I always read Katniss and her dad as indigenous american. Her description, the way that her hunting/foraging skills are talked about it and the way that their district is so separated all felt coded that way. Her mum being a fair skinned trader that came into the area and decided to stay against her family's wishes fits too. It even fits with the miners being worked to death by their distant ovelords just with coal instead of precious metals.
Yeah, agreed. Appalachia has a long history of mixed race folks (such as the melungeons, my own family’s heritage) and District 12 is heavily Appalachia-coded.
I think it's really interesting how much of our own cultural context we bring into our reading, because as a European it didn't occur to me when I read the books. But of course it rings true
@@abstractforest4546 Yeah, I figured that Katniss was Melungeon. Also, I thought that District 12 was canonically Appalachia? I haven't engaged with the books or the movie in a long time so I don't remember for sure.
Many actual indigenous Americans have a Caucasian appearance due to mixing with White settlers over the centuries, so Katniss in the films could pass for indigenous. If she is, then her victory over President Snow who's the Panem equivalent of a WASP is symbolic of a future where indigenous people have retaken America from the White man.
I thought they were a just a light blue or a myth until my daughter was born with grey eyes that have not changed and surprised us all. I have blue eyes and my husbands are almost back.
2% of the world is redheaded, 5% is blonde. Media tends to highlight rare individuals for that exotic flare, and through repitition start giving the impression they are more common than they actually are
People really underestimate small percentages, just because something is rare doesn't mean no one has it. I have grey eyes, and one way to visualize percentages like that is to think of 100 people in a room, and then however many people have that trait. I have a class of about a hundred, and I see blonds and redheads every day. Sure, most people aren't, but it's not like their some endangered species just because the percentage is a single digit
For real, the first time I encountered the phrase "olive skin" I was sure the described guy was green and I felt kinda repulsed😂 Then my parents explained to me that it meant light brown
Wait, I thought that’s what it actually meant. Someone who doesn’t have cool, blue undertones, but also doesn’t have warm, golden skin, and instead has undertones of a more neutral green-gray, reminiscent of the muted green of olives. 🤯
trillian in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is described as a "slim, darkish humanoid with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little knob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes" as well as looking "vaguely Arabic" and every adaptation is like "got it, blue eyed north western european woman." cmon guys can you not even spring for a sicilian.
i remember reading hitchhiker's when i was younger and taking the "arabic" description very literally, then her hair would be mentioned and i'd be like..... but she's hijabi we can't see her hair 🤔⁉️⁉️
@@fionnualaz lol same! I always imagined her with a light brown hijab, but the kind where the front of her hair is out. I just assumed she wasn’t very religious
Pedantry corner: the radio series is the original version of Hitchhikers and Trillian isn't described at all but is voiced by Susan Sherdan who was definitely white. (And also, fun fact, voiced Princess Eilonwy in The Black Cauldron)
one could argue she was TOO white compared to her book description! (but as an actress she was absolutely perfect i'm not criticising that casting choice)
@@begaydocrime5719that's what I was thinking. That she was lighter than I expected. She was amazing in that role so I wouldn't say it was a bad casting or anything but I definitely pictured her darker.
@@begaydocrime5719I've talked to my friend about this many times. Her actress is biracial. Objectively she shouldn't have been, but she absolutely DELIVERED the part. I think a lot about the horrifying racism that was directed at the actress in response and what sort of response an even darker skinned black girl might've gotten in response to her casting.
i have always thought that americans probably work very hard to get tan in the same color skin i naturally have due to miscigenation (white brazilian fyi)
Growing up in Africa, when women said tall,dark and handsome, they meant Idris Elba or djimon Hansou. But when I went to America, I found out that Europeans or Americans meant something different 😂😂😂
It turned out, Johnny Cash's wife DID in fact have African ancestry. A few years ago, Rosanne Cash, eldest daughter of Johnny and Vivian Cash, found out that actress Angela Bassett is her cousin from her mother's side of the family. This happened on an episode of "Finding Your Roots"
I remember when the twitter shitshow about Rue happened because I felt so sickened by it. So many fans read how Rue reminded Katniss of Prim and assumed it must also apply to her appearance, when it was their similar gentle personalities that reminded Katniss of Prim. 🙃 How people could boldly declare that her death wasn’t as sad because of her race is still disturbing and breaks my heart.
I thought it was obviously because they were little girls around the same age. Rue represented the very reason Katniss volunteered- to protect an innocent child from participating in a murder game. And I could swear that her race was made very clear in the books. How can people be so delusional?
@@luna-p I agree, it was just a (not so clever) way of saying that I feel OP's heartbreak AND don't understand how people couldn't feel sad at that scene because it always makes me cry
side note on Katniss: I always imagined her as Native. the physical description can be a lot of different backgrounds, but looking at the district she's in makes me think of a reserve. whereas Rue's black and her district is very much either a plantation or prison, Katniss's seemed like a reserve, which made me think she's supposed to be Native. just my personal take.
When takling about Hunger games, lets not forget about Haymitch. He too should have been dark hair/oliveskin/grey eyes like Katniss. A big part of their relationship is built on how alike they are (personalities, backgrounds, experiences) and how Katniss both hates it and trusts him more than almost anyone else. When in the weirdnes of the Capital he is familiar, he grounds her, and looks paly into that. The films really missed that part
@@stephennootens916as someone who likes a little guideline on how to imagine characters, I clocked all the descriptions, especially since the way the characters are describer in the Hunger Games speak to their other qualities as well. Like the one red head from the first book who survived so long by being sneaky and was described as fox like.
I totally missed this coding of Hamish, perhaps I saw clips before/during my reading of the first book. This totally changes their relationship and his character in many ways I think. Thank you for sharing this! Now I am sorry to have missed this reading of the book. Also, being from rural Tasmania, I didn't pick up on the indigenous American coding in general, but feel I could still access many of the other themes and relationships, without picking up on this subtext. I just code for class without the racial link.
The ambiguity around these labels reminds me of years (decades, almost) ago when I (an American) was teaching English in Moscow. I was working with an elementary student on basic language for filling out ID information, and the worksheet we were using had a 'race' section that had a checkbox for 'Caucasian.' My student was really confused and kind of taken aback when I explained that that meant 'white,' asserting that 'Caucasians' weren't white, they were black. From her perspective (and racial and linguistic context), folks from the Caucasus - Georgia and Azerbaijan - were 'black' because of the more common MENA/Mediterranean features there, and were distinct from 'white' northwestern/European Russians.
yep, and russians are also generally straight up racist to these people and any similar nationalities with dark hair/eyes and somewhat darker skin. they're usually portrayed as stupid, dirty, speaking incorrectly, and doing some sort of simple manual labor or being a scammer
This is why whiteness is a totally made up nonsense category simply designed to exclude. It has nothing to do with ancestry or skin tone, it’s just a way to other people who don’t qualify for ever shifting goalposts.
I've always thought it was weird to have 3 adjectives back to back describing a character and two of them define what he looks like and for some reason the one in the middle refers to his personality. So I would just read it as dark-skinned
@@DylanCrossing same. I'm actually surprised that there are people who interpret it as describing a personality even though the preceding and following words were describing the outer appearance.
Now I'm laughing thinking about anytime I'd watch a movie with my mom as a kid where a woman would say she wanted someone 'tall, dark and handsome' and then she'd find her man and in the end I'd be like "awww she never got with the Black man she was looking for" ....not realizing the white guy WAS the "Dark" man she wanted, LORDT.
Please this shit confused me so much as a little brown kid reading books with exclusively white British casts and that was NOT how I pictured them in my head LMAO I was so disappointed 😭😭
Literally this. I was so confused as a kid. Seeing a white face when I hear this phrase is a conditioned response for me. It's like correcting for what society thinks 😅
I'm from Eastern Europe, and when I see 'olive-skinned' in western literature I think first of all of someone from middle east, or pretty much any country around the Mediterranean sea. But you see, a bunch of people in my country, including my mom, tend to become 'olive-skinned' during summer simply by existing under the sun, without tanning intentionally. So if an author from my country described their character as 'olive-skinned' I'd just think of someone who looks like my mom in summer. So it really depends on who the author is and where they're from. The word 'dark', however, doesn't mean anything for me. I wouldn't be able to imagine a character described as 'dark' without further clues. And even if I tried, my first guess wouldn't be a white person with dark hair.
If I heard "dark" I would probably imagine someone in dark clothing. Olive skin I understand as tan, but only from the context, since I think of the olive fruit.
@@yue_river unless writters can't write, makng a enumeration of prmar physical attrbutes and breaing it wth personnality traits, expecially since that's a superficial one (like you don't really now whether he's "dark" or not) isn't a smart move. Also do people in the englsh language refer to people wth "colder personnaltes" as "dark"? All recorded was a French meme with a dude saying he was dark, but it lookks like people would more use the word emo nowadays
I have always been fascinated by the usage of olive as a reference to skin tone because my mind just thinks greener undertones than usual or straight up Kermit the frog in my goofier mental moments about this 😂
@@lepidopteranodon same, when people say olive skin I imagine myself and some people from my hometown because that's what people would call us. Also got compared to wheat a lot, because our skin tone is also yellowish
Another example that really jumps out to me is Sara Crewe from A Little Princess. She's referred to as having a "little brown hand" and "small dark face", and she outright thinks she isn't pretty because she compares herself to another little girl who is blonde and blue-eyed. Some have taken this idea and run with it, suggesting that Sara could be mixed race, since she did grow up in India, and it's possible her father is descended from one of the many British men there who married highborn Indian women. And while she could still be white with a more Mediterranean complexion from her mother, who was French, and possibly from the south where a lot people have Greek ancestry (and therefore dark hair and olive skin), it adds another layer. Like when Sara loses everything and has to become a servant, the reactions of the other servants and their schadenfreude makes a lot of sense. Not only did she used to be pampered, she's from a demographic lower class white women could feel somewhat superior to, so her being reduced to the lowest status among the staff is a kind of catharsis for them. And of course Ms Minchin is implied to resent Sara for being an outspoken brown girl or "uppity". Sara also feeling out of place among the upper classes is what allows her to feel empathy for and become friends with someone like Becky (who isn't actually black in the book, just a white cockney girl). And then of course the films cast actresses who resemble the type of girl Sara wishes she were than how she's described on the page, somewhat undermining the message that even if Sara doesn't look like that girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, she's said to be prettier than she gives herself credit for, and has something about her that compels adults to attend to her
Ralph Crewe was described as fair and blond, if I recall correctly. I've come around to the idea that his wife's Frenchness was likely a more socially-acceptable form of not-English than if he were to be openly acknowledged as having married an Indian woman, even one of high caste who loved French language and culture. Anglo-Indian Sara changes her dynamic with Ram Dass (the best character) into something more sibling-like, which I like a lot.
Yeah, I think Shirley temple did a good job, but for a book reader her appearance is 😬. And yes! I thought the exact same thing on my reread of A Little Princess in my teens.
I'm so glad you brought up Heathcliff! I remember when the 2011 adaptation came out and how lots of people online were insisting that Heathcliff couldn't possibly be anything other than white no matter how much the novel underlines his racial otherness. One persistent argument against the movie's casting was that "it made the story about racism when it was actually about classism" AS IF THEY WERE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.
Yeah, it’s literally impossible to misread it as well?? His racial identity (though left ambiguous) is very clearly highlighted as a reason for his mistreatment
@@itslou2338 Heathcliff's past is never uncovered in the novel. Lots of characters point out his dark features and speculate that he might be of Romani, Indian, or Chinese origin, for example, but we never know for sure. He could be just a white guy with a dark hair and a tan complexion, but I honestly feel like the text leans more towards him not being white, at least not completely.
your point about where paul fits into whiteness is so interesting and it made me think about how there also seems to be this weird disconnect where like, ANCIENT greeks (and romans) often aren't actually thought of as the mediterranean, Other kind of white people at the bottom of that hierarchy of whiteness you mentioned, that like, contemporary greek and italian people get grouped into? i mean the same way that so much of that history is thought of as THE epitome of "Western Civilisation" (often as a white supremacist dog whistle)... white people identify very strongly with a specific constructed version of Ancient Greece, and so they also imagine the people of that time period as like. not necessarily as actual blond white men, but still as unambiguously *white* and as being at the top of that hierarchy the same way that blond blue eyed white men would be, which is again not how they perceive Actual people with more typically mediterranean features, if that makes sense? so it weirdly let's them group greek people and *ancient* greek people into tho different types of whiteness, with one at the top and the other at the bottom of that hierarchy, EVEN WHEN they look the same. it's like the strong association of "Ancient Greece=White Culture" somehow overrides the otherness that an olive skin tone would otherwise signify... in that sense it doesn't surprise me that house atreides being aligned with ANCIENT greek mythology isn't supposed to be a sign of them being poc or even an exotic kind of whiteness, because "ancient greek" doesnt seem to evoke that association the same way that "greek" does.
Yes, it's a whole thing. Ancient Greek culture has been appropriated for white supremacy. You can still happen upon the random German or Brit who casually believes their culture is the true continuation of ancient Greece and modern Greeks have nothing to do with it. It can come up in discussions about the return of the Parthenon marbles. (just to make it clear, most Brits don't think like that)
Greeks basically viewed Northern Europe people as strong warriors but dumb and people South of them, Smart but Stupid but the Greeks the selves were "just right"
I always interpreted "dark" as brooding, so a character who was "tall, dark, and handsome" was a byronic hero. Also, in fanfictions, a lot of people would describe blond characters as "tall, dark, and handsome" too
Yeah, pretty sure this video is just flat out wrong lol. Tall, dark, and handsome was never about skin color lol. It's like the DARK TRIAD, when white people say dark triad we aren't talking about like the triad of black people lol. It's dark, as in emotionally dark. Like a golden retriever puppy vs a wolf. One is happy, sunny, one is intense, dark.
@@hhjhj393 The video isn't wrong though, because dark does often refer to skin tone in literature. It CAN simultaneously mean brooding, which is what I attributed the description to, after realizing the dark wasn't actually "dark" in appearance.
34:57 - "...[white readers] are used to seeing stories about black and brown people as sociology rather than literature." I am a white reader, and this hit me like a ton of bricks. Damn. Guilty. That's why I watch this channel - I appreciate that you show me a perspective and experience on social issues that is so different (and more well-informed) than my own.
I'm Black and this is true even for me. I've had to do a lot of conscious decolonizing to change this. "White as the default" is such a prevalent thing because it's everywhere. Like literally everywhere. Most of my favorite movies, books, comics, etc, are filled with white main characters. When I write my own fiction, I often immediately imagine a white person as my first character.
@@MaddyGatzka +1 to both of you. White (Latino) reader/writer, and I definitely agree with the "default white" acknowledgement. On one hand, I try to write what I know and can sort of call upon from my own life experiences, thus I feel writing anything other than "myself" would be pretty disrespectful to the intended reader. On the other hand, stories filled with only white characters are not what I'm aiming for, that's not my style. It's a strange balance to try to find.
There's a book called Bud, Not Buddy by CP Curtis. It's made for kids, like elementary/middle schoolers, but I love it because it was the first piece of media I consumed that challenged the 'white = default' assumption. And it did so without explicitly saying what it was doing. The narrator is a Black orphan during the Great Depression; whenever he describes other characters, he only notes their race when they're white. It took my white third-grade self a while to realize that, but now whenever I think of it I want to read it again. (Beyond that, it's a well-written, sweet, funny story).
