/siberia/ - Off-topic

>>789134
It's not that it's bad not to be white, it's that whiteness is a basically arbitrary phenomenon and you're drawing the boundary lines in a way that doesn't map up with how people actually behave, particularly in the US. (the main place that cares about "whiteness")

Syrians, Turks and Iranians are genuinely awkward cases because they're geographically in the middle east which has its own implications (some are "white passing" others fall into the awkward grouping most yanks would call "Arabs"), Yugoslavs and Greeks on the other hand are, like Italians, a specialised type of white. Nobody thinks "wow, Mike Dukakis could be the first non-white president and it was super-racist of George Bush to crush him like that!" I mean, bush did crush him by being super-racist, but it was by race-baiting against black people…

Whiteness is a spook, like religion. Nevertheless, if enough people act as if it's real, it becomes real to the extent that it affects peoples actions.

Whiteness in the vast majority of cases is really just phenotypes. If you have certain phenotypes that look close enough to the average phenotypes in Europe, you are treated as white.

Being treated as white (important to frame it this way rather than saying "being white") is considered important because it gives you a bunch of advantages in social life - such as in business, job search, policing, dating, politics etc.

>>789155
>phenotypes
Is this man white? He looks french

>>789157
Again, you're asking the wrong question. Is he TREATED as white is the question. And that question is answered in different ways based on who's asking (a.k.a the thousands of people you interact in daily life, millions if you're a public figure).

You don't even have to resort to using near-Euro ethnicities like Armenians or Lebanese. Just look at white-passing biracial black celebrities here - https://www.theroot.com/the-pope-has-black-roots-but-heres-15-more-white-passi-1851780447/slides/10

Those people are objectively not white, in the sense that they have ancestry and genes from Africa and absolutely no one considers Africans white, not even the Cushitic people.

Nevertheless these people are effectively white because they are treated as white, not just in the US but anywhere else in the world.

To answer your question, Assad will likely be treated as white by the vast majority of people, even after knowing his actual ancestry.