The (Black)Faces of Aeschylus' Suppliants

A theatre group at the Sorbonne has been making headlines after a production of Aeschylus' Suppliants they were preparing for was shut down by protestors. What?! This sounds CRAZY! Were the protestors opposed to a possible message of the play as welcoming refugees and immigrants (as seems to have been the point with the Sicilian staging in 2015)? No. They were protesting the play as racist and they have a point.

Here's a picture of the performance (possibly last year's?). See if you can tell me why they might think something was awry:

Notice anything about the actors? Hint--this is a photograph, not a coloring book. That stuff on their skin is #blackface.

Since the protestors blocked the performance, there have been a series of statements from the uni and the director with excuses replete with condemnations of the protestors. John Ma sums it up on a Twitter discussion about it:

The most recent responses have the director saying that it was intended that the actors would wear masks (according to ancient Greek tradition) for the performance, not #blackface. And yet:

Last year's performance apparently had been done in #blackface and, really, do actors do dress rehearsals in #blackface if they are going to wear masks in performance? Why would they not practice instead in the masks and not go through all the time and effort of donning #blackface? And if the director was really interested in capturing the dynamics that emerge from remembering that the Danaids are in the play black-skinned, why not cast appropriately?

Because, one of the remarkable things about the play is that, although the Danaids explicitly refer to themselves as "black" ('black, sun-beaten people" μελανθὲς ἡλιόκτυπον γένος lines 154-5), it is not considered an important mark of their difference at all when they arrive in Greece from Egypt. When the Argive king Pelasgos first sees them, he thinks they look very foreign, but doesn't even notice their skin color:

This group that we address is unhellenic, luxuriating in barbarian finery and delicate cloth. What country do they come from? The women of Argos, indeed of all Greek lands, do not wear such clothes. It is astonishing that you dare to travel to this land, fearlessly, without heralds, without sponsors, without guides. And yet here are the branches of suppliants, laid out according to custom next to you in front of the assembled gods. This alone would assert your Greekness…(ll 245-54).

This play is one of many indicators from ancient Greece that skin color was not usually associated with prejudice. And yet this director managed to take this play and make it all about skin color and prejudice through the employing of a well known racist practice of #blackface--which, by the way, has a long tradition of being just as racist in France as it does in the US.

Additional irony? The thing that marks them as foreign in Aeschylus is their clothing. See anything in the pictures about their clothes? Yep--Greek-style. This director has reversed Aeschylus.

Of course, there is much else to be discussed concerning the reaction to the play. The protestors are reacting to the #blackface and placing it within the context of France's history of colonialism (and its 'official' state denial of racism as a phenomenon in France):

Over the last two weeks, I've given a series of talks on Aeschylus' play and asked myself the question of whether in its original context it was a play about welcoming refugees or about the benefits of the Athenian empire (and so 'colonialist propaganda), or if it was really about the threat and danger of immigrants to Athens. Because audiences aren't monolithic, I think it probably can legitimately be interpreted as all three, depending on who is in your audience.

I've been trying to think of the play within the context of Athens' descent in the 460s and 450s into anti-immigrant policies and strict monitoring of citizenship. The play was performed around 463 BCE, around the time that the new category of 'metic' (translated as 'immigrant' or 'resident foreigner') was created and only a decade before Athens began racializing its citizenship with the passage of the law requiring double Athenian parentage for citizenship and emphasizing its autochthonous birth.

In the play, the king initially rejects the supplication of the Danaids. And he does so based on reasons we all may find familiar--that the Danaids aren't really in danger at home (387-91) or, more importantly:

The case is not easy to judge: don’t choose me to judge it. I have already said I am not prepared to do this without the people’s approval, even though I have the power--if something rather bad should happen the people may end up saying “By giving privileges to foreigners you destroyed our city” (397-401).

And when he is finally convinced to take their petition to the assembly and it is approved and the Danaids enter the city? They bring a war to the city (the sons of Aegyptus invade!), the Argives lose, Pelasgos dies, and, by the end of the last play in the trilogy (our extant play is only the first in a three-play series), the city is under the foreign rule of one Aegyptids (Lynceus) and his wife, the only Danaid (Hypermnestra) who didn't kill her husband on his wedding night. So much for welcoming in refugees as a benefit to the city...

Wow. Hmmmm. I've clearly been feeling a bit cynical given the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee world we seem to have devolved into in recent years.

My point being, however, that the protestors of the Sorbonne production have every right to see the #blackface in this play as racist. They have every right to worry that the play is not being produced thoughtfully or with a message of empathy in mind. Maybe, with his costumes and #blackface, the director was trying to invoke the Ovadia Sicily production. But he failed to understand that France is not Sicily and protestors are well within their rights to sense that a poorly staged, colonialist version of this play could do more to engender prejudice than discourage it. And the director and performers should know better than to don #blackface in rehearsal or performance and then cry foul when they get called on it. 

What Future, Classics?

This weekend's events at the 2019 AIS/SCS annual meeting in San Diego will go down as some of the most important in our field's history, I think. In part because so much of it has been captured on video and on Twitter. But also because it forced to the surface what has been percolating below the surface forever--the field of classics has now and has always had a racism problem. It isn't just the use of classics by overt white nationalist and white supremacist groups. It isn't something locked in the past like the use of the Apollo Belvedere and Myron's Discobolus as examples of perfected white bodies.