As a racially ambiguous Mexican 20-something year old, I always thought the "dark" in "tall, dark and handsome" meant a morally gray or even villainous personality. My reference point for YEARS was Tom Hiddleston's Loki.
I always thought it was a character trait not a physical descriptor even though it’s sandwiched in between two others. Like dark as in brooding, mysterious, ambiguous, guarded. Like a mysterious villain in a film noir and that’s the hero’s first perception of them When they opened with “picture these traits” I’m like, those are describing three different people😅
I actually think that often, som kind of dark demeanor is a connotation of it. Maybe not morally grey, but then like, dark rings under their eyes and a pessimistic and/or sarcastic view on life and on society. AND dark hair. And blond people are happier and more naïve, in that kind of descriptions.
There are plenty of authors that use "dark" to mean slightly darker skinned white people without intending ambiguity. When i first read Dune i was sure Paul was supposed to be Middle Eastern, then as the books went on it became extremely clear he was supposed to be Greek. Felt similarly about Nick Andros in the Stand
Isn’t Dune inspired by the Arabian culture? I have never read nor watched the movies, but I remember reading that the writer said he’s inspired by Bedouins’ culture ( Arab Peninsula people)
@@StarlightBibiYes, but Paul Atreides is not from Dune, his origin planet is Caladan, therefore he wouldn’t look like the Fremen (the native people of Dune). I too imagined him as Greek
As a half Italian who had to migrate to Belgium at 7yo, I got bullied for the color of my skin for six years. (that was in the 1990s and nillies). I was called 'brown' and had to play with the other 'brown' people, which in my school meant Indians, blacks, Turkish people, Maroccans. I was also said to have 'an Italian temperament' which somehow was 'in my genes'. My Italian tan faded because I started to scarily avoid the sun, and I attained the privilege of being white, both because of my lighter skin color and because of the ideas in rural Belgium changing. I am so sorry to ask, but what word can I use to describe this experience? Was it colorism? Can one only be racist towards black people, and therefor I did not experience racism? In the situation I experienced, everyone with a foreign name would be systematically kept out of the 'nice' jobs, and my dad always had the police checking his papers and mumbling stuff about dark skinned people. Of course the blacks had it much worse. I just don't know how to name this experience.
To be clear, we don't have to talk about that if you don't want to. I don't want to take up space here. I am autistic and am looking to check how much I can understand racism and how that affects life. I read and read and listen to a lot of black creators, but I know that my empathy works by having similar experiences. And I only remember exactly how to behave and talk if I emotionally understand the other. Please don't judge my abilities and possibly different way of trying to learn. I will never say my question out loud, and I have no idea who to go to. I know it is considered racist by some to try to understand by asking the wrong questions. If it feels like that, I am so sorry. I do not know all the wrong questions. I try my best. Of course I love the video and I thank Princess Weekes for the amazing content. I have noticed the things she talks about since childhood, and the issues of the total absence of clearly black people in literature (and movies) is terrible.
@@theantiskiasystem2260 Belgium is just a horribly bigoted country to live in. In some respects there have been improvement, but there's a lingering core in there that's just...difficult to explain or understand.
Yeah, I spent my entire childhood assuming tall, dark, and handsome in books meant brown in some form. I'm from the Caribbean and there aren't many white people in most places here. When I first saw this description used in American tv, I was beyond disappointed and immensely confused. The Hunger games really had me thinking Katniss, Gale, AND Finnick were POC. Was also kinda disappointed about Rue's depiction, as she's described as dark-skinned in the books; and people were STILL mad when a fair-skinned biracial actor played her.
Caribbean too, grew up in the states, learned pretty young that any description of any character in anything would never mean black, and if there was genuinely a black person in anything they would either be the most boring character or a stereotype I was incapable of relating to. I was actually very surprised to learn people personally relate to fictional characters at all.
@@MisterCynic18you can’t read white people stories and expect POC to be represent there lol. I’ve never understood that complaint. For example if I go to west Africa and pick up one of Chinua Achebes book I’m not finding him describing white folk. He will be describing people under his own worldview. Same as a white person, a white person who lives in a multiethnic community would have a different view however.
Unfortunately in places like Europe or America they love to use words or terms that create unnecessary obfuscation and confusion and it's all done to avoid saying brown or black.
As a Puerto Rican who is constantly, constantly called Mexican, Italian, or some ambiguos combination of Latino, this conversation about the history of the othering of being racially ambiguous really hits home.
As an Arab who can pass for white but now I'm "opting not to", I have become the "dark" stereotype. Just some white chick with dark hair and dark eyes... Textured hair if I wear it naturally to make me come off "least" white. Still not fitting in with all the Hispanic/Latin community in terms of looks because they look like caramelized sugar and honey... And I look like a tissue paper. 😐
as someone who had a super hard time figuring out makeup shades until i found olive skin communities online, i think it’s so funny to use it as a description for someone’s skin shade. now i know olive is just an undertone, meaning there are lots of people with varying depth of olive skin, from extremely pale to very tanned. and it really just indicates a neutrality or green appearance to the skin, which even has variety within itself (cool, neutral, warm olive). i, for example, mix green into my foundation to get it a color that actually matches me. so what does describing someone as “olive” even mean? my impression is a general tan-ness but i’m not even sure of that
I think the grey eyes always throws me off. They'll be describing what I'm picturing as mixed race and then *bam* this character will have my pasty-ass-almost-pink family's eye color. Obviously, any ethnicity can have grey eyes, but it immediately makes me think of my family's grey eyes. I have to visualize characters in order to keep track of a book, and it can throw me off.
Great video! As a 50+ white woman, tall, dark and handsome always meant a white person to me. Although, the dark part of that equation does double duty, meaning both brown or black hair and eyes and a serious or brooding countenance. The book that really started my interrogation on what we really mean when we call someone black or white was “The Westing Game”. There is a scene where the African American judge looks down at her hand resting next to her Greek neighbors hand. She considers how her black skin is lighter than his white skin. Really made 11 year old me think.
As a brazilian, I was convinced I had a cultural and linguistic miss understanding about the sentence "tall, dark and handsome" because it always refered to a white man. Thank you for the video
Same. Also, "olive skin" aways evokes the image of a green person. Even now that I know it's about a white person, I imagine a white green person. Pastel green idk.
Ive always took it as italian or spanish To clarify, i meant "olive skin." Tall dark and handsome for some reason i always took the dark to mean brooding or mysterious vibey stuff, not looks.
Same, cuz all those men with chiseled abs on the covers were white and described as white later down the books lmfao. I'm hoping to see a book subvert this!
When I hear olive skin I always think of Mediterranean... Like where olives come from? Italians, Spaniards, Southern French, etc. Pale Nordics, vs tanned southern Europeans.
To me „olive skin“ always indicated Eastern Mediterranean, the kind that racists hate because they screw with the concept of being „white“, which us good, because it is a terrible category. Turks, Greeks, Persians and Arabs can look absolutely interchangeable, and that kind of skin can be matched by anyone with native American traits (all 3 continents), as well as mixed race people. To me, a very white European, the description of „tall, olive-skinned and handsome“ made me think Pedro Pascal, then Jason Momoa. Take from that what you want 🤷
Turks, Arabs, Greeks and Persian have the same green undertone ( olive skin ) and dark facial features brown/ black hair, eyebrows…etc. And olive skin is either light or tan with a green undertone color, basically.
olive skin refers to european mediteranean and balkans that’s what people mena with those descriptions arabs and persians are dark(middle eastern non arab groups look more mediteranean because they are from there like assyrian jewish amazigh copts and so on)arabs are more darker being indigenous to saudi arabia and persians arw also brown so olive skin will fit indigenous groups from the mediteranean:jewish,copts,assyrian,kurds to some extent,greeks,balkans in general
@@hurremhightower But not all Arabs are dark tho? Levant Arabs can look white to brown, same with Iraqi Arabs and North African Arabs. I have Arab friends from Levant and they look white passing. Plus Levant and North African Arabs are also Mediterranean people. Persians also have all typ of races in Iran. But Gulf Arabs plus Yemen are usually darker.
Now you are just joking. Turks are one of the most mixed populations in Eurasia, and Arabs and middle easterns in general look far browner than mainland Greeks, even if many Greeks do share features with them what you’re saying it’s straight up ridiculous
As a queer brown girl who always got mistaken for a boy and who grew up loving Little Women, Jo March was absolutely my girl! To the point where I felt so betrayed by Book 2 where she married the old professor and Amy with Laurie, because I'd unconsciously read Jo and Laurie (who are both queer coded) as having some sort of queerplatonic found family dynamic. Laurie too is racialized as other with his Italian mother and him presenting as more feminine and so on. So it was so disappointing to see them settle into traditional gender roles in the end. Instead of having wild gay European adventures together. I was so upset I wrote fan fiction!
idk if you'll see this but i went to a production of little women last year that explicitly had jo and laurie understanding each other on queer terms (as in both were trans/trans coded) and it was pretty cool to see that perspective applied to those characters! it definitely felt like what you were describing (laurie at one point actually verbalizes the desire to be a girl and be perceived like the march girls, and jo cutting their hair off had a different connotation than in the book) so just so you know this reality does exist haha
I was a young mixed kid who read hunger games. I remember assuming Katniss was like me, and I'm sure seeing her cast as a white woman really solidified that I probably wouldn't see a main character that looked like me on the screen :/
Tbf, she might be mixed but just like the black girl ruth(who was meant to be dark skinned but they cast a mixed fair skinned) in the book, Hollywood struggle to cast accurate people of colour in positive roles
People really don't understand that _THIS_ is why we need proper representation in mainstream media. Representation truly does matter and I get so annoyed by people who are so used to being represented that they take it for granted and when others are represented, they act as if it's a personal affront. They feel as if they're being erased and it's like,"Hmm. If you feel like _you're_ being erased, how do you think people who barely existed in media feel?" Also, they're not being erased because there are still plenty of roles for them.
I don't know if you ever watched The Time Machine with Guy Pearce but as a biracial person, I think you'd enjoy it. When he goes forward in time billions of years into the future, we see nothing but mixed-race people. It was really cool to see actually.
@@lizzybeary I've been thinking about this and I think it's a similar phenomenon to the backlash to the rise of feminism and women's rights, and LGBTQ+ rights and visibility, when a lot of men say that "women now have more rights than men" and people saying that LGBTQ+ people are everywhere and "why do they need to shove it in our faces", leading to violence against these groups. I think it's because people who have privilege and don't realise it interpret a gradual rebalancing of rights and privileges as an unfair loss, which it really isn't. Someone else gaining something doesn't mean you losing something (although when it comes to unaddressed privilege it must feel like it). But we must keep striving towards more justice and equality for all people! And representation is such an important part of that
I always pictured the phrase as Middle-Eastern or Arab, and by aesthetic association, Latino and Mediteranean. I guess it makes sense that white society has been doing what it can to exclude darker skinned people from their positive connotations in phrasing, and that has most likely affected me in subconsciously differentiating "Dark" from "Black".
Yes, I am an Arab from the Arabian peninsula and I am pale with green undertones ( literally hard to find my foundation shade) and yes I got dark features. I also tan easily and don’t get sunburned like other pale undertones. Olive skin is basically either a light skin or a tan skin with green undertones 🫒 . We also call our skin “Wheat color“ sometimes. ( P.S sorry if my English isn’t good )
When I read the Percy Jackson books, Nico was described as olive skinned. I had no reference for olives except black olives, so for pretty much the first two whole Percy Jackson series I read them fully believing that he wasnt just black, but also dark-skinned. It was a huge surprise later in high school when I saw fanart of him and he was white. I always think of this now when a character is described as olive skinned.😂
No literally same! I always imagined Bianca and Nico as being fully black for the entirety of the original series and I was so confused the first time I saw Percy Jackson fan art and was like “is this tumblr making him another 2010 emo white boy??”
I get your frustration, but I instead one time was shocked cause someone said Nico couldn't have light skin and dark hair cause he was italian and italians don't look like that... Now, imagine being me and reading this take while you ARE a italian (like, living in Italy etc) with pale skin and dark hair😂 I was like "Ok I don't exist then, amazing"
Nico explicity got pale after his time in the underworld. He is Italian and some Italians can pass for Mexican. I was surprised when I found out a Mexican charecter was played by a white girl but I'd never know because of how dark she was. Nico got so pale he was said ti look green. We don't know if he's capable of tanning now but no one draws his as green and people see will as tanner (from time in the sun) so it makes alright color contrast in fanart.
SAME!! I read the percy jackson books and always imagined nico and his sister to atleast be a little tan. my first language isn't english, so I just assumed olive meant like having a tanned skintone. I happily read all 3 books with nico in them, always imaging him as an angsty boy with black messy hair/black eyes and tanned skin and huge eyebags, like me (I'm brown) 😭 looking back, I was probably just projecting but imagine my shock when I searched "nico percy jackson fanart" and he's as white as a sheet of paper LOL
My dad has grey eyes, dark hair, and '''olive''' skin. We're Welsh. I have a theory this phrase originated in classical literature in the UK where celtic-looking people were seen as different to the 'fair englishman/english rose' type. Sorta like wild men of the isles as opposed to high society
This. All my life I've been told I have "olive-toned skin" - meaning white but very much not pink - and I'm so pale I practically glow in the dark (with almost-black eyes and hair that started out reddish gold and is now a dark red-brown, for reference). I'm basically allergic to sunlight though, so that definitely contributes to the whole paleness thing.
Yeah, my father used to get harassed by the cops when he first immigrated, but by the time I was born I guess we were fully white because I never had any problems. 😅
u got that lovely mediterranean area racial ambiguity 😚😚 another demographic thats similar is russians who r mixed with like siberian region/central asian turkic heritage.. like why does irina shayk (russian with tatar heritage iirc) look like she could be adriana lima's (brazilian) cousin or sister 👁👁
My favorite book was A Little Princess when i was little and Sara Crewe is described as "not fair in the least" with black hair and green eyes. Her skin is said to be dark one time I think. I imagined her mixed-race because of a scene where she is shopping in London and a sailsgirl wonders if she is "the little girl of an idian rajah". But her father is english and her mother was french. So I theorized her father was the son of an english man and an indian woman because I didn't want to admit that this 1888 novel was racist.
@faintingheroineExcept her mother spoke only French, so Sara was fluent in it just like English. So doubtful that her mother was Indian. It’s more likely that she was southern French and so somewhat darker than most English.
Great discussion and analysis! Interesting thing about Johnny Cash's first wife, Vivian, is that she actually does have Black ancestry. There was an episode of "Finding Your Roots" with Roseanne Cash and this information was discovered through DNA and census records.
I’ve never heard “dark” being used to describe black people, it’s always been used to refer to darker-toned white people, like black hair as opposed to blond or brunette
I love the historical breakdown of this subject. The more books i read the more i saw that this was more a description of rogue-ish white men than minority men as I had initially thought.
@@dustrose8101 That's what I eventually assumed when I was a kid. Cause a lot of the guys being described as "tall, dark and handsome" didn't even have dark hair or eyes.
pleeeeasseeeee talk about colorism in the Sopranos. I think that’s one of the few pieces of white media that casts and uses “olive” skinned people purposefully. Carmella being a blonde Northern Italian American marrying Sicilian-Italian Tony etc.
