The ruckus over the "race" of Santa Claus and Jesus is making my soul hurt and causing me to believe that Idiocracy has arrived several hundred years earlier than predicted. Conservative knee-jerkers are insisting on the literal truth of images created by Coca-Cola in the 1920s, and, amazingly, Liberal knee-jerkers have outdone them this time by making even bigger leaps of nonsense.
--------------------------
The most trivially obvious fact that is being overlooked here in peoples' rush to infest literally everything with partisan ideology is that Santa Claus does not have a skin color because he does not exist. Really, that should be the end of it. The other absolutely crucial fact to know about Santa Claus is that he is not St. Nicholas. St. Nicholas lived and died in the 4th century in Anatolia. Santa Claus is a mythical being who supposedly lives at the North Pole, spies on all of the children of the world, and has magic flying reindeer and elf slaves.
 | |
| Santa Claus. |
 |
| Not Santa Claus. Also not a Turk. |
Going a level down into the idiotic claims I have been seeing, no, St. Nicholas, although from a region which many centuries later would become part of Turkey, was not "Turkish." How do I know that? Because I have a grasp of very basic world history and know that Turks did not migrate from Central Asia to Anatolia until after the battle of Manzikert in 1071 AD. And stepping even deeper into low neuron land, many people, even the venerable Jon Stewart, are claiming that Turks and/or Greeks aren't Caucasians. This claim will be instantly falsified by anyone who has ever met a Greek or Turk, and certainly ought to be distressing news to, for example, the Golden Dawn party.
I just want to say that for every second you spend constructing elaborate and historically inane arguments about the skin color of a mythical entity, a kitten dies.
--------------------
Moving on to Jesus. Jesus' skin color has been a point of contention among people who have nothing important to think about for decades. With Jesus we have someone who is claimed by many people to have been born to a virgin, walked on water, healed sick people just by touching them, and was resurrected from the dead. And yet in spite of all of these very supernatural events, we are being regaled from all sides with the notion that Jesus' skin color must be determined by his ethnic identification. That's right, for some reason the path from genes to melanin expression must be absolutely materially deterministic.
Both Conservative knee-jerkers and Liberal knee-jerkers have been on the 'let's reconstruct Jesus' appearance' bandwagon. And both of them seem to have settled onto the notion that Jesus' ethnicity is "Semitic." Thus we are treated to people spouting to one of the most prevalent and least accurate myths on the internet, that there is a Semitic ethnicity or race.
So I'll say it for the thousandth time: "Semitic" is not an ethnicity or race. Semitic is only a language family, spoken by a very diverse group of people, and includes Hebrew, Arabic, Maltese, and the highland Ethiopian languages. I hope you can take one look at that varied group of people and agree that they do not have a common ethnicity or race. Jesus was not Semitic because nobody is Semitic.
Jewish, on the other hand, is an ethnicity, or at least a nation. If we absolutely insist on assigning an ethnic identity to Jesus, he was either a) Jewish, if you do not believe in the New Testament, or b) half Jewish and half divine if you do believe in the New Testament. If it was b), we cannot possibly know what a half-Jewish-half-divine person looks like. If it was a) we also cannot possibly know what any given individual Jewish person who lived 2000 years looked like. Therefore I submit that anyone who proposes to tell us what Jesus looked like is dumb. Real dumb.
If selfies were around 2000 years ago we would know what Jesus looked like and people could then misapply modern particularly American racial notions to their hearts' content. But we don't have those selfies, or even polaroids, so please choose someone else to misapply modern particularly American racial notions to.
 |
| Either a) Jewish or b) supernatural. Either way, there are no photographs and you can not possibly claim to know what he looked like. |
YEP fizziks, Jesus probably did look similar to the shot you posted at the bottom of your diary....
ReplyDeleteMy takeaway regarding Kelly was this: She was pissed off about a "tongue in cheek" article which she didn't know was "tongue in cheek". SO.. in her own way, and "fighting against the P.C. police", Kelly lashed out (not humorously as she claimed) with push back against what she perceives as liberal attacks on her cultural icons.
What is telling to me is that she needed to even "pushback" in the first place. The question we should ask is WHY is it so very important to establish that Santa Claus or Jesus were white? What does the color of their skin matter in any way, shape, or form. Isn't a cultural icon like Santa simply the spirit of the Christmas season? I didn't know that the season had a race?