Laurence Fishburne as Prof. Maurice Phipps Higher Learning

It's the assumptions, in fact, that scholars of color in our field only have places because they are not white, as if only white people are capable of truly understanding the classics, while black people are incapable. This is a very old and toxic lie, but one that continues to haunt our field. As I said in a Facebook comment to a friend: "This whole desire to abstract both ourselves and our work from who we are is a way to ensure that there is an invisible norm against which anyone else can be measured. You can't say who the norm is, though, because then it reveals all the -isms it is laden with." It's the only that is the problem. Because sometimes, as stated so eloquently by Dan-el Pedilla Peralta, ones blackness should be the reason they are hired:

 I should have been hired because I was black: because my Afro-Latinity is the rock-solid foundation upon which the edifice of what I have accomplished and everything I hope to accomplish rests; because my black body’s vulnerability challenges and chastizes the universalizing pretensions of color-blind classics; because my black being-in-the-world makes it possible for me to ask new and different questions within the field, to inhabit new and different approaches to answering them, and to forge alliances with other scholars past and present whose black being-in-the-world has cleared the way for my leap into the breach.

Yes, please. Let's all say this together: they should have been hired because they are black.

A few years ago, I was the chair of my university's personnel committee. We had spent a couple of years trying to remove exclusionary language from our job ads and ranking criteria--for example, when you say "small liberal arts experience preferred" you ensure that your applicant pool will likely be about 85-90% white, and that any candidate who applies who did not attend or previously work at a small liberal arts college will start at a deficit in the rankings and thus not rise to the top of the pool, regardless of other qualifications. Such criteria also ensures a level of group-think or sameness in educational philosophy among the candidate pool. This isn't a good thing if you want a vibrant and dynamic faculty and one that will better match the growing diversity of the student populations on campus.

There were other measures as well to increase the number of applicants and ensure fairer treatment for non-white non-middle/upper class candidates, too, like an improved diversity statement, implicit bias training, etc. Whether it has worked or not is an issue for another day. For now, it is enough to note that it made some faculty uncomfortable.

One faculty member whose department was conducting a search sent me an email and wanted to ask some questions about the diversity statement and other measures the university was taking around hiring. He wanted to propose a hypothetical situation and see what I would say. The hypothetical was the following: say their department was hiring someone in perception psychology and they had two candidates who were in all ways equal except for one way--one of the candidates was blind. He wanted to know if, according to our 'new' hiring policies, would they be required to hire the blind candidate. In other words, would he have to hire someone only because they were blind.

The problem with this hypothetical is the only.

The reason for hiring the blind candidate is not only because they are blind, but because they are blind. Being blind means that the individual has experienced the world differently from other members of the department. It means that the way they perceive and receive and comprehend the world has to happen differently. This difference means that they will bring something to the program, to the classroom, to faculty meetings, to their scholarly inquiries that are unlike what others who have not experienced the world in the same way. In other words, they bring something dynamic and vibrant and meaningful that didn't exist there before.

The other thing they do, of course, is to provide an opportunity to students who may have thought that being in front of a classroom and being a scholar was not for them to learn that it is for them. This value cannot be underestimated. Those experiences are embodied in the person standing before them, in the voice of the scholar, in the ideas and the questions and the answers, in the assignments they craft, the syllabi they decide upon. If you continue to hire similar people, then what happens in the classroom and in the scholarship and in the leadership and contributions to the college are the same.

I explained this to my colleague, who seemed unconvinced at the time that there was no such thing as only when it came to hiring someone who had experienced and navigated the world differently.  Some people, after all, like sameness. They don't want surprise. Difference makes them uncomfortable. And they are willing to hire someone only because they are like them because it means they can avoid that discomfort.

Although my colleague used the issue of sightedness to ask his question, race is often the real question on people's minds. And when someone says to them that they should hire a person because  they are not white, because that brings something to the program that another white colleague can't, this means that there must be some reason, some prejudice, that converts that because to an only, that seeks to negate the value of that different experience and perspective. And that means, as @rogueclassicist remarked on Twitter the other day, that a whole lot of white people will need to start wondering whether they only got hired because they are white.

The Historically Contingent 'Race' Problem

At a basketball game last weekend while sitting at the scorers tables keeping book, I was asked by a ref whether or not I believed that whiteness was real. It wasn't a totally random, inappropriate question--I had Denise McCoskey's book Race: Antiquity and its Legacy and he saw it sitting there. I think I must have looked at him puzzled, but then said "Yeah. It exists."

I mean, I find the whiteness of my normal environment kind of overwhelming sometimes--our whole team (6th grade girls travel ball) and pretty much all of our teams generally in my town are 100% white. And we were playing an almost entirely black team--the reality of our whiteness was pretty obvious. This is a normally odd feeling for someone who grew up in a minority white place with a mostly non-white family. And, yes, I think about (and write about and talk about) race all the time, so the question should not have puzzled me--the context just threw me for a second.

But it also got me thinking about how I often respond to questions about race in antiquity--all the caveats and the definitions and the fine distinctions and nuances. And then I thought about why we so often try to avoid talking about race in antiquity at all (we talk about "ethnicity" instead) and all the reasons we give--why I have done so, even. And then I thought about how I would have talked to the ref at the game about all of this and how big of an eye roll I would have gotten.