I've been watching the sopranos and was thinking about that recently, I really wanted to hear someone comenting about this, especially because I've always heard how nothern italian people and southern italian people view themselves (and each other) differently
@@belleturco2140 oh they totally do! and it’s wrapped in with class as well. The reason many Italian-Americans descend from Southern Italian regions is because they were mostly farmers and laborers who didn’t own land.
Same! tho in my mind Duke Leto is brown (mainly 'cause I'm brown), Lady Jessica is white and Paul is described as to be fiscally more like his mother so tan white which I thought is on propose from Frank Herbert 'cause part of the critic of the book is the white savior trope and how that can doom an entire society.
Same when I saw people describe a white guy as such IRL I was very confused. The Russian phrase "pale as a booger/snot" comes to mind for the actor described. It also made me think editors of books were slacking when descriptions later in the book were of pale people who'd previously been described as dark and handsome. It still trips me up.
Rue is described as having dark brown skin, so, if anything, Amandla Stenberg was too light to play the part. (No hate to Amandla - she's a good actor - but it kind of feels like for a while she was the go-to person to portray black girls in YA movies, no matter how they were described in the source material.) When I saw internet randos complain about Rue being "suddenly" black, it made me want to give them a set of crayons and find me the dark brown one.
My initial thought about this would be Queen Sheba. She was usually depicted as a white woman until you read her description and then you realize she probably isnt white. Another one would be Andromeda. She is described as being west african,a woman of dark features. When i read that it was this moment where you realize some white people in the past were very aghast by the idea that men would risk their lives for non white women, would marry non white women. And my initial thought of tall, dark and handsome were greek men i saw on my vacation. To be fair though, you know they arent talking about a black person unless they attach a food item in the descriptions. Or they reference a time of day.
Ohhhh... this video just gave me a huge revelation: in the first Tales of Earthsea, the MC is described as "brown" and I assumed that meant he was well... brown. Brown-skinned. But before I had started reading the books, I had read LeGuin's author commentary and she spoke about how she was happy so many people had understood her characters as POC while in her mind, she had always envisioned them all as white (which she regrets). Those two facts didn't click together for me, why would she describe a character as clearly brown but envision him as white? Thanks to this video, I guess I now understand. "Brown" while writing meant either brown-haired or white-skinned but a darker shade of white to LeGuin. Which, happy to report that the copy I'm reading has canonised the MC as brown-skinned through the featured artwork! So sometimes, things do work out :)
'Spicy white'. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a while! Sadly, and despite my own dark hair, I don't think that description will ever apply to me! 😂
"Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of height, was more striking; and her face was so lovely, that when in the common cant of praise, she was called a beautiful girl, truth was less violently outraged than usually happens. Her skin was *very brown*, but, from its transparency, her complexion was uncommonly brilliant; her features were all good; her smile was sweet and attractive; and in her eyes, which were very dark, there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness, which could hardly be seen without delight."
i give u a virtual kiss for mentioning s&s, because i studied this book n vividly remember reading this line n not rly knowing what to think of it.. it made me imagine her as brown haired with less pale skin than what i imagined her sister, aka both of them still pale as shit
And yet Marianne is always played by a Very Blonde girl... bc she's young and only blonde hair symbolizes youth :). Elinor is the blonde one in the book.
See also: Phebe in Louisa May Alcott's "Eight Cousins", whose dark curly hair and black eyes were constantly emphasised and whose author was an abolitionist. Sara Crewe in Frances Hodgdon Burnett's "A Little Princess" whose brownness is constantly mentioned and put in contrast to the blond, rosy English girls and whose mother is dead but who was born and grew up in India.
Jane Austin's Sense and Sensibility is a great example of this topic! I'll never forget reading that book and realizing how the author's POV/worldview impacts what words mean. In the book, the character Marianne is described as "very brown" and initially I was like "Omg, so revolutionary for the time! A biracial family!?" but then I realized Austin just meant Marianne was tan.
I’m European so I knew what was meant with those descriptions since we describe black and brown people differently than just “dark”, usually specified that it’s the skin that’s dark. If we describe Italians or spainiards we don’t say dark skin we say they are dark as in dark type of white meaning not blonde or red haired usually black or brown hair and maybe tanned skin, tho that’s usually also specified if it’s the case that they are not the whitest white. It seems kind of obvious to me so I never thought about it like that 😅
I definitely read Katniss and Gale and the other members of the Seam as being Native American or at least more mixed than members of the merchant class growing up, and I remember being completely thrown by the casting choices. Another thing that threw me was the drama of the casting for the Wheel of Time series. I always imagined the people of the Two Rivers to be some kind of ambiguous brown because of how much Rand stood out with his height, pale skin, and red hair. When my friend was ranting about people on the internet whining about casting I was like "wait weren't they always brown?" Most of the time, when I run into the descriptor "dark" it's in the context of a historical romance and I know by context of that man being a British aristocrat that it means white unless it's quickly followed up by some backstory about his mom being French, Spanish, or some "other". Just a note... why are all these olive-skinned people running around with grey eyes? It can't be a coincidence.
My interpretation from WOT was that the Two Rivers was so white and homogenous that Rand having slightly different features of blue eyes and red hair, made him stand out. I don't ever remember Rand's skin color being noted as at all a distinguishing feature. But tbh, no matter how many times i hear that the Aiel are light skinned, I literally cannot picture them as that way
Yes, I always thought the Emonds Fielders were brown too! I swear Egwene and Nynaeve were described as quite dark (though not as dark as the Seafolk or Ebou Dari's), and the queen at first didn't believe Rand was from the Two Rivers because underneath his farmer's tan he was still super pale - implying that someone with full Two Rivers heritage is brown all over. (I was a bit annoyed with the casting in that they made Emonds Field less homogeneous over all, but that's a different complaint)
I think there is also something to be said not just with descriptions of a character's skin, but also their names. Yossarian from Catch-22 never has his skin color described, but his name is said to be Assyrian (ancient Assyria was located in modern day Iraq). In the book Colonel Cathcart describes Yossarian's name as "an odious, alien, distasteful name," and he is meant to feel like sort of an outsider and isolated from everyone else. Imo, this aspect of his character has never fully translated in the adaptations of Catch-22 that have been made so far.
Johnny Cash's first wife as well as Johnny Cash himself had some black ancestry. From Wikepedia "His paternal grandmother claimed Cherokee ancestry. But a DNA test of Cash's daughter Rosanne in 2021 on Finding Your Roots, hosted by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr, found she has no known Native American markers.[21] The researchers did find DNA for African ancestry on both sides of her family. They were able to document her maternal ancestry by historic records, dating to her great-great-great-great-grandmother Sarah Shields, a mixed-race woman born into slavery and freed by her white father in 1848, along with her eight siblings. Her paternal DNA suggested African ancestry in a similar time frame among Johnny Cash's family."
@@onlyfoes Why are you so offended... It was in response to a comment by the TH-cam creator. Cash's wife's appearance was atypical enough for not just racist clansmen to wonder about her ethnic makeup. I was simply adding to the conversation.
I’m black and from the US, but half of my family is from Jamaica and in that half, there’s some Taino ancestry because there’s a nuanced, complicated history with enslaved black people and the indigenous people in the Caribbean. My features sometimes throw people off because my skin tone is a very orangey light brown, and my face has “something” that looks almost indigenous to people but not really. I change my hair a lot because I both have alopecia and I’m an artist (I see customizing and styling wigs as a crafty thing almost and I’ve had everything from jet black straight hair, to Afro hair, to platinum blonde, to curly highlighted hair, to burgundy hair), and depending on what I do with my hair, people often struggle to call me black even though both of my parents are black and it’s super normal for black women to do all kinds of things with their hair or wigs. I’ve had people assume I’m biracial when I’m not, I’ve had people act like I’m trying to look white when I decide to be blonde for a few months. I don’t look white when I’m blonde, I look like an obviously brown person with obviously unnatural blonde hair. I often find “racial ambiguity” to be kind of a weird concept because at times it can feel like it’s used as a way to make being brown but not specifically sub Saharan African this thing that is “wrong”. Like this unimaginable thing that doesn’t exist. Like characters will be described in ways that leave out anything that would cause the reader to imagine the character as anything other than a tan white person if you see white as the default. And in the same way, people sometimes will act like you are constantly on a slider of being “more white” if you don’t look Subsaharan African specifically or if you fall outside of a narrow window of particular self expression. The looming shadow of whiteness sort of makes everything you do be read as “trying to be white” or biracial mixed with white if your features aren’t a particular type of features that people consider “the most black”
I just want to clarify that the "latino look" is only in the mind of people from the global North. Latin Americans are not a "race", we don't have a look.
@@hurremhightowerDon't talk for us. I'm latina and I would say we don't have a look but there is discourse on who is a Latine and who isn't but that has to do with parentage, culture connections and birthplace not skin color or else argentinos would be called gringos
When I was a child I remember being shocked at how much closer to Katniss's description I was, as a little Mexican girl, than Jennifer Lawerence who played her in the movie that I was so into. For me, this made my experience of the story much richer when I read the novels. It always made me feel some type of way about the movies after I had found that out. And I think I always mourned the loss of this dimension even as a 10 year old.
In my country probably the most famous knight was called Zawisza Czarny (czarny literally means black), historians still argue whether it was because he wore black armor or had black hair. For many older people it's still obvious that when they say "he was black" about someone, it means "he had black hair", even if the person's skin was cottage cheese white. Still, we didn't have many non-white people here until fairly recently (we had Romani people and they were "dark" to us) and a big part of our population still never personally met a non-white person. And it takes time to change such phrasing/way of thinking.
I'm from central Europe and I can confirm that is was very common that describing a person by color usually meant their hair color. It made kind of sense here, since until maybe 20-30 years ago, there were barely any darker skinned people living in most parts of Europe, thus there was no point in describing the skin color if everybody is white. Nowadays, Europe has a higher percentage of people of color (but still much lower then the US) and also higher exposure to international media, so at least most younger people now default to meaning skin color rather that hair color when using color to describe people.
@@RomaniScientist Genuinely curious: Is the term in the respective language actually "black"? Or something like "dark"? Just since Romani have on average darker skin than, say, Croats, Hungarians, Poles or Germans, so it kinda makes some sense, while black just ... off.
I think there's a linguistic point that is overlooked a little in this video. A hundred years ago, if you described someone as "dark" or "fair," Any English speaker would think you were referring to hair color. These adjectives just weren't used to describe skin color. So when older texts refer to someone simply as "dark," there is no racial element implied (other than the assumed whiteness) , barring the occasional occurence where skin color is explicitly mentioned. You can see this in just about any traditional folk song. That's not to say there wasn't some undertone of otherness to these descriptions, but it would be a misreading to read a racial element into these examples. It's easy to assume that words were always used the same way that they are now, but it can result in misunderstanding when you don't know how the language has changed! Game of Thrones is intentionally written in an old fashioned voice, so when it describes Jon Snow as dark, it almost certainly refers to hair color exclusively (It doesn't even refer to eyes, since he has to mention that separately).
Ditto little women. Alcott almost certainly meant brown hair, when she calls Jo "brown" That said, I think your analysis of "olive skin," and more explicit examples like heathcliffe is on point. Also movie adaptations can do whatever the hell they want with their casting!
oh thing about this I just remembered: I learned that black was NOT what I was "supposed" to think of in a conversation about Angel the series of all things. Someone called Angel tall dark and handsome and I was like 🤔 gunn is more tall dark and handsome imo (I stand by this, J August Richards is a beautiful man)
@@RPG5ruletall dark and handsome means Henry Cavill People say something and mean something White men and women are most desirable and black women and asian men are least World is a fked up place 😔
What I find really interesting is that it may only be an English language issue. In French, for instance, the phrase "tall, dark and handsome" is "un grand brun ténébreux", which first of all is a noun phrase, and as "un brun" usually means "a dark-haired/black-haired man", there is much less ambiguity there, in my mind at least. Although it is true that white skin is still the default, but maybe historically it makes sense? (through a language lens, I mean) And with "ténébreux", the darkness takes on a decisively abstract quality, as in something to do with their personality rather than their appearance. Like a mysterious, tortured type. Similarly, there is no true equivalent to "fair" in French, as in potentially meaning both blonde and light-skinned. If you mean blonde, you say blonde, and if you mean light-skinned, you say light-skinned. And if you mean beautiful, you say beautiful. "Fair" has always confused me a little bit if I'm being honest, particularly when you take into account its other meanings of "beautiful" and "right" or "just". It seems to reinforce the medieval trope of the "fair maiden", which in English would be both beautiful and blonde, with a light complexion. It's so strange how this one word conflates all these meanings. This has been your local linguist's take on this 😆
as a french persln, thanks for pointing this out!! its something i know of but i cant rly put into words myself, since speaking the language makes me less likely to think "hm whats the french equivalent for this specific thing" when i do its usually trivial, or i guess not pertaining to literature archetypes.. at least not this specific one, until now!! its good to compare how these specific characters r recurring in multiple places, but with a layer of nuance due to untranslatable aspects of the language
Thinking some more about the white skin default when you mention someone's hair colour. I think that it sort of makes sense linguistically, because hair colour was used to distinguish people when describing them, and, in areas where, historically, people of colour were less numerous, and sometimes even practically non-existent, people didn't need to use hair colour to differentiate a black man, for instance, from a blonde one, because they would just use the men's skin colour, which was seen as the most obvious difference between the two. I'm not condoning this, just an observation. I think this has seeped into language and it will take time for it to evolve.
Same in Vietnamese, I know it is not an European language but still. Although I have noticed recently that Vietnamese translations are getting very creative with how they can translate the „vibe“ of „tall, dark, and handsome“ or „fair“
Thanks for bringing up the Celtic ancestry being indigenous-coded and associated with darker complexions! I have a lot of Celtic ancestry (Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc.) and dark hair/eyes and olive skin. My sister and I have repeatedly been 'othered' as racially ambiguous despite the fact that our ancestry is 100% European. My eyes were really opened when I first learned that a truly ancient 'Celtic' complexion in Ireland is dark hair/eyes/skin. The stereotypical red hair/pale skin/freckles that we associate with the Irish came from the advent of Vikings raiding and settling the country alongside the native peoples. And I've so enjoyed delving into the pre-Christian religions and cultures of ancient European peoples - there is so much there that we would associate with indigenous peoples and their cultures/religions today. The random strangers asking 'what ARE you?' demonstrated to me from an early age how 'whiteness' has nothing to do with ethnicity and everything to do with social constructs.
Definitely, not to mention the contempt people from these areas have had to face historically from their governments/neighbouring areas, and the violent repression of their languages and cultures. Not only in the most well-known Celtic areas either. For instance, centuries ago, Breton people from the French Celtic area of Brittany were called "savages" (and compared in their savagery to native Americans) and "backwards" because they lived in a rural region, looked different (short, dark) and spoke an incomprehensible language (to the basic French nobleman), therefore must be stupid. In the 17th century, Louis XIII even sent a mission of Jesuits there to evangelise the population.
