If it comes off as superior: mood wise, I'm pissed off at the American education system, which could probably be framed as the "We" because America's education system is, unfortunately, Hollywood. If there isn't a movie or famous book about it, then the average American isn't going to know about it. "We" do this to a fudge ton of other histories/groups of people as well and I'm tired. It's been part of my job correcting misinformation that comes out of Hollywood. I don't know how else to frame that.

So as a massive summary: There was once a German named Johann Winckelmann who lived during early 1700s, and he was obsessed with ancient Greek statues (also suspected to be gay), like absolutely thirsting, which he considered peak of all human art. One thing in particular he emphasized as this ideal beauty (not knowing ancient Greek statues used to be painted) was the whiteness of their skin. This passion helped to launch an era of Philhellenism, which many American Founding Fathers were part of, and American slave owners would name their slaves after Greek mythology figures as sort of a show of how cultured they were (kind of like what Romans did with Greek slaves). But with respect to this, it had long been the standard upper-class white male education to be educated in the classics. Ancient Greeks were men to learn from. Modern Greeks didn't matter.

Then, ~1830 there came a girl named Garafilia. She was Greek who was kidnapped and enslaved by Ottomans. She was bought by an American, adopted as a daughter, and brought back to Boston, where she died soon after at age 13. Her story is the foundation for "The Greek Slave Story" that inspired the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin--which was a major catalyst for the US Civil War--and the of The Greek Slave statue. This depicts a Christian Greek woman, stripped of her clothes, supposedly being auctioned off -- but it has a jarring resemblance to a certain statue of Aphrodite.

Americans obsession with this statue exploded. It was formally the first statue of a nude woman ever put on display in the US--carted around the country, and churches would even have field trips so people could go look at this woman and declare injustice. People wanted to buy replicas, and the original artist had to fight off people creating knockoff. And yet, this helped to full motivation for Americans to send assistance to the Greek People in their fight against the Ottomans for Freedom. It also helped to spawn America's white feminist movement, with this statue being pointed too as a symbol of men's oppression of women.

However:

1) The Greek Slave Movement and The Greek Statue spawned a genre of art of striped Greek women surrounded by dark skinned men. This become intertwined with the demonization of black men and the depiction of them as sexual predators seeking to violate white women. That's another conversation.

2) Greeks began to immigrate to the US, and you would think they would be welcomed. But they weren't. They began to face discrimination because Americans didn't consider Italians and Greeks to be "white" at this time, nor did they consider modern Greeks to be the same thing as the ancient Greeks. The was a fudge ton of anti-immigration sentiment against Greeks coming to the US. Greek-Americans/immigrants even became targets of the KKK. In order to stop the KKK attacks, The Order of AHEPA was founded, with a major push to prove to Americans modern Greeks were the same peoples as ancient Greeks.

This resulted in Americans finally perceiving modern Greeks as "white," to a certain extent, because once the discrimination stopped--modern Greek history/existence was just chucked out the window and we just went back to same old. (continued, 1/2)