I think it is extremely important for everyone in the Greek mythology community to know that even though Greeks can have light skin and light hair, and that white supremacists like talking about Ancient Greece and using statues as their profile pictures, it doesn't mean white supremacists actually like Greek people.
White supremacists use Ancient Greece to insert themselves and their beliefs, completely erasing an accurate Ancient Greece and actual Greek people and culture from the narrative. There's a reason why when discussing the casting of Helen in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, they only show pictures of blonde, blue-eyed, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon women, and never actresses who are actually Greek or of Greek descent. Just like how a black woman playing Helen is an issue to them, a Greek woman playing Helen is also an issue to them.
Since the very beginning of the concept of whiteness, beginning in the 19th century, white supremacists have excluded Greek people from whiteness, like they did for other ethnicities that you may now consider white, such as the Irish and Italians. Whiteness did not exist before the 19th century. When whiteness was conceptualized, it was purposefully created to not just view people native to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania as lesser than, but to also view other Europeans as lesser than.
Even if Greeks are viewed as white today, white supremacists still won't accept them because their culture does not fit into their vision of whiteness, and they don't accept them as descendants of the Ancient Greeks because they think it is impossible for them to be related to a past where they've inserted their perfect image of white society onto.
Adding onto this: Nazis and other white supremacists love an imagined version of Ancient Greece, not actual Greeks at all. Nazis literally tried to frame themselves as the rightful heirs of Ancient Greece during World War II while treating modern Greeks as racially “polluted” because of centuries of contact with Turks via Ottoman occupation (obviously this is racist pseudoscience). They were doing this WHILE invading Greece and slaughtering her people.
A lot of Western idealization of Greece was built around a fantasy of Greece, not Greece as a real place with real people, language, history, occupation, displacement, and survival (this part is important to me, because we survived over 1,000 years of occupation).
The idealized version of Ancient Greece that white supremacists (and many non-Greeks more broadly) love to fetishize and fixate on is largely a fantasy constructed by European powers and intellectual movements, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was used as an imperial and racial ideology at a time when Greece itself had been under foreign rule for centuries and had very little control over how it was being represented.
In fact, European travellers who journeyed to Greece in the wake of Greece's War of Independence frequently reported disappointment because they did not match the idealized image of “ancient” Greeks that existed in their imagination.
Anyways, this is why Greek people care about Greek representation: because Greek history and culture have been so thoroughly co-opted by non-Greeks that actual Greek people are often treated as secondary to the fantasy others have built around them.