And yet, as an academic, I find explaining the history of race in a clear and meaningful way difficult, especially when most of us classicists seem to want to avoid talking about race in antiquity at all. Read any book on ethnicity and you'll find some dance around the term "race" explaining why we don't use it. Some of the ways scholars do this is with fun little trite phrases like:

"Race is a social construct" and so not real and so we can ignore it. Except that social constructs are thoroughly "real" in their impacts and in shaping the worlds we live in and study.

"Race is biological and we are talking about culture." No it isn't. It is cultural and social and political. The biological part is part of its imaginary reality. The rooting of it in biology is what makes it dangerous. It emphasizes that character is embedded in physiognomy at some primordial date in the past. It privileges a mythical 'nature' over the reality of socialized, racist 'nurture.'

I think for many of us, myself included, to speak of ethnicity carries less baggage than to speak of race, but also, to speak of ethnicity is easier because we can connect it to the Greeks, at least, through the term ethnos, while race is "foreign." In my book on metic ("immigrant") women, I used ethnicity to discuss individuals mostly because people were identified on their tombstones by an ethnos--their city of origin, and most of the foreign women in Athens of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE were Greeks, too, just not Athenians. But there was and is a valid reason for me to have talked about race, which I did, but maybe not enough.

If we think about what race is, its really a way of thinking, not a "thing." It's a way of thinking that assumes hierarchies. It assumes one group of people is inherently better than another. It assumes that there is a connection between geography and identity that can't change--that you take the geography of your primordial origins with you through time and space. The Athenians believed in something like this. Its why some of us (Susan Lape, importantly, here and here) talk about race and racial identity and citizenship--the Athenians very clearly believed that they were superior to others inherently based on their birth (indigenous to their land--an autochthonous birth unrelated to the descent of other humans) and that they had to preserve this superiority by rejecting intermarriage with non-Athenians (anti-miscegenation) and in this way retaining their purity. This is pretty close to race and race thinking in in the modern world.

So, the women I studied were excluded and legally oppressed because of their race--they weren't Athenian. Didn't matter that they were Greek. And yet, while I talked about "racial citizenship" and "racial thinking", I didn't use the word "race" but "ethnic identity" when speaking of individuals and the group they belonged to. That's kind of cowardly of me, in some ways. Whatever other types of identities they constructed, Athenians had a concept of "race" that maps pretty well onto ours--even if they didn't have anything like modern race science to underscore it.

In truth, no identities are "real," if by "real" we mean an impermeable category that someone is born into that is defined through immutable characteristics. That "real" doesn't exist. No identity that we have (internally of externally constructed) can meet this criteria. Does that mean identities aren't "real," though, in the sense that they matter in the way we navigate the world around us?

Could I have explained this to the ref at the game? That, well, yes, I study ancient Athens and they were racists and were the "white people" of their day, even though the only actual "white people" in the city would have been the rich women or the Scythian slaves or someone with a bad skin condition or disease? He probably would have asked me why I would want to study a bunch of racists. I think some of us still struggle with the answer to that particular question.

Sometimes, it takes just a moment to realize that, when people talk about academics as "out of touch," there are reasons for it. It takes a special form of distance to be able to treat something that is so much a part of the lived experiences of others (and not in a good way necessarily) and treat it in a rationalized and abstract manner. As one commenter on a recent Twitter conversation noted (about a different issue)*:

I don't say "objective manner" for a reason, though. Because when we talk about issues like sexual assault (which the above commenter is referring to) or race and racism, objective is really just another word for "not an issue I have to deal with" or "privilege." And it is also something that results from the viewing of "black" as a race but not "white." If we "don't see race" or think that we can deal with it "objectively" or "rationally" it's because we have lived without its weight for most or all of our lives.

We academics, especially those who deal with the distant past, are trained to abstract ourselves. But, as I tell my students all the time--objectivity is a myth (which is what ideals are); whoever writes the narrative or compiles the evidence and pieces it together is a subjective part of the history. Whoever asks the questions and sets the parameters for the experiment or interprets that resulting data has included their subjective self in the study. There are no self-evident, self-monitoring, self-completing, self-narrating events, studies, or experiments. All we can do is be aware of our subjective input and do our best to not let it overtake us.

And we need to recognize this when the quest for objectivity leads us to split hairs and our lack of experience leads us to only be able to theorize and not be able to engage with our object of inquiry when they are a real person's subjective reality. Race is a reality too many of us scholars on race and ethnicity in antiquity have trouble thinking about in anything but an abstracted way because we project race (regardless of our knowledge that skin color =/= race) onto people of color both in our field and in our studies and leave whiteness as a colorless, raceless norm. We assume whiteness for the Greeks and Romans even when we don't mean too because we only ever picture race and ethnicity in antiquity as non-Greeks and Romans.

But white people have race now and ancient Greeks--the Athenians, at least--also had race then. And still we treat "race" like a historically contingent nuisance that we can articulate away through philological sophisms and rhetorical sleights of hand. We act like it is our scholarly responsibility to place it on its modern shelf and not taint our ancients with. It's one of the many reasons we have a racism and race problem in Classics.

None of this ruminating helps me with the problem of being able to articulate a history of race to the ref on the fly during a time out. But at least I can be a little more honest with myself as I prepare to do more scholarship on the history of race in antiquity and classics' contributions to modern white supremacy.


