you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]ifuckredditsnitches_Resident Pajeet 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I am not an expert in indian texts, but if i recall correctly I think he mentioned vedic texts or vedda? I am not certain. He mentions it in the first part of the interview, and I believe he even mentions the indian word, the word "enlightened" was associated with having blue eyes.

The Vedas do mention white skin and red hair but I don't know that it mentions blue eyes or what you mention about the word "enlightened". Will have to dig further. There is one major Hindu deity with blue eyes (Shiva) but I'm not sure of any other major figures in Indian religion with that feature besides Siddartha Gautama (Buddha).

Another interesting thing is that it seems that "white" and even "european" might be a rather new identity, and quite different to the geopolitical identities of pre industrial age.

I think until fairly recently "white" only really referred to WASPs and a couple other groups (see Ben Franklin's letter on this). This changed sometime in the 20th century I believe, but many academics still see Anglos as the true "whites". Though US government policy was never really that strict, their definition of white was always a bit strange.