Whatever happened to fair skinned, blue eyed Americans?
Asked by
Aster (
20028
)
December 3rd, 2015
I may be imagining it but it seems to me we are running quite low on blue eyes. I say this knowing that my husband and best friend have blue eyes and she has true blonde hair. Do you have several blue eyed blonde hair friends or relatives? I don’t. What has happened to them?
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I haven’t found that to be the case. I’m fair skinned and blue eyed. So is my sister, parents, and many other people I know. Although, it is likely that there will be less and less blue eyes and fair skin going forward. If I had had kids the probability of blue eyes for them would probably be statistically low, inn not sure if my husband has blue anywhere in his family? Mostly brown and some green. My kids would also likely be a little darker skinned than me, which I think would be great.
There are so many blue-eyed people I think that recessive trait will be around for a long long time. Red hair might be more at risk.
My mom is, her two sisters are, my sister is and my daughter is.
My family has many. I’m true blonde with green eyes.
You need to come visit the Midwest, especially rural Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. You’ll find what you are looking for.
Eye color is determined by several different genes, and that leads to blue eyes being very recessive.
I’m a natural blonde of primarily Irish descent, though half of my mother’s side is German.
My father had clear blue eyes. My mother green. Mine are slate gray, unless they are reflecting my clothing
Does it matter or is this a thinly veiled question about minorities taking over America?
Eye color as a genetic trait is fascinating. I love the rare colors: Amber and lavender and pale colors on people with otherwise dark, dominant traits.
You have to blame people like me – my family was thrown out of Germany and came to the states just before WW2. Dark-haired Jews with brown or hazel eyes. We got into the gene pool, and ..damn .. no more blondes and blue eyed…
I didn’t know eye color was a prerequisite for citizenship.
Probably almost half the Jews I know are blue eyed. I don’t know the actual stat in America, but since we are mostly Ashkenazi here, I bet it’s a pretty strong percentage. I don’t mean a majority, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 20% or so.
@janbb I didn’t know minorities were taking over America so no. I do know they’re increasing in California and Texas.
@Aster Have you ever heard the expression, “the browning of America”?
I’m German, Irish and English, brown eyes but have red haired, blue eyed sisters. Genetics are complicated for all of us mutts
My skin has been more or less permanently tanned through long-term sun exposure in my youth, I suppose, but my eyes are as blue as they ever were.
^^ So that’s what happened to one of them!
Blame fake tan & Crystal Gayle
Blue eyes will go extinct at some point.
I think what you’re seeing is the culture changes that allows non-white, non-blue eyed people to have a say in what’s going on. Also, a culture that no longer frowns on racially blended families.
Out of this group of people (my people) four of us have blue eyes. There is one blue eyed, blonde grand daughter missing.
I think the blond-haired blue-eyed people all joined the Hitler Youth.
I remember when I was in college someone asked me how I could be blue eyed and fair haired (medium brown) and be Jewish. At the time I thought the question was so odd. I was in my late teens.
If you’re hankering to be surrounded by blue-eyed blondes, just move to one of the Scandinavian countries.
Problem solved.
We decided to stop having children.
Some of us got older and our hair darker. Blue eyes haven’t changed though.
@Buttonstc There are plenty of dark haired-brown eyed scandinavians. The indigenous people from scandinavia whose genetics are all over Europe have dominant dark hair/brown eyes.
I remember learning as a kid that MOST people have brown eyes. I assumed most people had blue eyes….like me.
I know a lot of people with blue eyes. I have hazel eyes, but they’re mostly green because only the outer edge is a brown/gold, and my ancestry is definitely really mixed (Irish, Native American, German, Danish, French, and maybe Scottish). Interestingly, my dad has blue eyes and my mom had true brown. My sister and my maternal uncle are the only other people, on either side of my family, that have green eyes.
All in all, I know more people with blue eyes than anything else, but that could be because something like 80% of people in Oregon are white.
Funny.
I don’t remember being in Hitler Youth as a child.
Unless they wore green, earned badges and sold cookies.
Oh, and we never, ever, wore veils at all.
It’s ok, I think we’ll all be extinct at the same time.
Globally.
I’m fair skinned and blue eyed.
All this time I am thinking raven-haired saucy Brazillian type, had me fooled
I guess one could say the same about where have all the dark chocolate, blue-black African Americans gone? Seemingly each generation they get lighter and lighter, some do light they resemble more Hispanic or Middle Eastern than from Africa. As the world get smaller by travel and communication and people relocating, we are becoming more of a blended world, but that won’t make peace for all, we will find something to bash eachothers brains in for.