For a recent discussion of some of the dynamics of racism and race in our field see "Episode 51: Race & Racism in Ancient & Medieval Studies, Part 1: The Problem." Episode 52 (Part 2) is coming out Wednesday. A good discussion of the terms for race, ethnicity, nation, etc. in the Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon is their "Episode 44: 'Us' & 'Them' in the Ancient and Anglo-Saxon Worlds."

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*A reference to the Twitter convo I had with Mary Beard the other day on how using the USA Gymnastics case to talk about the need for sentencing reform was a bit tone deaf and she shouldn't be surprised if people just didn't have time for it. The commenter above joined the fray and said some very thoughtful things.

The Dorian Invasion and 'White' Ownership of Classical Greece?

I was speaking with a student last semester. She loves Classics, but she can't seem to get her parents to understand why. She's Indian and her family and family friends, she tells me, have asked her things like why she wants to give up her own culture and study someone else's. India, of course, has a long history with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Greeks even settled in parts of what was called India in antiquity (though are parts of various modern nations now). India appears in our Greek sources as early as Herodotus (and earlier is some fragmentary works), was an important players in the ancient trade networks that went through the Persian empire, and became part of Greek reality in the Hellenistic world as a major political and military player. The idea that the study of Classics is 'foreign' to a student from India more than the descendants of Celts and Germans and Norse people is weird. And one needs to wonder why (though we already know the answer: hint, it's racism).

I should not wonder why, however, as I (mistakenly) spent time today reading the comments on an article concerning the casting of a black man as Achilles in the new BBC Troy series, Troy: Fall of a City. Within the comments, all sorts of tales of genetics and descent are being thrown around--both for and against Europe or Africa as the originator of all races, the place of 'whites' vs. 'blacks' in Egypt (with the subset of Cleopatra as Greek, Arab, or black African), whether Neanderthals are part of this conversation or not, and then the "just because we come from Africa doesn't mean we are black" divisioning between sub-Saharan and north African. And then we get fun comments like (all screen grabs of comments are from the article on black Achilles unless otherwise noted):

I'm white. And yet, I have certainly not felt over the 25 years during which I have studied and worked to become a Classics professor that Classics and 'everything' came from me or belonged to me. I'm from a small town near Akron, Ohio in the middle of the US and then moved to San Diego, CA. I'm a first gen college student. Most of my family have no idea what I actually do. They certainly don't spend all that much time thinking about ancient Greece and Rome and their ownership of it in an unbroken line of descent. How can this field 'belong' to me? It doesn't. Or so I thought...

Turns out, I was wrong! I am pretty much solid German on my mom's side (she was the first generation of her family in the US to marry a non-German dating back to before the Revolutionary War) and, it so happens that, according to the Nazis and their Romantic-Nationalist predecessors and many a neo-Nazi today, THAT MAKES ME DORIAN GREEK!

In other words, it's time to talk about the myth of the so-called "Dorian Invasion" and the myth of an Aryan Ancient Greece.

H/T http://www.ars-longa.sitew.com/Le_mythe_de_l_Aryen.B.htm#Le_mythe_de_l_Aryen.B for the map.

As with many a historical myth about the origins of various Greek cultures, this one has a source in Herodotus and was an attempt by mostly German scholars (at first, it seems) to explain the changes in language from non-Hellenic to Hellenic. The mysterious Pelasgians appear as a 'native' substrate of possibly Anatolian origin (except the Athenians, who were indigenous but 'became Greek' by changing languages..maybe..Herodotus is a bit dodgy on this one), while the Dorians--those vigorously masculine Greeks best represented by the Spartans, as you can see from the map above--from a Nazi textbook--those Dorians came from Germany!

The myth of the Dorian/Aryan/Nordic invasion begins, in many ways, as a failure of methodology, specifically, as a result of historical positivism. Historian Jonathan Hall once described historical positivism as a mode of seeing in "myths of ethnic origins a hazy and refracted recollection of genuine population movements" in the Bronze Age. Variants of these myths were "pathological aberrations from a 'real' historical memory" (Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, 41). Unfortunately, these "pathological aberrations" became bound to ideological positions that became linked to political parties and movements and race science.

As one can read all about in my new favorite book Brill's Companion to the Classics and Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (the chapters by Wiedemann and Whyte specifically) or (going back pre-Nazi) in Helen Roche's Sparta’s German Children, Hitler and many a German firmly believed that Spartans/Dorians and Germans were one people and that the martial valor and glory of Greece was the result of Germans invading Greece and establishing a civilization. They, the modern Germans, were then both the progenitors of ancient Greek civilization and its heirs. And they, as Tacitus explained to them, were a pure people. Their Blut und Boden  ideology explained both who they were and why they were born to be conquerors.

I've even read 19th century texts that suggest that some German scientists and anthropologists explained the fall of ancient Greek civilization by the deterioration of Germans too long from their proper climate--the heat of Greece enervated them over time, making the rise of a new Greece in Germany the only solution. Hitler certainly saw it that way as did many of his predecessors, like Karl Otfried Müller. Whatever other flaws there may be in Martin Bernal's Black Athena, pointing out the long trail of classical philologists and historians invested in a northern European invasion as the only possible explanation for the development of an advanced civilization in southern Europe was not wrong. The Aryan/Dorian (later Nordic) invasion was used to explain not only ancient Greek civilizations, but also those throughout Asia and even north Africa.

