4 ms·

Biological father. His (adoptive) father was white, and Jobs didn't look middle eastern, the key part. There's a whole spectrum of skin tones within ethnicities

by nether 11y ago

Biological father. His (adoptive) father was white, and Jobs didn't look middle eastern, the key part. There's a whole spectrum of skin tones within ethnicities that affects how you are treated in the US more than where your parents originate.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
> Jobs didn't look middle eastern Jobs didn't look stereotypically middle eastern.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > Jobs didn't look stereotypically middle eastern. No kidding. Many people in the Middle East are completely "white", by every definition. In fact, it's amusing that the word "Caucasian" has been corrupted into a euphemism for "white", given where the word comes from....[0]. (Most people who are Caucasian aren't even white!) While we're on the topic, the most pale and fair-skinned people I've met in my life were not European; they were Indian (Kashmiri). People have this notion of what regions stereotypically map to which skin tones, and this doesn't actually reflect reality at all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasus_Mountains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasus_Mountains
  - elektromekatron 11y ago
    For added comedy points, the word 'aryan' means Indo-Iranian, at least according to Tolkien, who I suspect knows a thing or two about the meanings of words. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-have-no-ancestors-of-that-gifted.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-have-no-ancestors-of-...
  - akkadian2 11y ago
    Umm, it means white. As in "mountain covered in snow" is white.
jaegerpicker 11y ago
> There's a whole spectrum of skin tones within ethnicities that affects how you are treated in the US more than where your parents originate. That is so true. Personal I look very very stereotypically Scots/Irish but I also have a lot of Native American ancestry. As sad as it makes me to say I've had a far easier path in live than my cousins who were undeniably Native but from an extremely similar background and level of income growing up, in a 10 mile radius of each other. I was certainly treated differently then them.
logfromblammo 11y ago
There are actually psych studies out there that take a photo of a person, darken one copy of it, and lighten another, and ask the volunteer subjects to form first-impression opinions of the people shown in the photographs. The results typically show that lighter-skinned people are viewed more positively than darker-skinned people, even when the person providing the opinions is a darker-skinned person. This can be trivially verified by testing the hypothesis, "In the relationship triangle, the protagonist will always choose the lighter-skinned person in the end," against all existing Tyler Perry movies. And that's just passive cultural enforcement. I'm sure that the regular two-minutes hate on that one photo of Osama bin Laden as the quintessential, stereotypical terrorist mastermind did no favors to anyone sharing similar facial features.
csomar 11y ago
His (adoptive) father was white, and Jobs didn't look middle eastern, the key part. This shows your lack of knowledge of the Middle-East. People in Syria/Lebanon look extremely different from the people in Saudi Arabia. They just happen to speak the same language (heck the accent is quite different too)
- mikeash 11y ago
  Steve Jobs didn't look Middle Eastern in the same way that this kid's clock looked like a bomb. Which is to say, it's not true, but "looks like" often depends on what the observer thinks a thing is.

by nether 11y ago

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

> Jobs didn't look middle eastern Jobs didn't look stereotypically middle eastern.

chimeracoder 11y ago
> Jobs didn't look stereotypically middle eastern. No kidding. Many people in the Middle East are completely "white", by every definition. In fact, it's amusing that the word "Caucasian" has been corrupted into a euphemism for "white", given where the word comes from....[0]. (Most people who are Caucasian aren't even white!) While we're on the topic, the most pale and fair-skinned people I've met in my life were not European; they were Indian (Kashmiri). People have this notion of what regions stereotypically map to which skin tones, and this doesn't actually reflect reality at all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasus_Mountains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasus_Mountains
- elektromekatron 11y ago
  For added comedy points, the word 'aryan' means Indo-Iranian, at least according to Tolkien, who I suspect knows a thing or two about the meanings of words. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-have-no-ancestors-of-that-gifted.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-have-no-ancestors-of-...
- akkadian2 11y ago
  Umm, it means white. As in "mountain covered in snow" is white.

jaegerpicker 11y ago

> There's a whole spectrum of skin tones within ethnicities that affects how you are treated in the US more than where your parents originate. That is so true. Personal I look very very stereotypically Scots/Irish but I also have a lot of Native American ancestry. As sad as it makes me to say I've had a far easier path in live than my cousins who were undeniably Native but from an extremely similar background and level of income growing up, in a 10 mile radius of each other. I was certainly treated differently then them.

logfromblammo 11y ago

There are actually psych studies out there that take a photo of a person, darken one copy of it, and lighten another, and ask the volunteer subjects to form first-impression opinions of the people shown in the photographs. The results typically show that lighter-skinned people are viewed more positively than darker-skinned people, even when the person providing the opinions is a darker-skinned person. This can be trivially verified by testing the hypothesis, "In the relationship triangle, the protagonist will always choose the lighter-skinned person in the end," against all existing Tyler Perry movies. And that's just passive cultural enforcement. I'm sure that the regular two-minutes hate on that one photo of Osama bin Laden as the quintessential, stereotypical terrorist mastermind did no favors to anyone sharing similar facial features.

csomar 11y ago

His (adoptive) father was white, and Jobs didn't look middle eastern, the key part. This shows your lack of knowledge of the Middle-East. People in Syria/Lebanon look extremely different from the people in Saudi Arabia. They just happen to speak the same language (heck the accent is quite different too)

mikeash 11y ago
Steve Jobs didn't look Middle Eastern in the same way that this kid's clock looked like a bomb. Which is to say, it's not true, but "looks like" often depends on what the observer thinks a thing is.