@Hypocrisy_Central You’re quoting me?
True about many black people being lighter here than generations ago. I always chalked it up to the slave owners. Less time in the sun too.
^ Yeah, it was your quote, had me fooled, but then again, I hardly know any other Flutheronians really.
Less sun had nothing to do with it, it is that propensity for those Blank men to go crazy after those blondes and those blondes to be crazy about “burning coal” to get back at “The Man” for oppressing them all these years. ~~~
Fooled how? You assume I “look” Brazilian (which is pretty varied, but I’ll assume medium skin tone and thick dark hair) but you know I’m a Jewish girl who lives here in the US.
Again, I don’t remember any black troop leaders wearing any veiled items either. Gee Wilikers! I must’ve missed that meeting of the Scout Youth also! Gosh, are all of us extinct yet? Wait, OMG my eye color is faaaaaddddding away!
Oh No!
I need to blame it on someone!
Let’s see…..hhhmmm…I guess when we hold the next meeting, instead of saluting as we march around, I’ll put on My Ray Ban’s and search for The Person who caused this all!
How many boxes of cookies would you like to purchase? Our Thin Minties went up in price. More $$$ funds to pay for bringing more of our brethren over!
I didn’t realize that various groups gave us a discount on stickits!
I can use more of the stickits to hang up more Scout Youth propaganda!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
oops! Gotta go- I don’t want to miss the next meeting of the Scout Youth!
We’re making sock puppets! Gosh, I hope they have enough yellow yarn and blue buttons!
You want to hear something sad? I dated a black guy who grew up in Selma Alabama. He was born in 1954.
One time he was being disparaging of the way Asian people speak, “All that gobbelty gook.”
I said, “The English language sounds like gobbelty gook to them, you know.”
He didn’t believe me. Then he said something like, “They aren’t even real Americans.”
I paused, then said, “Exactly what IS a “real” American?”
“White people,” he answered, without hesitation.
OK, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but it made me so sad to think that somewhere in his culture in the Deep South that bullshit had been planted in his young mind. Hell, his family has been here much, much longer than mine on either my mother’s side (1929) or my father’s (1872.) But, to his mind, I was a super, duper REAL American.
I think if you ask this now to late gen-Xers or millennials the answers would be different.
ARE_you_kidding_me Different how?
Much less racism, generally more acceptance and almost absent bigotry. The difference between people aged around 40 and below to people older on average is night and day. Here in the south anyway.
Are you black, @ARE_you_kidding_me?
A black person of the same age from the north, or the east or the west would not have answered that way, There was a combination of deep, deep south mentality going back generations, back to slavery days, and a general lack of intelligence on his part.
No, I’m your stereotypical white male. I’m in my thirties. I’m just saying the racism tone has died down with people my age and it’s so obvious when having conversations with older people. Whites especially. My wife’s 90 year old grandmother uses the n word all the time and “can’t believe” they let “coloreds” be doctors. I had fifty something year old bosses who rolled their eyes when myself and a couple other coworkers recommended a black engineer for a job. The old guard is within a decade of being gone and the next generation has a different attitude and perspective. It’s much harder being black because the wounds are deep so the perception of deeper racism is still going to be transient even if it is about to be greatly muted.
^^My experience is so different.
How old are you? to the decade if you’re not comfortable revealing it. I would really struggle hard to think of anyone I know around my age or younger who hold actual racist views. Older…it’s frankly easy, often comically if it was not so sad. Even people who should really know better.
I’m 47. But, I was raised by Jewish parents in the Northeast who had a parent or parents who immigrated here, or their grandparents did. We were minorities.
My maternal side was educated and in the arts and fairly liberal. My paternal side there was some mental illness, very poor, and they didn’t say much, and certainly didn’t spend time bitching about other minorities. America was the new country after living through horrors in their former country.
Remember, a lot of Jews traveled down to the South to fight for civil rights. My parents aren’t void of making stereotypes, but they are not racist.
My grandmother worked as a counselor in a high school for pregnant girls for a while. A lot of them were minorities. She probably had some judgment about it, but she treated everyone as an equal and didn’t prejudge people. She would be judging Barbie doll white 16 year olds who are preggers too. I’ve never heard any of my grandparents use a derogatory slang description of anyone, except one time my grandmother told me to get my window treatments backed in white so my house doesn’t look like a Puerto Rican lives inside. LOL. I’m married to a Mexican and that house we decorated with bright colors.
Having said that, I know minority young people who are immigrants or their parents were and are quite racist. It’s annoying.