How long did historians and archaeologist struggle to fit the evidence into a narrative of a Dorian invasion? This great article from 1978 laying out the evidence debunking the invasion myth gives you a clue. And yet, even while scholars have moved on, the general population has not. And the recourse this public makes to genetics is complicating the issue. While there is quite a bit of good work being done in the realm of genetics, popularizing articles in magazines like Science and  National Geographic make it seem like we have hundreds upon hundreds of solid samples to test from, resulting in "new" discoveries every few months in the origins of genes for "whiteness" or "blackness" or homo sapiens vs. Neanderthals, etc.

Typically, however, we have only a few samples and studies of the sort that discovered "The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins, ancient DNA reveals" suffer from numerous flaws in the data (small sample sizes, assumptions about migration patterns, comparisons only with modern populations, choosing not to randomize samples) and give the general population a sense of certainty where there is none. The results are comments like:

This is a comment on Dimitri Nakassis' blog post about the Science article. The commentator and his predecessor "Double Helix" view the result of a 4-16% admixture of "northern" DNA possible for the samples labeled Mycenaean as DNA proof, to the commentator and others, of the Dorian/Aryan/Nordic reality of ancient Greece.  The longevity of this myth that all southern European, north African, and Eastern/Central Asian civilizations were the result of northern invaders is real, even if it is now playing out in the realm of pseudo-science. Whatever someone wants to believe, they will find evidence or skew evidence to support it because that's how ideology works.

But the Aryan/Dorian/Nordic myth does real harm if Classicists and ancient historians don't challenge it and do it regularly. It excludes people from our discipline whose history it is just as much as it is anyone's (more so in some cases) by allowing one small group of people--'white' people--to lay claim to it. It also puts a value on whiteness that encourages adoption of 'whiteness' as a way of viewing and moving in the world by those peoples who may have been excluded in the past--like  Greeks or Latino people, who are increasingly identifying as white while simultaneously developing virulent strains of white supremacy of their own. We see valuation on whiteness lead some individuals (like N. Taleb) to reject and work tirelessly to argue away cultural heritage and connections to a non-northern European past.

In the end, the lingering myth of a Aryan invasion in the popular imagination, though now grounded in different 'evidence',  perpetuates the whiteness of our field, continues to send a message that Classical Greece 'belongs' to northern Europe, and, perhaps the worst thing of all, seems to have made some corners of the internet nostalgic for the 2004 Troy movie and Brad Pitt as Achilles. What can we do when theories long debunked continue to prosper and cause harm? In addition to trying to make our research accessible to the broader public, I say we enjoy the new Achilles.

Crises of Culture and the Anxiety of the Powerful

We were, you know, foreigners in our own city, wandering lost like strangers and it was your books that led us back home, as it were.  As a result we were able to recognize who and where we were.  It was you who revealed the age of our country, the historical chronology, religious and priestly rules, civil and military customs, the location of districts and regions, in sum the causes, duties, types, and names of every human and divine matter.  At the same time, you shone a bright light on the history of our poets and in general on Latin writers and Latin language (Cicero, Academica Posteriora 1.9).   

Cicero, writing in the 1st century BCE, is discussing the situation that he and many other Romans found themselves in during the Late Republic and here praises the antiquarian Varro, who, seeing that much that was Rome's own history had been lost to the shadows of time, began researching his own people and culture. Cicero brings up Varro while he himself was attempting to forge a new philosophical vocabulary, one that was Roman and not, as most literature, cultural terms, and genres had been for centuries, Greek. It was nothing new--Cato the Elder, a notorious crank, had complained incessantly for years about the corrupting influence of Greece on Rome.

The Romans had conquered the Greeks, but, as Horace once wrote Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio (Captured Greece captured her fierce conqueror and bore her arts to rustic Latium, Ep, 2.156-7). Greek poetry, drama, history, philosophy, oratory, even language would dominate the Roman educated classes and popular entertainments alike. There was hardly an art the Romans had that was not first Greek (except satire, of course). Not entirely true, of course, but many a Roman felt this way nonetheless.

What it was, of course, was simple anxiety--the kind of anxiety that happens when people who are used to being in their comfort zone or used to being in control suddenly feel like they are out of their element or out of control. It is an anxiety felt by those who are used to swimming in the pool themselves and are suddenly asked to share it. And maybe the people coming in want to float around and play instead of swimming laps. Did the Romans truly no longer know what it meant to be Roman? Were they truly feeling like "foreigners in our own city"? Or was it simply that the sea of people they gazed out upon no longer was 80% "Roman," but maybe more like 65%?

One of the stumbling blocks in many a conversation about white privilege and issues of racial justice and equality is often the fact that people who have privileges don't feel like they do. Or rather, they don't recognize (or don't want to recognize) that at least some of what they have isn't earned, but given. And that others won't ever have those givens regardless of their work ethic or genius because our world really isn't a meritocracy. But meritocracy is one of the fundamental bedrocks of democracy, we are told. We have, we are told, the freedom to pursue our dreams, the freedom to speak our truths, the freedom to achieve--if only we have the ability and drive. And yet, as this weekend's discussion around NFL players taking knees at games during the national anthem in protest of police violence against certain of our citizens show, those freedoms aren't evenly distributed or recognized--no matter how good some people are, the system is stacked against them. There are entire segments of the US population who have never been granted the full rights their citizenship is supposed to provide. For the most part, these are people of color in the US, and the darker the color of your skin, the more the system is designed to keep you down--and out.