I'm not so sure that the original article was "tongue in cheek". If you are tempted to think it was, witness that there are a LOT of liberals out there who are very seriously trying to 'prove' that Santa Claus isn't white. Daily Show, Daily Kos, you name it. They are using the same derp that I referred to in my posting, going from Santa Claus -> St. Nicholas -> Turkish -> not white. Every step of that illogical progression is every bit as stupid as anything Megyn Kelly said.
DeleteThis whole incident is dripping with both Conservative AND Liberal stupidity. You can't just single out FOX News on this one.
I am pretty sure about it, and since Kelly admitted that in her response I am willing to go with that.
DeleteBut even if it were not, the lionshare of this issue has to be with FOX. I don't know anyone who made an issue regarding this who is in the mainstream of any Liberal movement. Honestly, this was an article by one person at Slate... Not any real massive part of the "Liberal Establishment".
Here is a direct quote from Aisha Harris, wrote the article at Slate:
"Earlier this week, I argued that our image of Santa Claus should no longer be a white man, but, instead, a penguin. I hoped the piece would come across as a little tongue-in-cheek, while at the same time expressing my real concern that America continues to promote the harmful idea of whiteness-as-default. "
And:
I’ll be fine if no one else jumps on board the penguin train and Santa remains a white man. But if you’re seriously emphatic that he is white and must remain white, there’s a good chance that your view of the rest of the world is just as limited and unimaginative. I mean, we are talking about a magical man who slides down your chimney every Christmas Eve. Just so we’re clear.
Anyway, IF you can please show me someone in the "Liberal Establishment" that really is concerned about this, I would love to see it. However, there is no one that even compares to FOX (who are the unofficial Spokespeople for all things Conservative) that maintains this.
UNTIL Kelly made a big deal of this, no one really cared and certainly no one as influential or "mainstream" as FOX. So, YES I can just single out FOX on this one.
Ok, does Jon Stewart count as part of the Liberal establishment? I think he does, at least as much as Megyn Kelly does as part of the Conservative establishment.
DeleteWell when did Stewart start a discussion on this? Do you have a link to what he said, and was he reacting to FOX or did he start the discussion. AND Stewart is a comedian so... what was the context?
DeleteHere's a video of the Jon Stewart segment I have in mind:
Deletehttp://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-december-12-2013/war-on-christmas---s--t-s-getting-weird-edition---black-santa
It is of course starting out by making fun of Kelly, but then they get into the whole thing.
Yes, he's an entertainer, but we're in an era where entertainers are political figures. Rush Limbaugh is a major figure on the Right even though he often claims to be just an entertainer.
And it isn't just Stewart. Over at the epicenter of knee-jerk liberalism, a bunch of 'HURR HURR Jesus wuz brown' and a self-appointed "scholar" telling us that there is a "Semtic race":
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/14/1262765/-A-scholar-tries-to-inform-Megyn-Kelly
Now as far as Stewart... I cannot see that as some "Liberal outrage". It is outrage about FOX being a bastion of racism and ignorance. If, say, Stewart ignited the whole controversy in a serious manner (as Kelly and FOX Bobblehead team did) THEN you could use that as an example. But Stewart is just a comedic and cynical response to Fox.
DeleteHad Kelly and Bobbleheads not gotten so aggravated over something so stupid and made a National Show about it, Stewart probably would not have said "Boo" regarding the race of Santa.
As for a Blogger at Daily Kos, I don't think
A. That one blog has even a smidgen of the influence that Kelly has...
B. That Daily Kos represents mainstream Liberal thought. I don't think most self described Liberals agree with the anti-Semitic nutjobs that also think 9-11 was a combination of the Mossad and the CIA, that Dennis Kuchinich, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Dr. Jill Stein, Ralph Nader, or Lyndon LaRouche would be acceptable Presidential Candidates (as most Kossaks do), or that Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden are real heroes.
Just Sayin'.
If you want to say the Hard Left and the Lunatic Fringe of the Left think this is an issue... I would agree with you. But to compare them to the average Liberal and then draw an equivalence to the mainstream Conservative movement is going to get my disagreement. FOX and Kelly represent a majority opinion of Conservatives. DKos and the loons therein represent the crazed fringe of both the Left and Hard Right.
Forget Santa, tell me about Hanukkah Harry ;-)
ReplyDeletehahaha I remember that... Way to go!
DeleteMegan Kelly started it.
ReplyDelete-Ethan