So much misinformation in this video and comment section. Your mixing up the indo-europeans and Celts. The indo-europeans that predate the Celts and built Stonehenge had a darker complexion and arrived into western europe around 3,000 BC. The Celts arrived more around 800 BC and intermixed with the previous population. We got writings upon writings of Romans talking about how pale Celtic Gauls and Celtic Britons were relative to themselves. Your darker skin is more likely to be from intermixing in the past 300 years than thousands of years ago.
@@Jdacosta1038Speaking of misinformation... The Gauls *were* Celts, and the the Celts *were* Indo-European. By the time the Romans arrived, the Celts in Britain and Ireland had nearly assimilated the indigenous Picts (thought to be darker skinned) and had also absorbed multiple waves of raids and invasion by Norse (fair skinned with reddish hair), mostly in the North and along the coasts. And when the Romans describe fair hair, it's not always clear whether they are referring to natural coloring or the practice of hair bleaching with lye. Following the Romans, the Saxons invaded, introducing the small-boned, fair-haired appearance you see in many parts of Britain.
I never thought of race when someone was just described as “looking dark”. I just thought it was someone who emitted a mysterious or brooding aura, describing how they portray themselves. Funnier still, the olive skin description confused me for the longest time, because all I thought was “so they look sickly,” because olives are green. I guess I didn’t pick up on the white-centered beauty standard sentiments behind these phrases, taking it either way too seriously or thinking it was a description of their personality.
Gale DOES get an unfair shake and you should say it! I think that one of the fundamental issues with racial ambiguity in stuff like THG and ASOIAF is kind of based in the authors' resistance to reflect on their own perception of the world and how that informs what they write, like race is relevant to them when they want to use it to say something, but it's irrelevant to them when it says something about them. And when I hear tall, dark and handsome I think of Justin Baldoni because the BTS It Ends With Us drama has me in a chokehold.
Justin Baldoni is what I tend to think of too, or maybe Omar Sharif. And it is definitely fascinating how much local cultural perception authors/readers bring. ie with THG, as an Australian and someone who had recently been travelling through SE Asian neighbours, my head image of Rue was a dark-skinned Indonesian or maybe Sri Lankan or Indian girl. And when people pointed out that her district working in farming was a clear signifier for American slave history, my brain just blanked and went - but tropical fruit?? green verdant agriculture? ??? what we think of as 'obvious' is really culturally located.
Another hot take, but I think Criston Cole falls into the same category as Gale - of characters who we feel very differently about because of the way they have been cast. If Criston had been the only PoC person in Kings landing - as the comments about his Dornish heritage heavily imply, then his clinging to honour makes more sense. Especially in the ASOIAF where the rhoynar are already sexualised. Instead in the show we still get hints of classicism but the idea of him being an outsider working twice as hard as anyone else to get respect is much less clear.
I think it's because grey eyes are a variant of blue eyes (from a genetic standpoint). By giving a racially ambiguous protagonist grey eyes, a writer is almost ensuring that audiences will see the protagonist as more proximal to whiteness. People of color CAN have blue eyes, of course (and thus their descendants could have grey eyes), but it's nowhere near as frequent as it is in white people. More often than not, it's probably meant as a distinctive eye color than anything else. But you can't ignore the racialized implications.
Speak for your self, my grandpa is browner than brown, but he has gray-hazel eyes! And that’s passed down so some of my cousins literally have gray eyes and olive skin(or sometimes even darker skin).
Grey eyes are a pretty common colour in white people, in Europe it’s the most common eye colour alongside green and blue eyes which are different tones of the same
I’m glad you mentioned Anakin! Because with Vader’s iconic voice being James Earl Jones and the clumsily handled slavery backstory, it definitely occurred to me even back in 2005 when I first saw RotS in theaters that Anakin’s character arc most resembles the real life experiences of a lot of Black men. Reading the memoirs and biographies of Black people, this experience of being singled out as “talented” or “gifted” and then plucked from a Black community and thrust suddenly into a hostile white milieu without a support system goes all the way back to idk Thomas-Alexandre Dumas’ life story. And it’s still present today in the stories Black people tell about attending PWI’s. I don’t really expect white America to respond well if Anakin was cast with Black actors, and I’m not even particularly sure if Black America wants to see this not uncommon story of theirs depicted on the big screen, because a lot of people still carry this trauma around with them, BUT it could definitely work and work really well! As a side note, maybe Princess can make a video in the future about the supposedly “new” DaRk AcAdEmIa genre? My contention is that there is nothing really new or original about the genre! It’s merely a continuation of the boarding school novel (British) or campus novel (US)! And again, if the topic under discussion is traumatic experiences at academic institutions, there are A LOT of stories Black and Native people can tell.
This is a master essay! Exceptional work. There are other language codes. For example in Europe "western world" is used as synonym of western Europe, all the Americas, Australia, New Zealand,and western literature is literature from the western world. But in America western world is only America and England. Western literature is only American literature and the English canon that Americans adopted as their own.
Also, as a mixed Puerto Rican (dad is a very brown-skinned triple heritage classic Puerto Rican, mom is non-Latino white), who’s skin color oscillates between racially ambiguous light tawny to a “café con poquito leche” (as my tía would say) depending on time of year, I would latch onto any descriptions of “dark” or olive features and imagine them as my Puerto Rican family, olive-skinned always meant black olive to me. So it always baffled me when you get not that at all in movies. I also didn’t realize just how often “Olive-skin and grey eyes” were used together. I never minded the phrase olive-skin that much, but seeing all the examples side by side made it start feeling like “chocolate” and “coffee” all over again There’s so many more interesting color words to describe skin color lmao. Umber, tawny, russet, ochre, ebony, fawn, with deep, warm, rich, light, dark, and more. Or just, ya know, say brown. Say black. Say them in some combination with the above. I’m begging for variety
Why do you people feel the need to throw in a mexican word, as if you'd be accused of being a fake latino if you didn't? The entire essay is in english but you had to throw in TIA when you could have just said aunt.
8:49 You know Jon isn’t supposed to have dark skin, because George R.R. Martin didn’t compare his skin color to teak or ebony or night the way he does compulsively for any dark-skinned character. /j
The first character whose ethnic ambiguity ever caught me off guard was Lena in Beautiful Creatures because all of her descriptions in the first book set her up to be a pale, green eyed white woman, BUT her grandma is supposed to be a Caribbean woman which to me immediately meant part of the African diaspora especially since they can do magic. I jumped to voodoo and hoodoo, yknow? So to see when the movie came out a white British woman instead a girl who is at least 1/4 black with green contacts was insane for me at 15.
25:36 - What threw me is that I grew up in Appalachia, and it never occured to me that Katniss would be anything but mixed. All kinds of different people came (or were brought) to work in the mines, on the plantations, or on the railroads. It was like its own mixing bowl.
i wish i could send this video backwards in time to me reading enid blyton books or whatever as a child and picturing peter tosh whenever she wrote "tall dark and handsome" smh, i remember being so confused like "i thought these books were about white girls in england why is her uncle black" 😅
When I first read the Hunger Games I interpreted the descriptions of Katniss as Mediterranean but when I heard other people mention their interpretation as Native American or mixed race, it made just as much sense
I've never been able to take the phrase "tall dark and handsome" seriously because despite last having seen it 20 years ago the first and really only thing I think of when I hear it is the SpongeBob episode when he takes Pearl to prom
Olive skin is Mediterranean european skin, when they say olive skin, they are meaning that, Mediterranean european with a darker skin than the more northern European
I always read 'tall dark and handsome' as 'dark thematically'... like, the mysterious bad boy. The detective with a questionable past. Angel from Buffy, Alucard and Dracula from Castlevania (or just dracula period), Idris Elba's character from the Dark Tower. Unsettling and alluring, completely irrespective of coloration. Lots of werewolves and vampires in my romance novels, in case that wasn't obvious XD
Roland (played by Idris Elba) from the Dark Tower 100% gives “Tall, Dark, and Handsome” in the morally ambiguous bad boy sense (and according to a lot of people’s comments in the visually descriptive sense too😁). Especially when reading the series, the whole first book sets Roland, the Gunslinger, up where you’re not really sure if he’s the hero or the anti-hero yet, I always took “tall, dark, and handsome” as a fleeting first impression, both of someone’s looks in the tall and handsome, and dark as in character, upon meeting someone and it’s definitely the vibe I think he’d give off at first glance to the residents upon rolling into a little desert town.
32:52 I always saw, besides the Greek references, Spanish references for the Atreides (the Salusan bull and what seemed to be Corridas on their home planet), which, besides the fact that Spain had a huge colonial empire at some point, also relates to the Middle-Eastern coding that permeates the Dune series, considering the history of the Arab conquests in the Iberian peninsula and later the Reconquista
I think the issue is less to do with the writing and more to do with people wanting to see themselves in the characters they read. I remember when the Harry Potter play came out, and there was controversy over Grangers skin color. People tried to defend the casting choice (which didnt really need to be defended) by pointing out that she was described as browned after her summer vacation. People choose to ignore context clues to help their own view of characters.
I’ve never read the phrase ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ but it is part of the zeitgeist for me as a shorthand for certain aesthetics. Like another commenter posted though, and probably due in no small part to ‘assumed whiteness’, dark was never about the skin color in that description. It was about demeanor. The kind of person who had storm clouds following them around. Or a signifier that a person was a little edgy or dangerous. This was a good video to start unpacking that. And that song over the supporters was great!
I've been writing a fantasy book where the setting has no white people, and found people just default into the thinking characters I don't expain explicitly the skin color of are...white. It's frustrating.
I clicked bc of the content and themes you talk about but now im obsessed with all of the framed art work in your background for each video. Maybe one day you'll do a tour, if you havent already.
"Her skin was like daytime coffee. If daytime coffee had a lot of milk. And only milk"
😂😂😂
The scream I accept lol
More like ..Day Time Rot Milk 😅
It's me. I'm daytime coffee
Hilarious.
I always read Katniss and her dad as indigenous american. Her description, the way that her hunting/foraging skills are talked about it and the way that their district is so separated all felt coded that way. Her mum being a fair skinned trader that came into the area and decided to stay against her family's wishes fits too. It even fits with the miners being worked to death by their distant ovelords just with coal instead of precious metals.
Yeah, agreed. Appalachia has a long history of mixed race folks (such as the melungeons, my own family’s heritage) and District 12 is heavily Appalachia-coded.
@@abstractforest4546 you're so right!
I think it's really interesting how much of our own cultural context we bring into our reading, because as a European it didn't occur to me when I read the books. But of course it rings true
@@abstractforest4546 Yeah, I figured that Katniss was Melungeon. Also, I thought that District 12 was canonically Appalachia? I haven't engaged with the books or the movie in a long time so I don't remember for sure.
Many actual indigenous Americans have a Caucasian appearance due to mixing with White settlers over the centuries, so Katniss in the films could pass for indigenous. If she is, then her victory over President Snow who's the Panem equivalent of a WASP is symbolic of a future where indigenous people have retaken America from the White man.
What really stands out to me is the grey eyes bit; like 3% of people have grey eyes, and yet so many of these dark protagonists also have grey eyes.
My thoughts exactly like they're so rare
I thought they were a just a light blue or a myth until my daughter was born with grey eyes that have not changed and surprised us all. I have blue eyes and my husbands are almost back.
2% of the world is redheaded, 5% is blonde. Media tends to highlight rare individuals for that exotic flare, and through repitition start giving the impression they are more common than they actually are
People really underestimate small percentages, just because something is rare doesn't mean no one has it. I have grey eyes, and one way to visualize percentages like that is to think of 100 people in a room, and then however many people have that trait. I have a class of about a hundred, and I see blonds and redheads every day. Sure, most people aren't, but it's not like their some endangered species just because the percentage is a single digit
What is weird to me is that most people I know with olive skin have brown eyes.
She had beautiful olive skin. As in, green olives. She was an alien.
For real, the first time I encountered the phrase "olive skin" I was sure the described guy was green and I felt kinda repulsed😂 Then my parents explained to me that it meant light brown
Turns out, they always meant black-olives.
they actually exist though. maybe for a south/southeast asian
💀💀💀
Wait, I thought that’s what it actually meant. Someone who doesn’t have cool, blue undertones, but also doesn’t have warm, golden skin, and instead has undertones of a more neutral green-gray, reminiscent of the muted green of olives. 🤯
trillian in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is described as a "slim, darkish humanoid with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little knob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes" as well as looking "vaguely Arabic" and every adaptation is like "got it, blue eyed north western european woman." cmon guys can you not even spring for a sicilian.
i remember reading hitchhiker's when i was younger and taking the "arabic" description very literally, then her hair would be mentioned and i'd be like..... but she's hijabi we can't see her hair 🤔⁉️⁉️
@@fionnualaz lol same! I always imagined her with a light brown hijab, but the kind where the front of her hair is out. I just assumed she wasn’t very religious
@@fionnualaz Arabic doesn't necessarily mean they would be a hijabi as well
Pedantry corner: the radio series is the original version of Hitchhikers and Trillian isn't described at all but is voiced by Susan Sherdan who was definitely white. (And also, fun fact, voiced Princess Eilonwy in The Black Cauldron)
@@J_ali_04 lol i know this now!! i was a young teenager at the time, i think i just ran with it in my head
I was absolutely baffled at the backlash Amandla got for Rue. She was PERFECTLY cast.
She knocked it out of the park with her acting, too.
one could argue she was TOO white compared to her book description! (but as an actress she was absolutely perfect i'm not criticising that casting choice)
@@begaydocrime5719that's what I was thinking. That she was lighter than I expected. She was amazing in that role so I wouldn't say it was a bad casting or anything but I definitely pictured her darker.
@@begaydocrime5719I've talked to my friend about this many times. Her actress is biracial. Objectively she shouldn't have been, but she absolutely DELIVERED the part. I think a lot about the horrifying racism that was directed at the actress in response and what sort of response an even darker skinned black girl might've gotten in response to her casting.
In the books, Rue was described as having the same dark brown skin as Thresh. So she should've been even darker.
As a Latino of Italian ancestry I AM the racially ambiguous man of writers' dreams.
I think that counts for all Latinos. I've lost track of which countries people have guessed
do NOT let U.S. American Y/A authors discover Argentina
@@baintreachas They don't even know Mexico
i have always thought that americans probably work very hard to get tan in the same color skin i naturally have due to miscigenation (white brazilian fyi)
@@andre-cmyktbf most rural white people tend to be tanner, especially southern white people where there's more ambiguous "race" mixing and the like.
"tall, dark, and handsome" oh no, my cultural touch point is SpongeBob 😬
Bless you. I felt so bad that this was what I IMMEDIATELY pictured 😭
"Meep"
EXACTLY WHERE I LEARNED THIS FROM
SAME! My first thought was Spongebob.
Oh nonononono! That was "long, tan, and handsome" 😁 Which funny enough is arguably less ambiguous
Growing up in Africa, when women said tall,dark and handsome, they meant Idris Elba or djimon Hansou. But when I went to America, I found out that Europeans or Americans meant something different 😂😂😂
Okay but to be fair... I agree with them with Idris Elba, he fine!
Well it makes sense. Darker skin is subjective to a given population.
