Tall, Dark and Racially Ambiguous 

"Her skin was like daytime coffee. If daytime coffee had a lot of milk. And only milk"

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.

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.

I was absolutely baffled at the backlash Amandla got for Rue. She was PERFECTLY cast.

She had beautiful olive skin. As in, green olives. She was an alien.

As a Latino of Italian ancestry I AM the racially ambiguous man of writers' dreams.

"tall, dark, and handsome" oh no, my cultural touch point is SpongeBob 😬

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 "Tall, Dark, and Handsome" was more referring to a "dark" personality-that they were brooding, melancholic, and moody.

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.

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 😂

"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"

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

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'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.

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.

Tall Dark and handsome is simply describing Idris Elba

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

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.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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 🤷

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!

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.

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

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.

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 😂😂😂

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.

TIL olive skin doesn’t mean what I’ve assumed for the last 32 years

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".

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 :/

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.

White people can have varying skin tones and even look tanned. that being said, just so the commenters know, latino is not a race and neither is italian. People of all races can be latino or have italian citizenship, with white being the native race of Italy, and 100% white latinos also existing. Black latinos and asian latinos are also a thing.

We italians are always in the middle of some racially ambiguous disasters

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.

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.😂

Tall, dark and handsome just means a WM with dark hair, dark eyes and slight tan.

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

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

“Babe, wake up! Princess Weekes dropped a new video essay!”💞

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.

The idea of "Exotic white people" because of a slightly darker complexion is such and american thing😂

People also forget olive skin can also be light skin. I’m olive but light skin. And no I’m not European.

0:44 I thought the ‘dark’ in tall, dark and handsome meant the skin colour. John Boyega and Michael B. Jordan come to mind

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 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.

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

As a kid i always thought olive skinned meant green skinned and I also loved 🫒😂😂😂😂

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a white person with brown hair who grew up in a VERY white town, I kinda get why white people default racially ambiguous characters to being white. Because I was treated like I was different from my blonde, blue eyed peers. Less desirable. Someone even told me that people preferred blondes because they were deemed more fertile (what does that make me, rotten? 🥴). It just goes to show how deep this colourism goes, even with the "right" race and ancestry, there's still a ranking order. That being said, I do think writers could be clearer on race in their books. I've read too many fantasy novels with "tawny-skinned" fantasy people who seemed a little too inspired by indigenous people. But it's still vague enough that some people might not pick up on it. And I dunno, it doesn't have to be wrong, but it kinda feels like erasure, or even appropriation. And especially so with historical novels. We already have too many people thinking that people of colour did not exist in Europe until the 1800's, let's not make it worse..

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.

why is it always olive skin and grey eyes, i don’t think i’ve ever met someone with grey eyes 😭😭

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 😆

Tall, dark, and handsome always confused me growing up. None of these characters were ever as dark as my Sicilian Grandfather. They are all fair-skinned how is that dark? Katniss is another one that drove me nuts because I did imagine her with a darker skin tone and looking at least looking more Mediterranean. Talking to a friend from a WASP background was interesting because she thought the movie Katniss matched her book vision. So, yeah even among white people you can get some pretty varied opinions on this.

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.

As you list all the Europeans who were excluded from true whiteness, we need to all have a real talk about how much being protestant was an unspoken essential of whiteness.

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.

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 think it's about time U.S. Americans realize how colorists white people around the world are to each other. It's interesting how the olive skinned "Mediterranean" cultures tend to be extremely colorist against themselves. Often words like "blonde" or "light eyed" are just shorthand for beautiful, attractive, and there's this very unspoken yet agreed upon understanding that Northern Europeans are just somehow "better." They're taller, stronger, more attractive, their economies work, they're successful, structured, disciplined, industrious, etc. No one's supposed to say it, and if you do they'll protest, but they act as though it is true. I believe that this, in fact, blurs the lines between the concepts of "colorism" and "racism;" while in the U.S. racial categories have had legal repercussions and are therefore more strictly discriminated, in other parts of the world, the difference between a blonde Swede and a swarthy Sicilian may inspire a starker difference in treatment than that between a Sicilian and an especially fair Lebanese, or, here in Latin American, between an olive skinned Andalusian and an olive skinned mestizo. As a Latin American, I actually find the comment from Suzanne Collins that you found to be a copout quite compelling. Race in Latin America essentially works like that; it's interpersonal, intrafamilial, muddled and mixed together with class. The idea that Katniss is in a different ethnic or racial category than her own sister is very evocative, and I don't think it's a copout to say that the reason she didn't see them as "non white" is because of "centuries of race mixing," because the truth is that their not being "non white" doesn't mean they're "yes white," so to speak, it means that those categories aren't that useful anymore. I know that choosing the strictly segregated categories of The United States as descriptors for the characters, at least when they are meant to be put to film, seems like the more responsible thing to do to a U.S. American, because doing otherwise seems like one would be shying away from confronting the reality, not of the world the story takes place in, but of the world the story will be read in; but I live in a reality right now where that comment sounds more real to me than the current U.S. racial reality, so it doesn't seem irresponsible to me, quite the contrary. I do think Jennifer Lawrence's physique du rôle was not really up to par, I thought of her as probably having indigenous ancestry, specifically, but I still respect Suzanne Collins' comment more than you seem to have.