I do think on the whole, most people under 30 don’t separate people into races like older generations did.
Do you think it’s racist to notice someone’s skin color or eye color? I don’t notice eye color much, I don’t focus on it. Many people over the years have told me I’m lucky to have blue eyes, and I never really gave it much of a thought.
I don’t think it’s racist to notice, unless you are blind you are going to. What makes someone racist is if they hold preconceived views and equate them to the holder of those traits. I don’t notice eye color either. I have brown eyes and I don’t think it’s ever been a strike against me in any way. Being a white male in public school and in employment actually was to a certain degree. For whatever reason it seemed like people acting on white guilt seemed to want to step on white males, younger ones especially. Job prospects in the age of affirmative action with workplaces already flooded with white guys made finding certain employment difficult. I guess that accomplished what it intended, making the children of the old guard have a taste of what it’s like to be on the other side of the fence. It also made me realize the perverse pleasure some people take in bringing down members of specific groups. A good number of people who were anti-racist were so in a hateful way, quite a lesson in complex humanity to a teenager. In reality though it was a few psychopaths who used the social justice warrior veil to mask their own hate and sociopathy. Not representitive of the whole movement but they leave marks. In college though, I felt pretty welcomed, not too much of that going on. In several or more generations race will be a shadow since the whole world will essentially be a melting pot. I have always thought that the end of racism will be a progressive, organic death as we bring cultures together. Ideologies won’t matter, this is just nature taking it’s course.
@Dutchess_III He didn’t believe me. Then he said something like, “They aren’t even real Americans.”
Strange, some time back I read something that stated in the eyes of greater US society Asians were looked upon as the model minority. That they were less prone to crime, better educated, and more docile and polite in comparison to stats of African Americans and Hispanics. That as minorities go, they were hired more often than the aforementioned groups because of their desirable qualities and satisfying of ”coloring” the work place.
As I think about it, it’s kind of odd to point out to a Jewish person they are lucky to have blue eyes. That blue eyes are coveted. You would think people would worry about any type of reference or reminder to Hitler’s desire for blue eyes and blonde hair.
@JLeslie I think for whatever reason blue eyes are simply seen as a beauty trait and not really a racial one. Light colored eyes bring out detail that is obscured with more pigmentation. It happens to be racial but I don’t think the act of admiring blue eyes is implicitly racist, just a preference. Most people actually assume I’m Jewish for some reason and I have never really understood why except I just “look that way” to them. I certainly can’t tell if someone is unless they tell me they are.
@JLeslie
You mentioned the Jewish civil rights workers who traveled down to the South to march in protests against racism.
I think it bears mentioning that most people remember Medgar Ever’s muder (he was black) but there were also three civil rights workers in the summer of ‘64 also murdered, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwermer. Not so prominently remembered is that two of them were Jewish.
They were killed by the exact same hatred that prompted the killing of Evers.
@Buttonstc I wasn’t aware of that. I’ve heard stats regarding what percentage of the people and lawyers who traveled south for civil rights were Jewish, but I don’t remember the numbers well. It was significant.
@ARE_you_kidding_me I’d have to see you, are we Facebook friends? Sometimes it’s mannerisms though, or how you speak. A friend of mine in TN used to say I arrange my sentences like Jewish people.
When I think someone is Jewish I’m right probably 90% of the time, but often enough I have no clue and am surprised the person is Jewish. If a woman looks WASPy to me, especially very beautiful and WASPy I don’t expect her to be Jewish. They are out there though. Men it’s less obvious for me.
Mississippi Burning @JLeslie. Excellent movie.
My husband’s father is 92 years old, and he is interestingly non-racist, but he still holds old views. We were watching American Idol once, several years ago. A black gal was singing. He said, “Wow. She is very good. But her color is against her.” I almost fell out of my chair! He didn’t say it with contempt, just regret at the reality of the sad, sad word.
The contestant was Jordan Sparks.
It’s also possible that Dad was yanking my chain! He loves doing that.
Blonde, blue eyed AND left handed. lol
@Coloma‘s a lefty??? UNFRIEND HER!!!!
^^^ Hey, no leftism allowed! lol
I’m blond haired and blue eyed. I live in Southern California, there’s lots of us, but lots of every other skin color, hair color and eye color too. My ancestors came from England and France, so that’s why I have the coloring I do.
I really think that it only seems that there is a shortage, because people of color are being featured in equal, or greater numbers in venues all over society. Before 1970, actors, actresses, politicians, police officers, managers, virtually everyone in the spotlight in any way was Caucasian. Unless they were steering up trouble like that Martin Luther King fella.
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