It turned out, Johnny Cash's wife DID in fact have African ancestry. A few years ago, Rosanne Cash, eldest daughter of Johnny and Vivian Cash, found out that actress Angela Bassett is her cousin from her mother's side of the family. This happened on an episode of "Finding Your Roots"
Was coming to say just that
I remember when the twitter shitshow about Rue happened because I felt so sickened by it. So many fans read how Rue reminded Katniss of Prim and assumed it must also apply to her appearance, when it was their similar gentle personalities that reminded Katniss of Prim. 🙃 How people could boldly declare that her death wasn’t as sad because of her race is still disturbing and breaks my heart.
I thought it was obviously because they were little girls around the same age. Rue represented the very reason Katniss volunteered- to protect an innocent child from participating in a murder game. And I could swear that her race was made very clear in the books. How can people be so delusional?
I don't know what breaks my heart more, this or her death scene 😢
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome affects so many white people. Knowingly and unknowingly.
@@lepidopteranodon At least one is fictional. The real one is so much worse.
@@luna-p I agree, it was just a (not so clever) way of saying that I feel OP's heartbreak AND don't understand how people couldn't feel sad at that scene because it always makes me cry
side note on Katniss: I always imagined her as Native. the physical description can be a lot of different backgrounds, but looking at the district she's in makes me think of a reserve. whereas Rue's black and her district is very much either a plantation or prison, Katniss's seemed like a reserve, which made me think she's supposed to be Native. just my personal take.
When takling about Hunger games, lets not forget about Haymitch. He too should have been dark hair/oliveskin/grey eyes like Katniss. A big part of their relationship is built on how alike they are (personalities, backgrounds, experiences) and how Katniss both hates it and trusts him more than almost anyone else. When in the weirdnes of the Capital he is familiar, he grounds her, and looks paly into that. The films really missed that part
I have to be honest I don't remember much description of people in The Hunger Games special any description of Katniss.
And Gale too. P much everyone in the Seam vs the merchant section of district 12 (blond blue katniss mom, peeta)
THANK YOOOOOOOU
@@stephennootens916as someone who likes a little guideline on how to imagine characters, I clocked all the descriptions, especially since the way the characters are describer in the Hunger Games speak to their other qualities as well. Like the one red head from the first book who survived so long by being sneaky and was described as fox like.
I totally missed this coding of Hamish, perhaps I saw clips before/during my reading of the first book. This totally changes their relationship and his character in many ways I think. Thank you for sharing this! Now I am sorry to have missed this reading of the book.
Also, being from rural Tasmania, I didn't pick up on the indigenous American coding in general, but feel I could still access many of the other themes and relationships, without picking up on this subtext. I just code for class without the racial link.
The ambiguity around these labels reminds me of years (decades, almost) ago when I (an American) was teaching English in Moscow. I was working with an elementary student on basic language for filling out ID information, and the worksheet we were using had a 'race' section that had a checkbox for 'Caucasian.'
My student was really confused and kind of taken aback when I explained that that meant 'white,' asserting that 'Caucasians' weren't white, they were black. From her perspective (and racial and linguistic context), folks from the Caucasus - Georgia and Azerbaijan - were 'black' because of the more common MENA/Mediterranean features there, and were distinct from 'white' northwestern/European Russians.
Yepp, that's what Caucasian means in Europe, at least when I was growing up (genX). Literally people from the Caucasus region.
That's strange. I've always seen Georgians as white as a Turkish person
yep, and russians are also generally straight up racist to these people and any similar nationalities with dark hair/eyes and somewhat darker skin. they're usually portrayed as stupid, dirty, speaking incorrectly, and doing some sort of simple manual labor or being a scammer
This is why whiteness is a totally made up nonsense category simply designed to exclude. It has nothing to do with ancestry or skin tone, it’s just a way to other people who don’t qualify for ever shifting goalposts.
@@k.umquat8604Gürcülerin bizden çok da bir farklari yok ki
I thought "Tall, Dark, and Handsome" was more referring to a "dark" personality-that they were brooding, melancholic, and moody.
Honestly same. Always understood it that way.
That's what it means.
That is how it's actually intended.. people are just dumb and fixated on race
I've always thought it was weird to have 3 adjectives back to back describing a character and two of them define what he looks like and for some reason the one in the middle refers to his personality. So I would just read it as dark-skinned
@@DylanCrossing same. I'm actually surprised that there are people who interpret it as describing a personality even though the preceding and following words were describing the outer appearance.
Now I'm laughing thinking about anytime I'd watch a movie with my mom as a kid where a woman would say she wanted someone 'tall, dark and handsome' and then she'd find her man and in the end I'd be like "awww she never got with the Black man she was looking for" ....not realizing the white guy WAS the "Dark" man she wanted, LORDT.
Me too I used to be so confused
Please this shit confused me so much as a little brown kid reading books with exclusively white British casts and that was NOT how I pictured them in my head LMAO I was so disappointed 😭😭
Literally this. I was so confused as a kid. Seeing a white face when I hear this phrase is a conditioned response for me. It's like correcting for what society thinks 😅
So glad to see I was not the only one confused by that phrase. I was always baffled when a white guy was described as that and never a black man.
Well dark it is often used to describe the haircolour...
Tall Dark and handsome is simply describing Idris Elba
Denzel.
David Ajala (The guy who plays "Book" in Star Trek: Discovery 😍✨)
Correct
Yup
And king charles the 2nd
"Olive skin" is one of those cases where I "know it when I see it"
Also I totally imagined Idris Elba for "Talk, Dark, And Handsome"
YESSS! High five!
I was looking fir thus one Idris is the epitome of tall dark and handsome to me
Me two!!! 😮😮
i imagined idris elba too!
God, yes.
I'm from Eastern Europe, and when I see 'olive-skinned' in western literature I think first of all of someone from middle east, or pretty much any country around the Mediterranean sea. But you see, a bunch of people in my country, including my mom, tend to become 'olive-skinned' during summer simply by existing under the sun, without tanning intentionally. So if an author from my country described their character as 'olive-skinned' I'd just think of someone who looks like my mom in summer. So it really depends on who the author is and where they're from.
The word 'dark', however, doesn't mean anything for me. I wouldn't be able to imagine a character described as 'dark' without further clues. And even if I tried, my first guess wouldn't be a white person with dark hair.
Same withe the olive skin!
If I heard "dark" I would probably imagine someone in dark clothing. Olive skin I understand as tan, but only from the context, since I think of the olive fruit.
when i read "dark" i tend to think of the characters' aura or vibe, as weird as that sounds
@@yue_river unless writters can't write, makng a enumeration of prmar physical attrbutes and breaing it wth personnality traits, expecially since that's a superficial one (like you don't really now whether he's "dark" or not) isn't a smart move. Also do people in the englsh language refer to people wth "colder personnaltes" as "dark"? All recorded was a French meme with a dude saying he was dark, but it lookks like people would more use the word emo nowadays
i think of greeks or balkans in general they fit that description
watching this again after Jacob Elordi casted as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights
I have always been fascinated by the usage of olive as a reference to skin tone because my mind just thinks greener undertones than usual or straight up Kermit the frog in my goofier mental moments about this 😂
The phrase always confused me for the same reason. I heard, it's due to the fact that olives of the past were brown.
@@moustik31 I don't know, I am olive-skinned and I definitely have greener undertones than a lot of people (can't wear green, it makes me look ill)
i was always confused by that phrase as well. i think its the autism
even now that i know it doesn't mean green i don't know why
White people aren’t literally chalk white
@@lepidopteranodon same, when people say olive skin I imagine myself and some people from my hometown because that's what people would call us. Also got compared to wheat a lot, because our skin tone is also yellowish
Another example that really jumps out to me is Sara Crewe from A Little Princess. She's referred to as having a "little brown hand" and "small dark face", and she outright thinks she isn't pretty because she compares herself to another little girl who is blonde and blue-eyed. Some have taken this idea and run with it, suggesting that Sara could be mixed race, since she did grow up in India, and it's possible her father is descended from one of the many British men there who married highborn Indian women. And while she could still be white with a more Mediterranean complexion from her mother, who was French, and possibly from the south where a lot people have Greek ancestry (and therefore dark hair and olive skin), it adds another layer.
Like when Sara loses everything and has to become a servant, the reactions of the other servants and their schadenfreude makes a lot of sense. Not only did she used to be pampered, she's from a demographic lower class white women could feel somewhat superior to, so her being reduced to the lowest status among the staff is a kind of catharsis for them. And of course Ms Minchin is implied to resent Sara for being an outspoken brown girl or "uppity". Sara also feeling out of place among the upper classes is what allows her to feel empathy for and become friends with someone like Becky (who isn't actually black in the book, just a white cockney girl).
And then of course the films cast actresses who resemble the type of girl Sara wishes she were than how she's described on the page, somewhat undermining the message that even if Sara doesn't look like that girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, she's said to be prettier than she gives herself credit for, and has something about her that compels adults to attend to her
She’s fluent in Hindi too.
Omg I love this. It would make so much sense! Thank you
Ralph Crewe was described as fair and blond, if I recall correctly. I've come around to the idea that his wife's Frenchness was likely a more socially-acceptable form of not-English than if he were to be openly acknowledged as having married an Indian woman, even one of high caste who loved French language and culture. Anglo-Indian Sara changes her dynamic with Ram Dass (the best character) into something more sibling-like, which I like a lot.
oh, wow, I would never have noticed that, but thank you. This is a really cool way of seeing this
Yeah, I think Shirley temple did a good job, but for a book reader her appearance is 😬.
And yes! I thought the exact same thing on my reread of A Little Princess in my teens.
I'm so glad you brought up Heathcliff! I remember when the 2011 adaptation came out and how lots of people online were insisting that Heathcliff couldn't possibly be anything other than white no matter how much the novel underlines his racial otherness. One persistent argument against the movie's casting was that "it made the story about racism when it was actually about classism" AS IF THEY WERE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.
Wasn't he a Romani Person?
@@itslou2338we don't know exactly. His past is kept hidden but we do know his skin color is pointed out by many characters
I was just wondering about this last week actually
Yeah, it’s literally impossible to misread it as well?? His racial identity (though left ambiguous) is very clearly highlighted as a reason for his mistreatment
@@itslou2338 Heathcliff's past is never uncovered in the novel. Lots of characters point out his dark features and speculate that he might be of Romani, Indian, or Chinese origin, for example, but we never know for sure. He could be just a white guy with a dark hair and a tan complexion, but I honestly feel like the text leans more towards him not being white, at least not completely.
your point about where paul fits into whiteness is so interesting and it made me think about how there also seems to be this weird disconnect where like, ANCIENT greeks (and romans) often aren't actually thought of as the mediterranean, Other kind of white people at the bottom of that hierarchy of whiteness you mentioned, that like, contemporary greek and italian people get grouped into? i mean the same way that so much of that history is thought of as THE epitome of "Western Civilisation" (often as a white supremacist dog whistle)... white people identify very strongly with a specific constructed version of Ancient Greece, and so they also imagine the people of that time period as like. not necessarily as actual blond white men, but still as unambiguously *white* and as being at the top of that hierarchy the same way that blond blue eyed white men would be, which is again not how they perceive Actual people with more typically mediterranean features, if that makes sense? so it weirdly let's them group greek people and *ancient* greek people into tho different types of whiteness, with one at the top and the other at the bottom of that hierarchy, EVEN WHEN they look the same. it's like the strong association of "Ancient Greece=White Culture" somehow overrides the otherness that an olive skin tone would otherwise signify... in that sense it doesn't surprise me that house atreides being aligned with ANCIENT greek mythology isn't supposed to be a sign of them being poc or even an exotic kind of whiteness, because "ancient greek" doesnt seem to evoke that association the same way that "greek" does.
Yes, it's a whole thing. Ancient Greek culture has been appropriated for white supremacy. You can still happen upon the random German or Brit who casually believes their culture is the true continuation of ancient Greece and modern Greeks have nothing to do with it. It can come up in discussions about the return of the Parthenon marbles.
(just to make it clear, most Brits don't think like that)
Greeks basically viewed Northern Europe people as strong warriors but dumb and people South of them, Smart but Stupid but the Greeks the selves were "just right"
Tall, dark and handsome just means a WM with dark hair, dark eyes and slight tan.
Sounds more like East Eurasian men.
Dark white. Southern European, Balkan, Sicilian, Armenian, Turkish. Tan.
Thats italians or spanish
Balkans DARK White huh?
@@beautifullEternalno it doesn’t it means south Europeans excluding Turks . Not Armanians n Turks
I always interpreted "dark" as brooding, so a character who was "tall, dark, and handsome" was a byronic hero. Also, in fanfictions, a lot of people would describe blond characters as "tall, dark, and handsome" too
Yes, tall dark and handsome has always been short hand in my mind uber hot brooding bad boy.
Oh yes same!
Same, but I read a wide range of books and a lot of "classics"
Yeah, pretty sure this video is just flat out wrong lol. Tall, dark, and handsome was never about skin color lol.
It's like the DARK TRIAD, when white people say dark triad we aren't talking about like the triad of black people lol. It's dark, as in emotionally dark. Like a golden retriever puppy vs a wolf. One is happy, sunny, one is intense, dark.
@@hhjhj393 The video isn't wrong though, because dark does often refer to skin tone in literature. It CAN simultaneously mean brooding, which is what I attributed the description to, after realizing the dark wasn't actually "dark" in appearance.
34:57 - "...[white readers] are used to seeing stories about black and brown people as sociology rather than literature."
I am a white reader, and this hit me like a ton of bricks. Damn. Guilty. That's why I watch this channel - I appreciate that you show me a perspective and experience on social issues that is so different (and more well-informed) than my own.
I'm Black and this is true even for me. I've had to do a lot of conscious decolonizing to change this. "White as the default" is such a prevalent thing because it's everywhere. Like literally everywhere. Most of my favorite movies, books, comics, etc, are filled with white main characters. When I write my own fiction, I often immediately imagine a white person as my first character.
@@MaddyGatzka +1 to both of you. White (Latino) reader/writer, and I definitely agree with the "default white" acknowledgement. On one hand, I try to write what I know and can sort of call upon from my own life experiences, thus I feel writing anything other than "myself" would be pretty disrespectful to the intended reader. On the other hand, stories filled with only white characters are not what I'm aiming for, that's not my style. It's a strange balance to try to find.
@@MaddyGatzka decolonizing… bro ur black in America ur an unwilling colonizer u have nothing to decolonize 😅
There's a book called Bud, Not Buddy by CP Curtis. It's made for kids, like elementary/middle schoolers, but I love it because it was the first piece of media I consumed that challenged the 'white = default' assumption. And it did so without explicitly saying what it was doing. The narrator is a Black orphan during the Great Depression; whenever he describes other characters, he only notes their race when they're white. It took my white third-grade self a while to realize that, but now whenever I think of it I want to read it again. (Beyond that, it's a well-written, sweet, funny story).
@ MaddyGatzka
If you lived in Africa wouldn’t there be an assumption of “black default”?
As a racially ambiguous Mexican 20-something year old, I always thought the "dark" in "tall, dark and handsome" meant a morally gray or even villainous personality. My reference point for YEARS was Tom Hiddleston's Loki.