FYI, Johnny Cash's eldest daughter went on PBS "Finding Your Roots, " and their genetic and genealogy research said that his first wife was, in fact, a bit black (and also Italian). I believe the wife was in "octaroon" territory.

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.

0:11 that's me bro

20:52 “Sorry, neither!” was my life partner’s favorite go-to quote from Star Trek. Thank you for keeping this deep knowledge alive!

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 fully thought tall dark handsome meant black as a kid. so idris elba remains my platonic ideal of it

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" 😅

'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! 😂

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).

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 :)

"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."

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’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!

In Norwegian we say "høy og mørk", tall and dark, always figuered that saying was applied to tall arab/blacks. I remeber being completley taken aback when i found out that I WAS apparentley "høy og mørk" (im white). In any case in Norway the saying predates most immigration, so it really isn’t all that strange or racist that it applies to whites, though the meaning of the term has been changing in young peoples minds as my own experience proves.

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.

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

So as a Gen Xer growing up I quickly learned that most of the fiction I was reading assumed whiteness as a default and "olive-skinned" or "dark" (along with "swarthy") was Anglo code for people like me (Italian heritage) or other Mediterranean-looking folks (or just as often, Romani-coded people). And it looks like a lot of these examples are coming from authors much older than me who would have internalized this terminology but whose works are currently prominent in the cultural consciousness. Because I think most millennial and younger authors realize the limitations and baggage of these terms--I can't think of many younger writers I've read who used them. Great survey of the topic, Princess!

i imagined Morris Chestnut when i imagined Tall Dark and Handsome

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.

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."

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

listen,, regardless of race, it's just wrong to think of ben affleck when you hear "tall dark and handsome"

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

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.

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 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'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

ppl disagreeing that Paul from dune is a yt savior is crazzzzy, like how much more obvious does dennis or herbert have to make it 😭😭😭 chani basically called that man a FRAUD AND A COLONIZER lmfaoooo

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'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

There have been so many times in which an author has described a character having “brown” skin in their books and what they really mean is a tan white person. Like SJM has so many characters that have “brown skin” but I really don’t believe she actually means a brown/black person.

This reminds me of Fiyero from Wicked who is described multiple times in the book as having dark or brown skin. His children even have Indian-esque names. But almost every depiction of him has been by a some white dude, including in the upcoming movie.

3:28 I’m watching this video during my break from studying for my archeology exam, there is always an anthropologist on the scene of the crime 😭

The Hunger Games being post-apocalyptic and thus, supposedly, after traditional racial or ethnic categories have been broken down or at least the terminology has been removed leads to a lot of racial ambiguity which I think is somewhat to its detriment. Because people do read all the characters as white regardless of the contextual clues and those clues can be very vague. I remember there being heated arguments amongst fans about Katniss and Gale and Rue's race but I even remember there being debate around whether the characters from District 3 were Asian. I don't know, I just find it interesting how in discussions about racial ambiguity, the characters are almost never described in an ambiguously Asian way.

As a French woman, who lived her whole life in the South of France, I feel like a lot of racist w. usian people would be blown away by how "dark" w. European skin can tan, without chemical tan enhancements. It's not rare for some of my w. friends to tan darker than my winter untanned Black skin! Also, living close to the Mediterranean Sea, the idea of dividing us btw "Blacks" and "whites" would make little sense: mixity of skin colour, facial features and hair textures is the rule, not the exception. [I'm not saying, the local far-right isnt trying to divide us but it's not a coincidence, they need to add the layer of antisemitism/islamophobia, etc. as people can literally look like literal siblings/cousins without it and there is no way to visually classify us until we disclose our names/religion and ancestry.]