Like Cicero and Varro and the curmudgeon Cato the Elder before them, the Romans felt the weight of foreign cultures weighing on them and overshadowing their own. But what did they expect when they decided to leave their land and invade and conquer those of others? When they decided to ship in slaves from all over the known world--from Asia as far away as India, from Africa as far south as Ethiopia, from Europe as far away as the Russian Steppe? But it was the Greeks whose culture weighed heaviest on them. It was Greek culture that they both admired and embraced and feared was destroying their own.

We might think similarly about the "others" who live among us--African-Americans, whose ancestors were brought to the Americas by force in slave ships, and Latinx-Americans, whose ancestors lived in much of the western US long before white, Europeans came to the continent and claimed it as their own. Why is it that we "white folks" are more than happy enjoy the fruits of the creativity and hard work and dedication of our non-white neighbors and fellow citizens, appropriating their cultural achievements while giving them little to no credit for actually achieving them while doing everything in our power to keep from them the freedoms and protections that are supposed to accompany being a US citizen? Because American identity was built upon, first, open racism and white supremacy, and later, upon its "user friendly" and banal front man, that mythical creature called "Western Civilization." And Western Civilization is, for all its high-flown language of freedom and equality and community, really about being of European descent, Christian, and, for better or worse, preferably, a man.  And Western Civilization, if you didn't know, is in CRISIS.

David Brooks, the New York Time columnist now mostly known for Panini-Gate, has been moaning for going on 20 years now about the "Crisis of Western Civilization," which he claims is destroying our identity. How it forms our identity is an interesting question. For the most part, this identity is supposedly shaped through the study of the foundations of Western Civ--the Classics. This education yields, he claims, a shared set of cultural values and a vocabulary for shared dialogue:

This Western civ narrative came with certain values — about the importance of reasoned discourse, the importance of property rights, the need for a public square that was religiously informed but not theocratically dominated. It set a standard for what great statesmanship looked like. It gave diverse people a sense of shared mission and a common vocabulary, set a framework within which political argument could happen and most important provided a set of common goals.

Are these really shared values? Do we really allow everyone in our society to participate in them? Should we expect them to in order to be called Americans? What religion should inform our public square?  Whose property matters more? When does "reasoned discourse" only serve to cover the violence of the powerful? What happens when the only way "diverse people" can participate in the "shared mission" is if they give up who they are, where they come from, and the basic rights they deserve and share that mission as subordinates and lesser than?

There is a fundamental problem with a society built upon a construct premised on the oppression of others--and with a society that is afraid to admit this oppression for fear that only that oppression is what holds the society together. As Brooks again bemoans, over the last few decades, this shared culture has broken down and "Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that Western Civilization is a history of oppression." Good. The truth matters. And should, we are told, set us free. But is even this truth enough? Reed College, one of the schools that still requires a "Western Civ" foundation course, finds itself hard pressed to defend the course (that includes Homer, Plato, Gilgamesh, and the Hebrew Bible) against students who feel that the civilization that rests upon these texts, and so the texts themselves, excludes and oppresses them--just as Brooks feared. Are these students wrong to oppose a set of texts that have traditionally been used to forge white identity and to exclude them, that incorporate and assimilate the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia and Jews to make the class diverse, while the dominant white culture rejects their modern counterparts and to feel like being forced to study them reenacts the violence that led to the establishment of whiteness? I don't have an answer for it, but Brooks' crisis and the crisis we keep hearing about in conservative writings seems to me like cultural anxiety--the expression of the powerful resisting the need to share that power.

Today, I read with my students about Cicero's concerns for Rome's lost identity. We also read Plutarch writing of Alexander the Great's Macedonian companions' anxiety as he slowly sought to merge his two worlds--the Macedonian/Greek practices he had been raised in and the customs of the myriad cultures he conquered when he led his troops into Asia all the way to the Indus River. The more Alexander assimilated himself to Persia--to its clothing, its people, its land--the more they resented it and felt he was betraying them. Some (like his companion Cleitus) grew so angry they threatened to kill him. Again, cultural anxiety, the fears of the powerful that they might need to give a little up in order for others to have a fair share. The Macedonians invaded the Asian continent. They destroyed the Persian empire and the world the peoples they encountered knew. And yet they were the ones who felt anxiety when Alexander decided to adopt some of the culture of the conquered. They even grew violent.

What does it say about us when we look at the world today and see the silent protests of our fellow Americans against the continued and brutal violence perpetrated against them and people think that these protests are more destructive of our communities and our identity than the violence itself? There is a crisis of values in Western Civ, but it isn't a crisis like the one Brooks and Steve King, and Pres. Trump think. The crisis is our acceptance of violence against others in the name of a false ideal, a crisis of privileging our white comfort and privilege and desire for conflict free spectacle over the lives of others.

Using Genetics to Prove Ancient Greeks Were "White"?

In a recent article by Prof. Denise McCoskey, she noted that our modern racial categories are socially constructed and that, technically, no Europeans are "white" since "whiteness" is not a biological reality but a socially created category that we try to place people with similar physical characteristics into. Race theories go deeper, of course, in that they also attempt to assign moral character to these biologically similar groups, and that is where racism emerges--attributing to groups of people who share inherited physical characteristics similarly inherited moral character that is then ranked in a hierarchy. One of the most consistent responses to the reality that race is social and not inherently biological is an appeal to modern genetics.