I always thought it was a character trait not a physical descriptor even though it’s sandwiched in between two others. Like dark as in brooding, mysterious, ambiguous, guarded. Like a mysterious villain in a film noir and that’s the hero’s first perception of them
When they opened with “picture these traits” I’m like, those are describing three different people😅
I actually think that often, som kind of dark demeanor is a connotation of it. Maybe not morally grey, but then like, dark rings under their eyes and a pessimistic and/or sarcastic view on life and on society. AND dark hair. And blond people are happier and more naïve, in that kind of descriptions.
There are plenty of authors that use "dark" to mean slightly darker skinned white people without intending ambiguity.
When i first read Dune i was sure Paul was supposed to be Middle Eastern, then as the books went on it became extremely clear he was supposed to be Greek.
Felt similarly about Nick Andros in the Stand
Isn’t Dune inspired by the Arabian culture? I have never read nor watched the movies, but I remember reading that the writer said he’s inspired by Bedouins’ culture ( Arab Peninsula people)
@@StarlightBibiYes, but Paul Atreides is not from Dune, his origin planet is Caladan, therefore he wouldn’t look like the Fremen (the native people of Dune). I too imagined him as Greek
As a half Italian who had to migrate to Belgium at 7yo, I got bullied for the color of my skin for six years. (that was in the 1990s and nillies). I was called 'brown' and had to play with the other 'brown' people, which in my school meant Indians, blacks, Turkish people, Maroccans. I was also said to have 'an Italian temperament' which somehow was 'in my genes'. My Italian tan faded because I started to scarily avoid the sun, and I attained the privilege of being white, both because of my lighter skin color and because of the ideas in rural Belgium changing. I am so sorry to ask, but what word can I use to describe this experience? Was it colorism? Can one only be racist towards black people, and therefor I did not experience racism?
In the situation I experienced, everyone with a foreign name would be systematically kept out of the 'nice' jobs, and my dad always had the police checking his papers and mumbling stuff about dark skinned people. Of course the blacks had it much worse. I just don't know how to name this experience.
To be clear, we don't have to talk about that if you don't want to. I don't want to take up space here. I am autistic and am looking to check how much I can understand racism and how that affects life. I read and read and listen to a lot of black creators, but I know that my empathy works by having similar experiences. And I only remember exactly how to behave and talk if I emotionally understand the other. Please don't judge my abilities and possibly different way of trying to learn. I will never say my question out loud, and I have no idea who to go to. I know it is considered racist by some to try to understand by asking the wrong questions. If it feels like that, I am so sorry. I do not know all the wrong questions. I try my best. Of course I love the video and I thank Princess Weekes for the amazing content. I have noticed the things she talks about since childhood, and the issues of the total absence of clearly black people in literature (and movies) is terrible.
@@theantiskiasystem2260 Belgium is just a horribly bigoted country to live in.
In some respects there have been improvement, but there's a lingering core in there that's just...difficult to explain or understand.
Yeah, I spent my entire childhood assuming tall, dark, and handsome in books meant brown in some form. I'm from the Caribbean and there aren't many white people in most places here. When I first saw this description used in American tv, I was beyond disappointed and immensely confused. The Hunger games really had me thinking Katniss, Gale, AND Finnick were POC. Was also kinda disappointed about Rue's depiction, as she's described as dark-skinned in the books; and people were STILL mad when a fair-skinned biracial actor played her.
Yeah, with Rue, they didn't even make her as dark as she was SUPPOSED to be in the books! And people still got mad!
Caribbean too, grew up in the states, learned pretty young that any description of any character in anything would never mean black, and if there was genuinely a black person in anything they would either be the most boring character or a stereotype I was incapable of relating to. I was actually very surprised to learn people personally relate to fictional characters at all.
@@MisterCynic18you can’t read white people stories and expect POC to be represent there lol.
I’ve never understood that complaint.
For example if I go to west Africa and pick up one of Chinua Achebes book I’m not finding him describing white folk. He will be describing people under his own worldview. Same as a white person, a white person who lives in a multiethnic community would have a different view however.
I mean I always saw Katniss as dark skinned, mixed person.
Unfortunately in places like Europe or America they love to use words or terms that create unnecessary obfuscation and confusion and it's all done to avoid saying brown or black.
As a Puerto Rican who is constantly, constantly called Mexican, Italian, or some ambiguos combination of Latino, this conversation about the history of the othering of being racially ambiguous really hits home.
As an Arab who can pass for white but now I'm "opting not to", I have become the "dark" stereotype.
Just some white chick with dark hair and dark eyes... Textured hair if I wear it naturally to make me come off "least" white.
Still not fitting in with all the Hispanic/Latin community in terms of looks because they look like caramelized sugar and honey...
And I look like a tissue paper. 😐
TIL olive skin doesn’t mean what I’ve assumed for the last 32 years
Olive skin is ambiguous
Where the green bitches at
Love you Bridgette! 💙💙💙
@@velvethunder ❤️❤️❤️
@@el-chupanibreSchrödinger’s olive skin?
as someone who had a super hard time figuring out makeup shades until i found olive skin communities online, i think it’s so funny to use it as a description for someone’s skin shade. now i know olive is just an undertone, meaning there are lots of people with varying depth of olive skin, from extremely pale to very tanned. and it really just indicates a neutrality or green appearance to the skin, which even has variety within itself (cool, neutral, warm olive). i, for example, mix green into my foundation to get it a color that actually matches me. so what does describing someone as “olive” even mean? my impression is a general tan-ness but i’m not even sure of that
I think you’re right that it really means very little, and the interpretation of the phrase says more about the reader than the character.
I literally had a similar experience when I had to change foundations since I'm a light olive and almost NO ONE makes light olive *anything*
I think the grey eyes always throws me off. They'll be describing what I'm picturing as mixed race and then *bam* this character will have my pasty-ass-almost-pink family's eye color. Obviously, any ethnicity can have grey eyes, but it immediately makes me think of my family's grey eyes. I have to visualize characters in order to keep track of a book, and it can throw me off.
Great video! As a 50+ white woman, tall, dark and handsome always meant a white person to me. Although, the dark part of that equation does double duty, meaning both brown or black hair and eyes and a serious or brooding countenance.
The book that really started my interrogation on what we really mean when we call someone black or white was “The Westing Game”. There is a scene where the African American judge looks down at her hand resting next to her Greek neighbors hand. She considers how her black skin is lighter than his white skin. Really made 11 year old me think.
As a brazilian, I was convinced I had a cultural and linguistic miss understanding about the sentence "tall, dark and handsome" because it always refered to a white man. Thank you for the video
Same. Also, "olive skin" aways evokes the image of a green person. Even now that I know it's about a white person, I imagine a white green person. Pastel green idk.
Ive always took it as italian or spanish
To clarify, i meant "olive skin." Tall dark and handsome for some reason i always took the dark to mean brooding or mysterious vibey stuff, not looks.
Same, cuz all those men with chiseled abs on the covers were white and described as white later down the books lmfao. I'm hoping to see a book subvert this!
olive has always read as a "dark but not too dark" to me
@@shadowmaster1313 I thought it was darker then tan, lighter then brown
When I hear olive skin I always think of Mediterranean... Like where olives come from? Italians, Spaniards, Southern French, etc.
Pale Nordics, vs tanned southern Europeans.
To me „olive skin“ always indicated Eastern Mediterranean, the kind that racists hate because they screw with the concept of being „white“, which us good, because it is a terrible category.
Turks, Greeks, Persians and Arabs can look absolutely interchangeable, and that kind of skin can be matched by anyone with native American traits (all 3 continents), as well as mixed race people.
To me, a very white European, the description of „tall, olive-skinned and handsome“ made me think Pedro Pascal, then Jason Momoa. Take from that what you want 🤷
Turks, Arabs, Greeks and Persian have the same green undertone ( olive skin ) and dark facial features brown/ black hair, eyebrows…etc. And olive skin is either light or tan with a green undertone color, basically.
olive skin refers to european mediteranean and balkans
that’s what people mena with those descriptions
arabs and persians are dark(middle eastern non arab groups look more mediteranean because they are from there like assyrian jewish amazigh copts and so on)arabs are more darker being indigenous to saudi arabia and persians arw also brown
so olive skin will fit indigenous groups from the mediteranean:jewish,copts,assyrian,kurds to some extent,greeks,balkans in general
@@hurremhightower But not all Arabs are dark tho? Levant Arabs can look white to brown, same with Iraqi Arabs and North African Arabs. I have Arab friends from Levant and they look white passing. Plus Levant and North African Arabs are also Mediterranean people. Persians also have all typ of races in Iran. But Gulf Arabs plus Yemen are usually darker.
Now you are just joking. Turks are one of the most mixed populations in Eurasia, and Arabs and middle easterns in general look far browner than mainland Greeks, even if many Greeks do share features with them what you’re saying it’s straight up ridiculous
@@StarlightBibi Thats’s my point.
As a queer brown girl who always got mistaken for a boy and who grew up loving Little Women, Jo March was absolutely my girl! To the point where I felt so betrayed by Book 2 where she married the old professor and Amy with Laurie, because I'd unconsciously read Jo and Laurie (who are both queer coded) as having some sort of queerplatonic found family dynamic. Laurie too is racialized as other with his Italian mother and him presenting as more feminine and so on. So it was so disappointing to see them settle into traditional gender roles in the end. Instead of having wild gay European adventures together. I was so upset I wrote fan fiction!
if it makes you feel better, i dont think jo was ever intended to marry at all but was so the book could sell better or smthn correct me if im wrong
idk if you'll see this but i went to a production of little women last year that explicitly had jo and laurie understanding each other on queer terms (as in both were trans/trans coded) and it was pretty cool to see that perspective applied to those characters! it definitely felt like what you were describing (laurie at one point actually verbalizes the desire to be a girl and be perceived like the march girls, and jo cutting their hair off had a different connotation than in the book) so just so you know this reality does exist haha
@@ayaka244 I'm so glad to hear of this take! Nice to know it's not just me.
I was a young mixed kid who read hunger games. I remember assuming Katniss was like me, and I'm sure seeing her cast as a white woman really solidified that I probably wouldn't see a main character that looked like me on the screen :/
Tbf, she might be mixed but just like the black girl ruth(who was meant to be dark skinned but they cast a mixed fair skinned) in the book, Hollywood struggle to cast accurate people of colour in positive roles
People really don't understand that _THIS_ is why we need proper representation in mainstream media. Representation truly does matter and I get so annoyed by people who are so used to being represented that they take it for granted and when others are represented, they act as if it's a personal affront. They feel as if they're being erased and it's like,"Hmm. If you feel like _you're_ being erased, how do you think people who barely existed in media feel?" Also, they're not being erased because there are still plenty of roles for them.
@@lizzybeary Hear hear
I don't know if you ever watched The Time Machine with Guy Pearce but as a biracial person, I think you'd enjoy it. When he goes forward in time billions of years into the future, we see nothing but mixed-race people. It was really cool to see actually.
@@lizzybeary I've been thinking about this and I think it's a similar phenomenon to the backlash to the rise of feminism and women's rights, and LGBTQ+ rights and visibility, when a lot of men say that "women now have more rights than men" and people saying that LGBTQ+ people are everywhere and "why do they need to shove it in our faces", leading to violence against these groups.
I think it's because people who have privilege and don't realise it interpret a gradual rebalancing of rights and privileges as an unfair loss, which it really isn't. Someone else gaining something doesn't mean you losing something (although when it comes to unaddressed privilege it must feel like it). But we must keep striving towards more justice and equality for all people! And representation is such an important part of that
I always pictured the phrase as Middle-Eastern or Arab, and by aesthetic association, Latino and Mediteranean. I guess it makes sense that white society has been doing what it can to exclude darker skinned people from their positive connotations in phrasing, and that has most likely affected me in subconsciously differentiating "Dark" from "Black".
Yes, I am an Arab from the Arabian peninsula and I am pale with green undertones ( literally hard to find my foundation shade) and yes I got dark features. I also tan easily and don’t get sunburned like other pale undertones. Olive skin is basically either a light skin or a tan skin with green undertones 🫒 . We also call our skin “Wheat color“ sometimes. ( P.S sorry if my English isn’t good )
@@StarlightBibiomg, I'm an Italian light olive and trying to find light olive foundation is sooo hard 😭 like why does no one make it?
When I read the Percy Jackson books, Nico was described as olive skinned. I had no reference for olives except black olives, so for pretty much the first two whole Percy Jackson series I read them fully believing that he wasnt just black, but also dark-skinned. It was a huge surprise later in high school when I saw fanart of him and he was white. I always think of this now when a character is described as olive skinned.😂
No literally same! I always imagined Bianca and Nico as being fully black for the entirety of the original series and I was so confused the first time I saw Percy Jackson fan art and was like “is this tumblr making him another 2010 emo white boy??”
I get your frustration, but I instead one time was shocked cause someone said Nico couldn't have light skin and dark hair cause he was italian and italians don't look like that... Now, imagine being me and reading this take while you ARE a italian (like, living in Italy etc) with pale skin and dark hair😂 I was like "Ok I don't exist then, amazing"
i imagined him as latino when i was kid, specifically mexican. i was so upset when i found out he was white. (i still headcanon him as latino though)😭
Nico explicity got pale after his time in the underworld. He is Italian and some Italians can pass for Mexican. I was surprised when I found out a Mexican charecter was played by a white girl but I'd never know because of how dark she was.
Nico got so pale he was said ti look green. We don't know if he's capable of tanning now but no one draws his as green and people see will as tanner (from time in the sun) so it makes alright color contrast in fanart.
SAME!! I read the percy jackson books and always imagined nico and his sister to atleast be a little tan. my first language isn't english, so I just assumed olive meant like having a tanned skintone. I happily read all 3 books with nico in them, always imaging him as an angsty boy with black messy hair/black eyes and tanned skin and huge eyebags, like me (I'm brown) 😭 looking back, I was probably just projecting but imagine my shock when I searched "nico percy jackson fanart" and he's as white as a sheet of paper LOL
My dad has grey eyes, dark hair, and '''olive''' skin. We're Welsh. I have a theory this phrase originated in classical literature in the UK where celtic-looking people were seen as different to the 'fair englishman/english rose' type. Sorta like wild men of the isles as opposed to high society
People also forget olive skin can also be light skin. I’m olive but light skin. And no I’m not European.
This. All my life I've been told I have "olive-toned skin" - meaning white but very much not pink - and I'm so pale I practically glow in the dark (with almost-black eyes and hair that started out reddish gold and is now a dark red-brown, for reference). I'm basically allergic to sunlight though, so that definitely contributes to the whole paleness thing.
Me too and yeah I am definitely not European. I am an Arab
Pale olives unite! (And petition makeup companies for more light olive foundation shades 😭).
We italians are always in the middle of some racially ambiguous disasters
Including literal racism 😬. God Bless our Italians who were lynched for being accused of being "mixed race" in the 20th century
Yeah, my father used to get harassed by the cops when he first immigrated, but by the time I was born I guess we were fully white because I never had any problems. 😅
u got that lovely mediterranean area racial ambiguity 😚😚
another demographic thats similar is russians who r mixed with like siberian region/central asian turkic heritage.. like why does irina shayk (russian with tatar heritage iirc) look like she could be adriana lima's (brazilian) cousin or sister 👁👁
At least you guys make good pizzas 🍕
@@zainmudassir2964we INVENTED pizza excuse you 😤 with tomatoes from south america
“Babe, wake up! Princess Weekes dropped a new video essay!”💞
😊
My favorite book was A Little Princess when i was little and Sara Crewe is described as "not fair in the least" with black hair and green eyes. Her skin is said to be dark one time I think. I imagined her mixed-race because of a scene where she is shopping in London and a sailsgirl wonders if she is "the little girl of an idian rajah". But her father is english and her mother was french.
