WI: Discrimination based on eye colour

Jonjo

Banned
What if western society viewed people who don't have blue eyes of whatever shade were inferior in some way? basically apartheid without skin colour.
 
how about reverse ?
If there is a society which views brown eyes as more beautiful/desireable, than blue eyes? Not discrimination blue eyed people, but for example brown eyed woman are prefered.
 
Can you list the eye colours of, say, your ten closest friends? Most cant. Its just that noticeable.

Seeing that having high cheek bones was a key reason to exterminate someone in Rwanda in 1994, I'm not sure that's a strong argument. If eye colour became all important, than you would start noticing it.
 
how about reverse ?
If there is a society which views brown eyes as more beautiful/desireable, than blue eyes? Not discrimination blue eyed people, but for example brown eyed woman are prefered.

Well, that's just ridiculous. The brown-eyed are hideously ugly with their mud-coloured eyes. They're a lower sub-species not fit to clean blue-eyed peoples shoes.
 
I thought Nazi's discriminated on eye color? (or alest, the ridiculous Aryan bullshit spouted said that a true Aryan was Blonde Haired Blue Eyed?"
 
Well, that's just ridiculous. The brown-eyed are hideously ugly with their mud-coloured eyes. They're a lower sub-species not fit to clean blue-eyed peoples shoes.

I don't know whether this is some dumb roleplaying or dumb trolling, but either way it's dumb and terrible and you shouldn't post like this, thank you.
 
Any Mediterranid society with a light-eyed minority and dark or mixed-eyed majority could discriminate by eye colour in this way - and did in history. The superstition of the 'evil eye' is strongly linked to the notion that people with blue or green eyes cause or propagate it; in modern-day Greece and Turkey amulets against the evil eye still take the form of a blue eye, intended to counter the blue-eye matiasma.

You could also have prejudice against recessive genotypes, fuelled by a form of eugenics. The argument goes that recessive genes behave the way they do because they are damaged - when the body has a damaged and a healthy gene to choose from it expresses the healthy (dominant) one, but when both copies are damaged (i.e. recessive) it has no choice but to express the recessive phenotype.*

Adherents to this philosophy could appeal to the fact that blue eyes confer no known survival advantage (indeed, slightly reduce vision in bright sunlight) and are likely simply a byproduct of more advantageous pseudo-albinism in colder climates. Of course, such a view would likely only take off in a society where most people had dominant hair/eye genes and the 'inferior' type was a minority.

Obviously, if you want prejudice against blue-eyed people to remain to the present day you need nations without a sizeable plurality of blue-eyed people to predominate. That's obviously easy to do in a world where the major world powers are, say, Chinese, Turkic, or Indian. OP mentions 'Western society' and implies it would just be blue eyes that were the subject of prejudice, so you're best off with Mediterranean powers retaining their dominance somehow (a hard sell given the lushness and rich mineral resources of northern/western Europe once it's civilised). A surviving Roman Empire is probably too late, since IIRC light phenotypes were already considered attractive, albeit somewhat exotic.

* Of course, this is nonsense, as the process of meiosis does not automatically know what traits will be advantageous in every situation and environment. A gene could be 'damaged' as far as the genome's 'antivirus' is concerned but still offer significant advantages, which is of course how individual mutations become widespread genotypes in the first place. 'Recessive' and 'dominant' are of course relative - if a recessive gene manages to completely elbow out a dominant gene from the pool with its survival advantages, then with nothing dominant to it, it becomes the most dominant gene for that trait.
 
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amphibulous

Banned
Originally Posted by Socrates
Well, that's just ridiculous. The brown-eyed are hideously ugly with their mud-coloured eyes. They're a lower sub-species not fit to clean blue-eyed peoples shoes.


I don't know whether this is some dumb roleplaying or dumb trolling, but either way it's dumb and terrible and you shouldn't post like this, thank you.

You do get that the guy is making fun of racists and racism? Well, obviously you don't - but he is.
 

amphibulous

Banned
That doesn't mean it's not dumb roleplaying, whatever the purpose.

It doesn't mean that it is, either. Really - do you watch The Producers and think "This is terrible! No one should be promoting Nazism this way!" ? I doubt it and I hope not. The point Socrates was illustrating by making a typical racist remark in an obviously absurd context was that racism of any kind is absurd.
 
Just realised I got an official warning for this! Utterly bizarre!

But just to clarify to anyone with hurt feelings, I don't really believe brown-eyed people are lower human beings. I'd even go as far as to say that I think they deserve full civil and political rights, and equality before the law. In fact, I'm actually in a long term live-in relationship with one!
 
Just realised I got an official warning for this! Utterly bizarre!

But just to clarify to anyone with hurt feelings, I don't really believe brown-eyed people are lower human beings. I'd even go as far as to say that I think they deserve full civil and political rights, and equality before the law. In fact, I'm actually in a long term live-in relationship with one!

Such a scandal!

A blue eyed boy meets brown eyed girl.

What's next saying blacks eyed people aren't pure evil?



If you can't tell these are jokes you need to go have your sense of humor installed you robot.


You heard me I hate robo-Americans :mad:
 
Well, I love brown-eyed people. They're beautiful, and were put here on Earth by the lord to pleasure us blue-eyed people as well as scrub our shoes, wash our clothes, cook our dinner, and raise our children, thereby freeing us to do the things that matter. It's in the bible.
 
Hahaha, you guys are all hilarious. I don't think that blue eyes are actually considered that great in the Western world. The traditional American atomic couple was pretty much a man with jet black hair and brown eyes, with a blonde woman who usually also had brown eyes.

In certain societies with a high-level of Nordicist bias, than yes, like in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa this occurred, but I would go so far as to argue that brown eyes are usually considered more attractive generally. And I'm blue-eyed :p

And also, there's a lot of cases where villains are pseudo-albinos with icy blue eyes that make them a bit creepy.

Green eyes, being more rare, could probably be discriminated against, like if they were associated with witchcraft in the Middle Ages.

The main problem with this is that eye colour is usually tied to other physical aspects in human perception, due to genetics. So discrimination against blue-eyed people would usually be part of racism to whites in general, and there are plenty of whites with brown eyes. So its quite problematic. Maybe a Nordicist England would discriminate against brown-eyed people, due to the latter having (usually) lots of Celtic blood?
 
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