In a previous blog post, I discussed some of the communis opinio of the physical anthropology community on the ways in which forensic and genetic categories are subjective and not accurate reflections of a biological realty. "Current scientific consensus is that craniometric yields clustered geographic groupings, but those groupings are subjective and arbitrary"; bone measurements do not yield objectively, naturally defined groups of humans, but we can group them into pre-determined subjective categories of our choosing. Same thing with genetics--we can create broad groups based on criteria that we assume subjectively to be biologically distinctive. We can make that group as large as we like, then label it "caucasoid" or "white" or whatever, and then, we can place those who have the specific traits we have identified into the category. What we cannot do is create neutral, objective categories from the genes themselves.

For example, 23andme and ancestry.com "use both preexisting datasets as well as some reference populations that they have recruited themselves." They create the reference categories themselves based on preconceived notions of what those communities should look like.

"'When a 23andMe research participant tells us that they have four grandparents all born in the same country — and the country isn’t a colonial nation like the U.S., Canada, or Australia — that person becomes a candidate for inclusion in the reference data,' explained Jhulianna Cintron, a product specialist at 23andMe."  

They depend on the accuracy of those self reports and that colonial migration is the only type of migration. And they assume contemporary national boundaries. History doesn't support the methodology.

This is important to understand--the categories are subjective. It is even more important to understand when white nationalists or supremacists use genetics as a way to argue against the scientifically accepted reality that race is not biological, but social. Why? Because it means they can manipulate and morph the categories to suit their needs in the moment. What do I mean?

In the comments to Prof. McCoskey's article, one commenter noted that one of these for-profit gene testing companies (23andme) proved that more than 98% of New Yorkers were of European descent and this proved something. Let's leave aside the fact that people who pay for these tests are a self-selecting group and, apparently, white supremacists like having them done. I am not sure what it proved other than that the logic is circular. It certainly didn't disprove her point that whiteness is a social construct and that the ancient Greeks and Romans would not have had any concept of "whiteness" associated to "race" that equated to ours. Further, the pointing to European genes as proof of the inherent "whiteness" of the ancients is confusing, since there aren't genes for "white", but for "of European descent" and the genes of modern Greeks and, apparently, ancient Greeks, too (and Italians and Albanians, and Cypriots) aren't of European descent, but of southwestern Anatolian (i.e. Near Eastern Asian) descent.

Are you confused yet? If white = European descent, as the commenter seems to have been suggesting, then how are ancient Greeks and Romans white given that they are supposedly genetically from not-Europe, but migrated there in the Bronze Age from somewhere else? Well, because, conveniently for many white supremacists, over the course of the last 100 years, the category of "white" has expanded to include not just people of northern European descent (the original "Anglo-Saxon" definition used for whiteness), but also southern Europe, eastern Europe, north Africa, Syria and Turkey, Iran, Iraq, the Kurds, even India in some instances. And, of course, "hispanic" is a sub-category of white, which means that most people from central and south America and Mexico are "white."

This, however, causes a quandary for most white supremacists who also want to be anti-Arab, anti-middle Eastern of any sort, anti-hispanic, etc. because technically ALL OF THESE GROUPS ARE "WHITE." But, if they want whiteness to be defined genetically as people who have similar biological characteristics to those people genetically categorized as European, then they also can't have the ancient Greeks and Romans because they are not of genetic European descent according to the data. If one wants to live by the genetics sword, they also need to die by it.

I'm not staking a claim in this game as to whether I think that genetic data is more accurate than archaeological and historical data in understanding ancient populations and migrations other than to say that I think it needs to all be considered together. But, I will say that if people, particularly those who think the US should be a "white" heritage only country, then they need to deal with the fact that this includes hispanic peoples, Arabs and other north African and Middle Eastern groups, and other "brown" people and, importantly, non-Christian people.  If they want this country to be a European-descent only country, then they need to stop calling themselves "white" and acknowledge that race as defined through whiteness and blackness is just what anthropologists, historians, and even geneticists have been saying for years--a social construct. And they also need to leave the ancient Greeks and Romans out of it.

The "Typical" Family in Roman Britain

There has been a lot of chatter about the BCC Roman Britain cartoon still flitting around, mostly because Taleb seems set on personally attacking anyone who disagrees with him or questions his data. It's not the most productive way to discuss the issue of diversity in Roman Britain (or the classical world, generally). But one thing has not seemed to come up and I am puzzled by it--one of the primary bones of contention is on the "typical" nature of the family represented in the cartoon. Even those who have agreed that the evidence had difficulty accepting the word "typical" (though, see now Prof. Tim Whitmarsh for a different take).

Perhaps the reason this difficulty arose was because they assumed that the "typical" referred to the skin color of the characters. Actually, the skin color is irrelevant to the "typicality" of the family. Regardless of what type of Roman this family was ethnically--Italian, Syrian, Egyptian, Algerian, Greek, Gallic, etc--their activities and lifestyle would be the same--the way they lived their lives would be TYPICAL of a Roman family living in Roman Britain. That was the point of the BBC cartoon, not the skin colors of the Romans.