So I theorized her father was the son of an english man and an indian woman because I didn't want to admit that this 1888 novel was racist.
How she just being white makes the book racist?
Indian women don't breed outside of their race. the dad was the Indian one.
@faintingheroineExcept her mother spoke only French, so Sara was fluent in it just like English. So doubtful that her mother was Indian. It’s more likely that she was southern French and so somewhat darker than most English.
Great discussion and analysis! Interesting thing about Johnny Cash's first wife, Vivian, is that she actually does have Black ancestry. There was an episode of "Finding Your Roots" with Roseanne Cash and this information was discovered through DNA and census records.
I’ve never heard “dark” being used to describe black people, it’s always been used to refer to darker-toned white people, like black hair as opposed to blond or brunette
I love the historical breakdown of this subject. The more books i read the more i saw that this was more a description of rogue-ish white men than minority men as I had initially thought.
Yeah the "dark" seems more like its supposed to be synonymous with "broody" than literal "darkness".
@@dustrose8101 That's what I eventually assumed when I was a kid. Cause a lot of the guys being described as "tall, dark and handsome" didn't even have dark hair or eyes.
pleeeeasseeeee talk about colorism in the Sopranos. I think that’s one of the few pieces of white media that casts and uses “olive” skinned people purposefully. Carmella being a blonde Northern Italian American marrying Sicilian-Italian Tony etc.
I've been watching the sopranos and was thinking about that recently, I really wanted to hear someone comenting about this, especially because I've always heard how nothern italian people and southern italian people view themselves (and each other) differently
@@belleturco2140 oh they totally do! and it’s wrapped in with class as well. The reason many Italian-Americans descend from Southern Italian regions is because they were mostly farmers and laborers who didn’t own land.
Remember when Carmela said to her mom that she was worried how “dark” meadow was
@@bruins94laurent85 when in reality the actress that plays her is of Jewish descent
0:44 I thought the ‘dark’ in tall, dark and handsome meant the skin colour. John Boyega and Michael B. Jordan come to mind
Same! tho in my mind Duke Leto is brown (mainly 'cause I'm brown), Lady Jessica is white and Paul is described as to be fiscally more like his mother so tan white which I thought is on propose from Frank Herbert 'cause part of the critic of the book is the white savior trope and how that can doom an entire society.
@@per-c8229 Interesting
Same when I saw people describe a white guy as such IRL I was very confused. The Russian phrase "pale as a booger/snot" comes to mind for the actor described.
It also made me think editors of books were slacking when descriptions later in the book were of pale people who'd previously been described as dark and handsome. It still trips me up.
Same
@@per-c8229leto is not brown
the atreides have greek ancestry he will look like a southern european certainly not brown
Rue is described as having dark brown skin, so, if anything, Amandla Stenberg was too light to play the part. (No hate to Amandla - she's a good actor - but it kind of feels like for a while she was the go-to person to portray black girls in YA movies, no matter how they were described in the source material.) When I saw internet randos complain about Rue being "suddenly" black, it made me want to give them a set of crayons and find me the dark brown one.
My initial thought about this would be Queen Sheba. She was usually depicted as a white woman until you read her description and then you realize she probably isnt white. Another one would be Andromeda. She is described as being west african,a woman of dark features. When i read that it was this moment where you realize some white people in the past were very aghast by the idea that men would risk their lives for non white women, would marry non white women.
And my initial thought of tall, dark and handsome were greek men i saw on my vacation. To be fair though, you know they arent talking about a black person unless they attach a food item in the descriptions. Or they reference a time of day.
Ohhhh... this video just gave me a huge revelation: in the first Tales of Earthsea, the MC is described as "brown" and I assumed that meant he was well... brown. Brown-skinned. But before I had started reading the books, I had read LeGuin's author commentary and she spoke about how she was happy so many people had understood her characters as POC while in her mind, she had always envisioned them all as white (which she regrets). Those two facts didn't click together for me, why would she describe a character as clearly brown but envision him as white? Thanks to this video, I guess I now understand. "Brown" while writing meant either brown-haired or white-skinned but a darker shade of white to LeGuin. Which, happy to report that the copy I'm reading has canonised the MC as brown-skinned through the featured artwork! So sometimes, things do work out :)
'Spicy white'. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a while! Sadly, and despite my own dark hair, I don't think that description will ever apply to me! 😂
"Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of height, was more striking; and her face was so lovely, that when in the common cant of praise, she was called a beautiful girl, truth was less violently outraged than usually happens. Her skin was *very brown*, but, from its transparency, her complexion was uncommonly brilliant; her features were all good; her smile was sweet and attractive; and in her eyes, which were very dark, there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness, which could hardly be seen without delight."
i give u a virtual kiss for mentioning s&s, because i studied this book n vividly remember reading this line n not rly knowing what to think of it.. it made me imagine her as brown haired with less pale skin than what i imagined her sister, aka both of them still pale as shit
Marianne is so light-skinned coded--bless her
Since it's Austin, a white woman, writing about the elite of the time, I assumed that meant she had a tan. 🤷
And yet Marianne is always played by a Very Blonde girl... bc she's young and only blonde hair symbolizes youth :). Elinor is the blonde one in the book.
See also: Phebe in Louisa May Alcott's "Eight Cousins", whose dark curly hair and black eyes were constantly emphasised and whose author was an abolitionist. Sara Crewe in Frances Hodgdon Burnett's "A Little Princess" whose brownness is constantly mentioned and put in contrast to the blond, rosy English girls and whose mother is dead but who was born and grew up in India.
Jane Austin's Sense and Sensibility is a great example of this topic! I'll never forget reading that book and realizing how the author's POV/worldview impacts what words mean. In the book, the character Marianne is described as "very brown" and initially I was like "Omg, so revolutionary for the time! A biracial family!?" but then I realized Austin just meant Marianne was tan.
I’m European so I knew what was meant with those descriptions since we describe black and brown people differently than just “dark”, usually specified that it’s the skin that’s dark. If we describe Italians or spainiards we don’t say dark skin we say they are dark as in dark type of white meaning not blonde or red haired usually black or brown hair and maybe tanned skin, tho that’s usually also specified if it’s the case that they are not the whitest white. It seems kind of obvious to me so I never thought about it like that 😅
20:52 “Sorry, neither!” was my life partner’s favorite go-to quote from Star Trek. Thank you for keeping this deep knowledge alive!
I definitely read Katniss and Gale and the other members of the Seam as being Native American or at least more mixed than members of the merchant class growing up, and I remember being completely thrown by the casting choices. Another thing that threw me was the drama of the casting for the Wheel of Time series. I always imagined the people of the Two Rivers to be some kind of ambiguous brown because of how much Rand stood out with his height, pale skin, and red hair. When my friend was ranting about people on the internet whining about casting I was like "wait weren't they always brown?" Most of the time, when I run into the descriptor "dark" it's in the context of a historical romance and I know by context of that man being a British aristocrat that it means white unless it's quickly followed up by some backstory about his mom being French, Spanish, or some "other".
Just a note... why are all these olive-skinned people running around with grey eyes? It can't be a coincidence.
They were Melungen
My interpretation from WOT was that the Two Rivers was so white and homogenous that Rand having slightly different features of blue eyes and red hair, made him stand out. I don't ever remember Rand's skin color being noted as at all a distinguishing feature. But tbh, no matter how many times i hear that the Aiel are light skinned, I literally cannot picture them as that way
Yes, I always thought the Emonds Fielders were brown too! I swear Egwene and Nynaeve were described as quite dark (though not as dark as the Seafolk or Ebou Dari's), and the queen at first didn't believe Rand was from the Two Rivers because underneath his farmer's tan he was still super pale - implying that someone with full Two Rivers heritage is brown all over. (I was a bit annoyed with the casting in that they made Emonds Field less homogeneous over all, but that's a different complaint)
gray is the "dark" of blue eyes. It's a way of not giving them "boring" brown eyes
I think there is also something to be said not just with descriptions of a character's skin, but also their names. Yossarian from Catch-22 never has his skin color described, but his name is said to be Assyrian (ancient Assyria was located in modern day Iraq). In the book Colonel Cathcart describes Yossarian's name as "an odious, alien, distasteful name," and he is meant to feel like sort of an outsider and isolated from everyone else. Imo, this aspect of his character has never fully translated in the adaptations of Catch-22 that have been made so far.
Johnny Cash's first wife as well as Johnny Cash himself had some black ancestry. From Wikepedia "His paternal grandmother claimed Cherokee ancestry. But a DNA test of Cash's daughter Rosanne in 2021 on Finding Your Roots, hosted by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr, found she has no known Native American markers.[21] The researchers did find DNA for African ancestry on both sides of her family. They were able to document her maternal ancestry by historic records, dating to her great-great-great-great-grandmother Sarah Shields, a mixed-race woman born into slavery and freed by her white father in 1848, along with her eight siblings. Her paternal DNA suggested African ancestry in a similar time frame among Johnny Cash's family."
So more than 150 years ago? Who cares about these things and why even? You people seem obsessed with the whole race thematics.
@@onlyfoes Why are you so offended... It was in response to a comment by the TH-cam creator. Cash's wife's appearance was atypical enough for not just racist clansmen to wonder about her ethnic makeup. I was simply adding to the conversation.
I’m black and from the US, but half of my family is from Jamaica and in that half, there’s some Taino ancestry because there’s a nuanced, complicated history with enslaved black people and the indigenous people in the Caribbean. My features sometimes throw people off because my skin tone is a very orangey light brown, and my face has “something” that looks almost indigenous to people but not really. I change my hair a lot because I both have alopecia and I’m an artist (I see customizing and styling wigs as a crafty thing almost and I’ve had everything from jet black straight hair, to Afro hair, to platinum blonde, to curly highlighted hair, to burgundy hair), and depending on what I do with my hair, people often struggle to call me black even though both of my parents are black and it’s super normal for black women to do all kinds of things with their hair or wigs. I’ve had people assume I’m biracial when I’m not, I’ve had people act like I’m trying to look white when I decide to be blonde for a few months. I don’t look white when I’m blonde, I look like an obviously brown person with obviously unnatural blonde hair.
I often find “racial ambiguity” to be kind of a weird concept because at times it can feel like it’s used as a way to make being brown but not specifically sub Saharan African this thing that is “wrong”. Like this unimaginable thing that doesn’t exist. Like characters will be described in ways that leave out anything that would cause the reader to imagine the character as anything other than a tan white person if you see white as the default. And in the same way, people sometimes will act like you are constantly on a slider of being “more white” if you don’t look Subsaharan African specifically or if you fall outside of a narrow window of particular self expression. The looming shadow of whiteness sort of makes everything you do be read as “trying to be white” or biracial mixed with white if your features aren’t a particular type of features that people consider “the most black”
I just want to clarify that the "latino look" is only in the mind of people from the global North. Latin Americans are not a "race", we don't have a look.
When people say latino look they are mostly referring to the mestizo default look.
In real life, we don't, but in Hollywood movies, they do tend to mostly cast dark white/ethnically ambiguous Latinos
@@trinidadgondi Yeah, didn't Sofia Vergara say she had to dye her hair dark early in her career because no one would cast a blonde lady as a Latina?
exactly!
@@hurremhightowerDon't talk for us. I'm latina and I would say we don't have a look but there is discourse on who is a Latine and who isn't but that has to do with parentage, culture connections and birthplace not skin color or else argentinos would be called gringos
When I was a child I remember being shocked at how much closer to Katniss's description I was, as a little Mexican girl, than Jennifer Lawerence who played her in the movie that I was so into. For me, this made my experience of the story much richer when I read the novels. It always made me feel some type of way about the movies after I had found that out. And I think I always mourned the loss of this dimension even as a 10 year old.
In my country probably the most famous knight was called Zawisza Czarny (czarny literally means black), historians still argue whether it was because he wore black armor or had black hair. For many older people it's still obvious that when they say "he was black" about someone, it means "he had black hair", even if the person's skin was cottage cheese white. Still, we didn't have many non-white people here until fairly recently (we had Romani people and they were "dark" to us) and a big part of our population still never personally met a non-white person. And it takes time to change such phrasing/way of thinking.
jewish people and romani people plus mongols plus turkish people plus caucasians plus central asians
@@hurremhightowerashkenazi jewish people are practically indistinguishable from huwhite people in looks though. I.e Bar Paly, Kirk Douglas
I'm from central Europe and I can confirm that is was very common that describing a person by color usually meant their hair color. It made kind of sense here, since until maybe 20-30 years ago, there were barely any darker skinned people living in most parts of Europe, thus there was no point in describing the skin color if everybody is white. Nowadays, Europe has a higher percentage of people of color (but still much lower then the US) and also higher exposure to international media, so at least most younger people now default to meaning skin color rather that hair color when using color to describe people.
Except when it comes to us pale skinned Roma. Europeans straight up call us Black even when we aren't in Black skin.
@@RomaniScientist Genuinely curious: Is the term in the respective language actually "black"? Or something like "dark"? Just since Romani have on average darker skin than, say, Croats, Hungarians, Poles or Germans, so it kinda makes some sense, while black just ... off.
I think there's a linguistic point that is overlooked a little in this video. A hundred years ago, if you described someone as "dark" or "fair," Any English speaker would think you were referring to hair color. These adjectives just weren't used to describe skin color. So when older texts refer to someone simply as "dark," there is no racial element implied (other than the assumed whiteness) , barring the occasional occurence where skin color is explicitly mentioned.
You can see this in just about any traditional folk song.
That's not to say there wasn't some undertone of otherness to these descriptions, but it would be a misreading to read a racial element into these examples. It's easy to assume that words were always used the same way that they are now, but it can result in misunderstanding when you don't know how the language has changed!
Game of Thrones is intentionally written in an old fashioned voice, so when it describes Jon Snow as dark, it almost certainly refers to hair color exclusively (It doesn't even refer to eyes, since he has to mention that separately).
Ditto little women. Alcott almost certainly meant brown hair, when she calls Jo "brown"
That said, I think your analysis of "olive skin," and more explicit examples like heathcliffe is on point.
Also movie adaptations can do whatever the hell they want with their casting!
I fully thought tall dark handsome meant black as a kid. so idris elba remains my platonic ideal of it
oh thing about this I just remembered: I learned that black was NOT what I was "supposed" to think of in a conversation about Angel the series of all things. Someone called Angel tall dark and handsome and I was like 🤔 gunn is more tall dark and handsome imo (I stand by this, J August Richards is a beautiful man)
@@RPG5ruletall dark and handsome means Henry Cavill
People say something and mean something
White men and women are most desirable and black women and asian men are least
World is a fked up place 😔
black people aren't the only dark people lol
What I find really interesting is that it may only be an English language issue. In French, for instance, the phrase "tall, dark and handsome" is "un grand brun ténébreux", which first of all is a noun phrase, and as "un brun" usually means "a dark-haired/black-haired man", there is much less ambiguity there, in my mind at least. Although it is true that white skin is still the default, but maybe historically it makes sense? (through a language lens, I mean) And with "ténébreux", the darkness takes on a decisively abstract quality, as in something to do with their personality rather than their appearance. Like a mysterious, tortured type.
