different shades of...tan. Oy.

http://www.solveisraelsproblems.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Israeli-women-22.jpg

She is Israeli (and pretty damned *hot*) and has the skin tone I would picture for Jesus. She ain't black. She ain't Latino. She ain't Asian/Eastern. She is considered white by all of society except maybe Obiwanobiwan. But this is no different than Obi's old self going "well I define it this way, fuck how society defines it."

Obiwan, you brought this on yourself by clicking on something that had "Fox News" written on it.

Who cares what Megyn Kelly thinks or says? She's just some bimbo meant to bring rednecks under the spell of conservative money.

Oh, and Obi, I am Dichromatic colorblind (not the more common and less debilitating Deuteranomalous), so lame ass excuse.

I remember a professor of mine in graduate school shocking the room by proclaiming that "Jesus looked more like Osama bin Laden than he did anyone in this room."

Which, upon a moment's reflection, was undoubtedly true.

Absolutely true. Lose the turban, keep the long beard...

Oh, and Moses? Probably the much-debated "Semitic olive color" from the past page or two, but his wife was undoubtedly African black. There was a whole thing where God cursed Moses' siblings with leprosy (white skin! get it?) for their racist attitude about her.

There is some debate to Moses color as he was recognized as an Egyptian when he ran away after killing the one Egyptian that was beating a Hebrew slave and it is pretty well established that the Egyptians at the time were a much darker skin - maybe not as dark as Seal, but probably darker than Halle Berry or Obama (both of whom are mixed race).

You know an interesting one on Jesus? What if he was fat?

Think about it. Pharisees called him a "glutton," he had enough meat on his bones to survive a 40-day fast (with no indication of a miracle) ...

Pretty slender evidence either way, but I think it's pretty safe to say he didn't look like the blonde blue-eyed European-looking guy with a pointy beard that's on the wall of your average Sunday school room.

Can we pause for a second and explain to me how nothing was made of krellin's creation of a fictional Aftican-American Santa equivalent whose initials were KKK? Since when are we above troll feeding?

Actually, Jesus being a carpenter and not having a place to lay his head probably ate very little. As far as surviving a 40 day fast, I give you this:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Gandhi_spinning.jpg

@Draug,

"Actually, Jesus being a carpenter and not having a place to lay his head probably ate very little."

Yeah, but he probably drank like a fish. I mean, if I could turn water to wine, I'd *never* be sober. Especially if the wine were unpretentious, am I right?

"I don't know--at what shade to you cease being a white person and now become "black," or "olive-toned," or whatever else?"

More nonsense. If the Roman census Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem for had the same racial criteria as the United States census does for race, then they'd be counted as "white." Since race is biologically meaningless, these arbitrary definitions are all we can go on.


"But maybe I'm conflating people with culture...but then, isn't that how we define people"

You are. And doing it with even sloppier reasoning than normal.

If your ancestry is from a green country on this map, you're "white" for the purposes of the US census. Again, since race is a social rather than biological category arbitrary definitions like this are all we can go on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:800px-US_Census_2000_race_definitions_Australia_Sudan_Afghan.PNG

@Invictus,
It's pretty evident that a Roman Census would not have counted Jews the same as Romans. Given the enmity and resistance to the Roman empire in Judah, they would certainly have been seen as other. Syrians, Persians, and Carthaginians were treated as racially "other" within the Roman empire, and likely the Romans would have viewed Jews as either similarly distinct, or as some sub-group of Syrians.

q.v. Isaac, Benjamin, "The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity," Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

You've chosen the least important thing to nick-pick over. Of course the Romans wouldn't have used the same system as the contemporary United States. That's so obvious I expected it to pass unsaid. It's nothing but a thought experiment.

Right... and I'm just saying they'd most likely have had boxes for Roman, Egyptian, Carthaginian, Barbarian, Persian, African, and Syrian. And they'd most likely have had Joseph and Mary tick "Syrian".

Point is, maybe they wouldn't have called it "White," but Jews would have been racially "other" in some way.

They wouldn't have looked at people's ancestry at all, since the census was just to calculate population and how much tax could be rung out of the masses. Plus, there probably wasn't a census like is portrayed in the Bible anyway.

Again, you're missing the entire point of what I was saying.

Get help.