The premise of Black Santas caused a fuss 10 years ago — now, they're everywhere

Racist fanfic cannon is pretty wild.

You know, Jesus, the middle-eastern Jew.

I know it's really popular these days to pretend Jesus for sure looked like a modern middle Eastern person, but it would be more accurate to say that we didn't know what he looked like given the variety in how people in 1st century Judea might have looked.

For example, one of the dead sea scrolls claimed Noah was a redhead.

2 Kings 5:27 talked about how there was a subpopulation who had ancestrally transmitted skin as white as snow:

Therefore the leprosy of Naaman shall cling to you and to your descendants forever." So he went out from his presence a leper, like snow.

In fact, the biblical leprosy may have actually been skin cancer - the extensive focus on skin checks would have made more sense for a paler skinned population such as redheads who have 10-100x the melanoma risk of people without those genes.

It's worth pointing out this all has little to do with the concept of race, given that in antiquity a number of prominent redheads appeared to be prehistory populations from North Africa - so you could have had African ancestry but redhead appearance for people in the Southern Levant.

There's even the only extant sample of 1st century CE Jewish hair so far:

One of the more fascinating finds in this tomb, one that has not received much attention, was the preservation of a sample of Jewish male hair. The hair was lice-free, and was trimmed or cut evenly, probably indicating that the family buried in this tomb practiced good hygiene and grooming. The length of the hair was medium to short, averaging 3-4 inches. The color was reddish.

• The Only Ancient Jewish Male Hair Ever Found

You had the Nazirite population, some of whom were designated as such from birth, where the vows were taken by the sacrifice of a cow with entirely red hair and one of the prohibitions was not being allowed to cut one's hair.

A population described as having unusually light skin in Lamentations 4:7. And with the tradition of John being a Nazirite from birth and the later tradition of James the brother of Jesus also being a lifelong Nazirite, it's an increasingly muddied picture given our relative ignorance about the unwritten characteristics or traditions of that area and time.

TL;DR: So it's one of these popular but inaccurate pictures of antiquity. There were likely a variety of different appearances in that area in antiquity, and the only real conclusion about Jesus being "a middle Eastern Jew in the 1st century" is that it's an insufficient amount of information to extrapolate any kind of accurate visual depiction without additional information.

Ah you must mean Jesus, the anti-establishment hippie anarchist preacher leading a grassroots community resisting Roman occupying forces, who was also anti woke and pro corporate interest and pro tax cuts for the rich and openly advocated for income inequality

Well Jesus is also in the land of mythical beings so why not… 🤣

That kind of nonsense is to be expected from the far right. But TBF you'll also sometimes see people on the left describe Israel as a white colonial state and Israelis as white, especially now during the whole Gaza thing, despite a clear majority of Israelis having (relatively recent) middle-eastern roots. Eg. Ben-Gvir, the controversial Israeli Minister of National Security and far right nationalist, has Iraqi and Kurdish ancestry.

Wow that's an emoji now? I added a custom black Santa to my discord server years ago because there wasn't one then

I don't think normal people care what Megyn Kelly has to say about anything.

There are some fish though probably.

Ok this sounds more like a succubus…. and now I have a new fetish 😂

Santa Noir And The Case Of Missing Elves

The only Santa I'll recognize is a drunk German!

I mean it would have an easier time sliding down chimneys but how is it supposed to carry a sack of toys without thumbs?

Santa Claus isn’t really a character, though. He’s a mythical figure. No one owns a trademark or copyright of Santa Claus. It would be like saying the tooth fairy is white. There are common depictions of Santa Claus, like the Coca Cola Santa, but those are just adaptations of a myth.

Blade, on the other hand, is an actual character, owned by Marvel. So Marvel decides what is canonical with regard to the character.

Genuine question, is being black an integral parto of the story of Blade? Never read the comic, saw the movie and don't remember if it was. Kinda different of other characters, like Black Panther where being black is an essential part of the characters background. Going back to Santa, he's based on a white guy, but the current cultural character of santa is so disconnected from him that it barely matters who the guy was. The character is a representation of Christmas, and Christmas is celebrated by basically everyone everywhere, so it was just a matter of time until local adaptations of Santa popped up.

It’s hard to say. The historical person, St Nicholas of Myra, was probably of a lighter complexion, given he was a native of Greece.

However, in traditional Catholic art, he is depicted as anywhere from pale-skinned to dark-skinned depending on the location of the images (Bari in particular has many paintings of him with darker skin, possibly to show that they were cool enough to be able to attract a ‘foreign’ saint).

So given that even the person who is the origin of ‘Santa’ is depicted with many different skin tones, I’d say Santa can be whatever skin color people want him to be.