Similarly, there is no true equivalent to "fair" in French, as in potentially meaning both blonde and light-skinned. If you mean blonde, you say blonde, and if you mean light-skinned, you say light-skinned. And if you mean beautiful, you say beautiful. "Fair" has always confused me a little bit if I'm being honest, particularly when you take into account its other meanings of "beautiful" and "right" or "just". It seems to reinforce the medieval trope of the "fair maiden", which in English would be both beautiful and blonde, with a light complexion. It's so strange how this one word conflates all these meanings.
This has been your local linguist's take on this 😆
as a french persln, thanks for pointing this out!! its something i know of but i cant rly put into words myself, since speaking the language makes me less likely to think "hm whats the french equivalent for this specific thing"
when i do its usually trivial, or i guess not pertaining to literature archetypes.. at least not this specific one, until now!!
its good to compare how these specific characters r recurring in multiple places, but with a layer of nuance due to untranslatable aspects of the language
Thinking some more about the white skin default when you mention someone's hair colour.
I think that it sort of makes sense linguistically, because hair colour was used to distinguish people when describing them, and, in areas where, historically, people of colour were less numerous, and sometimes even practically non-existent, people didn't need to use hair colour to differentiate a black man, for instance, from a blonde one, because they would just use the men's skin colour, which was seen as the most obvious difference between the two. I'm not condoning this, just an observation.
I think this has seeped into language and it will take time for it to evolve.
@@melowlw8638 So glad you found it interesting! I love thinking about this kind of thing too 😊
Same in Greek. If you read these books in translation you end up with "dark-haired".
Same in Vietnamese, I know it is not an European language but still. Although I have noticed recently that Vietnamese translations are getting very creative with how they can translate the „vibe“ of „tall, dark, and handsome“ or „fair“
Thanks for bringing up the Celtic ancestry being indigenous-coded and associated with darker complexions! I have a lot of Celtic ancestry (Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc.) and dark hair/eyes and olive skin. My sister and I have repeatedly been 'othered' as racially ambiguous despite the fact that our ancestry is 100% European. My eyes were really opened when I first learned that a truly ancient 'Celtic' complexion in Ireland is dark hair/eyes/skin. The stereotypical red hair/pale skin/freckles that we associate with the Irish came from the advent of Vikings raiding and settling the country alongside the native peoples. And I've so enjoyed delving into the pre-Christian religions and cultures of ancient European peoples - there is so much there that we would associate with indigenous peoples and their cultures/religions today.
The random strangers asking 'what ARE you?' demonstrated to me from an early age how 'whiteness' has nothing to do with ethnicity and everything to do with social constructs.
Definitely, not to mention the contempt people from these areas have had to face historically from their governments/neighbouring areas, and the violent repression of their languages and cultures. Not only in the most well-known Celtic areas either.
For instance, centuries ago, Breton people from the French Celtic area of Brittany were called "savages" (and compared in their savagery to native Americans) and "backwards" because they lived in a rural region, looked different (short, dark) and spoke an incomprehensible language (to the basic French nobleman), therefore must be stupid. In the 17th century, Louis XIII even sent a mission of Jesuits there to evangelise the population.
Yeah I'm ghostly pale and still get asked what I am because I have dark hair and olive skin.
So much misinformation in this video and comment section. Your mixing up the indo-europeans and Celts. The indo-europeans that predate the Celts and built Stonehenge had a darker complexion and arrived into western europe around 3,000 BC. The Celts arrived more around 800 BC and intermixed with the previous population. We got writings upon writings of Romans talking about how pale Celtic Gauls and Celtic Britons were relative to themselves. Your darker skin is more likely to be from intermixing in the past 300 years than thousands of years ago.
@@Jdacosta1038And so whoever built Stonehenge in the Mesolithic period is known to you? You're definitely older than I assumed!
@@Jdacosta1038Speaking of misinformation... The Gauls *were* Celts, and the the Celts *were* Indo-European. By the time the Romans arrived, the Celts in Britain and Ireland had nearly assimilated the indigenous Picts (thought to be darker skinned) and had also absorbed multiple waves of raids and invasion by Norse (fair skinned with reddish hair), mostly in the North and along the coasts. And when the Romans describe fair hair, it's not always clear whether they are referring to natural coloring or the practice of hair bleaching with lye. Following the Romans, the Saxons invaded, introducing the small-boned, fair-haired appearance you see in many parts of Britain.
I never thought of race when someone was just described as “looking dark”. I just thought it was someone who emitted a mysterious or brooding aura, describing how they portray themselves. Funnier still, the olive skin description confused me for the longest time, because all I thought was “so they look sickly,” because olives are green. I guess I didn’t pick up on the white-centered beauty standard sentiments behind these phrases, taking it either way too seriously or thinking it was a description of their personality.
The idea of "Exotic white people" because of a slightly darker complexion is such and american thing😂
Gale DOES get an unfair shake and you should say it!
I think that one of the fundamental issues with racial ambiguity in stuff like THG and ASOIAF is kind of based in the authors' resistance to reflect on their own perception of the world and how that informs what they write, like race is relevant to them when they want to use it to say something, but it's irrelevant to them when it says something about them.
And when I hear tall, dark and handsome I think of Justin Baldoni because the BTS It Ends With Us drama has me in a chokehold.
Hi bestie! and you are correct as always
Justin Baldoni is what I tend to think of too, or maybe Omar Sharif.
And it is definitely fascinating how much local cultural perception authors/readers bring. ie with THG, as an Australian and someone who had recently been travelling through SE Asian neighbours, my head image of Rue was a dark-skinned Indonesian or maybe Sri Lankan or Indian girl. And when people pointed out that her district working in farming was a clear signifier for American slave history, my brain just blanked and went - but tropical fruit?? green verdant agriculture? ??? what we think of as 'obvious' is really culturally located.
Another hot take, but I think Criston Cole falls into the same category as Gale - of characters who we feel very differently about because of the way they have been cast. If Criston had been the only PoC person in Kings landing - as the comments about his Dornish heritage heavily imply, then his clinging to honour makes more sense. Especially in the ASOIAF where the rhoynar are already sexualised.
Instead in the show we still get hints of classicism but the idea of him being an outsider working twice as hard as anyone else to get respect is much less clear.
why is it always olive skin and grey eyes, i don’t think i’ve ever met someone with grey eyes 😭😭
Grey eyes are a thing in my family.
@@el-chupanibreLikewise here, though mine are blue-gray
I think it's because grey eyes are a variant of blue eyes (from a genetic standpoint). By giving a racially ambiguous protagonist grey eyes, a writer is almost ensuring that audiences will see the protagonist as more proximal to whiteness. People of color CAN have blue eyes, of course (and thus their descendants could have grey eyes), but it's nowhere near as frequent as it is in white people.
More often than not, it's probably meant as a distinctive eye color than anything else. But you can't ignore the racialized implications.
Speak for your self, my grandpa is browner than brown, but he has gray-hazel eyes! And that’s passed down so some of my cousins literally have gray eyes and olive skin(or sometimes even darker skin).
Grey eyes are a pretty common colour in white people, in Europe it’s the most common eye colour alongside green and blue eyes which are different tones of the same
I’m glad you mentioned Anakin! Because with Vader’s iconic voice being James Earl Jones and the clumsily handled slavery backstory, it definitely occurred to me even back in 2005 when I first saw RotS in theaters that Anakin’s character arc most resembles the real life experiences of a lot of Black men. Reading the memoirs and biographies of Black people, this experience of being singled out as “talented” or “gifted” and then plucked from a Black community and thrust suddenly into a hostile white milieu without a support system goes all the way back to idk Thomas-Alexandre Dumas’ life story. And it’s still present today in the stories Black people tell about attending PWI’s. I don’t really expect white America to respond well if Anakin was cast with Black actors, and I’m not even particularly sure if Black America wants to see this not uncommon story of theirs depicted on the big screen, because a lot of people still carry this trauma around with them, BUT it could definitely work and work really well!
As a side note, maybe Princess can make a video in the future about the supposedly “new” DaRk AcAdEmIa genre? My contention is that there is nothing really new or original about the genre! It’s merely a continuation of the boarding school novel (British) or campus novel (US)! And again, if the topic under discussion is traumatic experiences at academic institutions, there are A LOT of stories Black and Native people can tell.
I think it’s an offshoot/sungenre but still into own thing, specifically combined with the Gothic genre/Elements more often as a feature
They absolutely hated Hayden Christensen, if he was black they'd be launching hard rs at him to this day
You gotta be dumbass blind to think anakin is supposed to be black.
They showed you his face, he was white, his damn kids were white.
This is a master essay! Exceptional work. There are other language codes. For example in Europe "western world" is used as synonym of western Europe, all the Americas, Australia, New Zealand,and western literature is literature from the western world. But in America western world is only America and England. Western literature is only American literature and the English canon that Americans adopted as their own.
Also, as a mixed Puerto Rican (dad is a very brown-skinned triple heritage classic Puerto Rican, mom is non-Latino white), who’s skin color oscillates between racially ambiguous light tawny to a “café con poquito leche” (as my tía would say) depending on time of year, I would latch onto any descriptions of “dark” or olive features and imagine them as my Puerto Rican family, olive-skinned always meant black olive to me. So it always baffled me when you get not that at all in movies.
I also didn’t realize just how often “Olive-skin and grey eyes” were used together. I never minded the phrase olive-skin that much, but seeing all the examples side by side made it start feeling like “chocolate” and “coffee” all over again
There’s so many more interesting color words to describe skin color lmao. Umber, tawny, russet, ochre, ebony, fawn, with deep, warm, rich, light, dark, and more. Or just, ya know, say brown. Say black. Say them in some combination with the above. I’m begging for variety
Why do you people feel the need to throw in a mexican word, as if you'd be accused of being a fake latino if you didn't?
The entire essay is in english but you had to throw in TIA when you could have just said aunt.
8:49 You know Jon isn’t supposed to have dark skin, because George R.R. Martin didn’t compare his skin color to teak or ebony or night the way he does compulsively for any dark-skinned character. /j
The first character whose ethnic ambiguity ever caught me off guard was Lena in Beautiful Creatures because all of her descriptions in the first book set her up to be a pale, green eyed white woman, BUT her grandma is supposed to be a Caribbean woman which to me immediately meant part of the African diaspora especially since they can do magic. I jumped to voodoo and hoodoo, yknow? So to see when the movie came out a white British woman instead a girl who is at least 1/4 black with green contacts was insane for me at 15.
i imagined Morris Chestnut when i imagined Tall Dark and Handsome
See when I hear that description I think of Denzel or Idris Elba. But Morris Chestnut is a REALLY good and underrated pick.
I saw Tyson Beckford in my mind lol 😂
I actually think Morris Chestnut is the correct answer.
@@deannawoolfolk4562 I also picture Idris!
This! The true definition.
25:36 - What threw me is that I grew up in Appalachia, and it never occured to me that Katniss would be anything but mixed. All kinds of different people came (or were brought) to work in the mines, on the plantations, or on the railroads. It was like its own mixing bowl.
Thanks!
i wish i could send this video backwards in time to me reading enid blyton books or whatever as a child and picturing peter tosh whenever she wrote "tall dark and handsome" smh, i remember being so confused like "i thought these books were about white girls in england why is her uncle black" 😅
Considering how racist Blyton’s works were (i.e. used actual slurs), this is 😆😆😆😆🤣🤣🤣
I had this misconception about 'Black Irish.' I thought it was just an equivalent to African-American.
When I first read the Hunger Games I interpreted the descriptions of Katniss as Mediterranean but when I heard other people mention their interpretation as Native American or mixed race, it made just as much sense
I've never been able to take the phrase "tall dark and handsome" seriously because despite last having seen it 20 years ago the first and really only thing I think of when I hear it is the SpongeBob episode when he takes Pearl to prom
Olive skin is Mediterranean european skin, when they say olive skin, they are meaning that, Mediterranean european with a darker skin than the more northern European
(source): I am from Spain
As I shared in this video. We understand that, it is just that olive skin is not ~only~ used to describe Mediterranean European People
I'm such a HUGE fan of yours.
Keep these videos coming.. I'm here for it.
Tall dark handsome for me always meant Billy D. Williams or Ebony man of the Month when I was a little kid.
I always read 'tall dark and handsome' as 'dark thematically'... like, the mysterious bad boy. The detective with a questionable past. Angel from Buffy, Alucard and Dracula from Castlevania (or just dracula period), Idris Elba's character from the Dark Tower. Unsettling and alluring, completely irrespective of coloration. Lots of werewolves and vampires in my romance novels, in case that wasn't obvious XD
Roland (played by Idris Elba) from the Dark Tower 100% gives “Tall, Dark, and Handsome” in the morally ambiguous bad boy sense (and according to a lot of people’s comments in the visually descriptive sense too😁). Especially when reading the series, the whole first book sets Roland, the Gunslinger, up where you’re not really sure if he’s the hero or the anti-hero yet, I always took “tall, dark, and handsome” as a fleeting first impression, both of someone’s looks in the tall and handsome, and dark as in character, upon meeting someone and it’s definitely the vibe I think he’d give off at first glance to the residents upon rolling into a little desert town.
32:52 I always saw, besides the Greek references, Spanish references for the Atreides (the Salusan bull and what seemed to be Corridas on their home planet), which, besides the fact that Spain had a huge colonial empire at some point, also relates to the Middle-Eastern coding that permeates the Dune series, considering the history of the Arab conquests in the Iberian peninsula and later the Reconquista
0:11 that's me bro
Same
6 foot Native American lol
@@theskeptic3214 im 6'8 and black
I'm a short serb do I count?
@@a_random_orthodox_Christian not really thats like the point of the video
I think the issue is less to do with the writing and more to do with people wanting to see themselves in the characters they read. I remember when the Harry Potter play came out, and there was controversy over Grangers skin color. People tried to defend the casting choice (which didnt really need to be defended) by pointing out that she was described as browned after her summer vacation. People choose to ignore context clues to help their own view of characters.
Tall dark and handsome makes me think of that one spongebob bit
I’ve never read the phrase ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ but it is part of the zeitgeist for me as a shorthand for certain aesthetics. Like another commenter posted though, and probably due in no small part to ‘assumed whiteness’, dark was never about the skin color in that description. It was about demeanor. The kind of person who had storm clouds following them around. Or a signifier that a person was a little edgy or dangerous.
This was a good video to start unpacking that.
And that song over the supporters was great!
I've been writing a fantasy book where the setting has no white people, and found people just default into the thinking characters I don't expain explicitly the skin color of are...white. It's frustrating.
That is very interesting, and sad. I understand your frustration.
@@lepidopteranodonthat’s literally what you guys are doing in this video lol
maybe try stating that no one is white. Or just simply describe many people's skin color.
@@waynewayne8419 could you clarify your thoughts? I don't really understand your comment
It kinda fits into the Ambiguously Brown trope
I'm finnish and translation influences it too but as a kid when I read 'dark' in things like 'tall dark and handsome' I assumed romani
I clicked bc of the content and themes you talk about but now im obsessed with all of the framed art work in your background for each video. Maybe one day you'll do a tour, if you havent already.