Why is it, then, that most of the commentary and controversy surrounded skin color? In part, because of the assumption that all Romans were actually ethnically Roman (or, at the least, Latin or Italian). But that was not the case a early as the 1st century BCE. Pick a well-known Roman author of the Late Republic or the Empire and you would be hard pressed to find an ethnic "Roman". Cicero? Nope. Catullus? Nope. Vergil? Nope. How about Caesar? Yes. Caesar. And Caesar himself made a bunch of Gauls "Roman," putting them in the Senate and in the ranks of the military. So, as early as the 1st century BCE, you could not even equate Rome with being Latin or Italian. Of course, all of these non-Roman Romans are still counted by us today as "white," but they weren't white by their own estimation (that's for women, lepers, and, maybe, Scythians) nor were they "white" until sometime around World War 2. So, assumptions in the general public about who does and doesn't count as a "typical" Roman are frequently mistaken.

The focus on their skin color is misplaced and shows our own preoccupations, not ancient ones. That a Roman family that had a sub-Saharan African father raises so much of a ruckus is our problem. This family was still "typical" in that is was Roman and participated in the life that being Roman in Roman Britain entailed as opposed to living the life of a non-Roman Celt. Those who focused on the skin color of the characters lost that typicality, assuming anachronism that was a projection of their own modern racial bias.

Anachronisms abound in the critiques defending Beard as well, however. For example, Massimo Pugliucci writes:

As a side note, I did find the BBC video just slightly too informed by modern sensibilities, as for instance in the scene, at 1'50", where a Patrician girl expresses the desire to one day become a military commander, only to be rebuked by her mother who explains that women are not allowed in the Roman military.

Actually, we have ample evidence that young girls and women chafed against restrictions placed on them and that warrior women or fighting women were a thing--from female warrior gods (Roma and Minerva!) to Amazons and Boudica and female gladiators, the idea that a young Roman girl--Patrician or not--wouldn't have any aspiration to be like her father or be in the military is, again, a projection of contemporary concerns. Especially in a place where the tales of Boudica leading her army against Rome would have been well-known, why would a girl raised by a soldier dream also of being a soldier? Gender is a social construct that needs to be developed and reinforced. Children are socialized into what are and aren't acceptable behaviors. That her mother told her no is socializing the girl into the historically accurate behavior--no Roman mother would say "you can be whatever you want!" That would have been an anachronism worthy of comment.

Hopefully, at this point, we can see that this debate reveals more about our own biases than anything about ancient Rome. It isn't the inclusion of a black father, but the assumption that there couldn't be one. But, skin color didn't make one Roman, it was citizenship and cultural practices.

Blood and Soil from Antiquity to Charlottesville: A Short Primer

In the recent white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, chants of "Blood and Soil" were heard coming from some members of the marchers of a tiki torch procession. This chant was interspersed with chants of "You will not replace us." When I read about this, I was stuck by the irony of a group of white supremacists--all of whose ancestors are not native to this soil--would be chanting about being autochthonous. I mean, the whole point of the two groups that most closely identify with the Blood and Soil language (in their web presences and poster/flyer campaigns), Identity Europa and Vanguard America is the emphasis on their European (not American) descent. They aren't even trying to claim to be indigenous to the US, and yet are invoking an ideology that is explicitly about being native to one's land and thereby a part of it. 

If you are confused, that's ok. It doesn't make much sense at first. But what these supremacists are appealing to when they chant or put up posters or name their websites "Blood and Soil"  is meant to align them with and appropriate for themselves an ideological position that links them both to the Nazi tradition in Germany and to Classical Athens, whose imagery and ideas they sometimes use in their advertisements.

Let's start at the beginning...What is "Blood and Soil"? Blood and Soil, or Blut und Boden, was an ideology that focused on two aspects of German identity--genealogy/descent and territory/land. Although most closely associated with the Nazis, it actually preceded them in Germany and has clear roots in the 19th century German Romantic nationalism and racialism, but it picked up adherents after WWI.

BLOOD: The term Volksdeutsche, supposedly coined by Hitler himself, encompassed all who were German of "race" or, as we would say today, ethnicity, as opposed to citizenship. The idea was that there were Germans by descent who lived both within and outside Germany, most notably in territories further east to which Germans had migrated in the preceding centuries. Some of these territories had belonged to Imperial Germany and been lost with the Versailles Treaty following World War I. Others had been part of the Habsburg Empire (which had been dominated politically by ethnic Germans); yet others never been part of a German state..  The Nazis, as historian Lisa Heineman notes,“joined the majority of Germans who were not only frustrated with the post-World War I settlement but who also felt the ‘small German’ solution of 1871 was inconsistent with ideals of national self-determination – ideals that were now endorsed by no less than Woodrow Wilson--the German state created in 1871 had not included the German portions of the Habsburg Empire.” 

Like many nationalists before them, National Socialists wanted all Germans to be united as part of the new Reich, a  perfect union of ethnic nationhood and state formation. Embedded within the idea was not just a unity of blood, but also a superiority of blood, an idea that German blood was purer than other blood. Where might Hitler and the earlier Blood and Soil adherents have gotten the idea that German blood was so wonderful? Sadly, a key source was probably the Roman author Tacitus, who, in his zeal to moralize about Rome's own decline under the emperor Domitian, maybe played up German isolation a bit too much.

Tacitus (58-120 CE) once wrote a book called Germania. This book, part of a long ethnographic tradition among the ancient Greeks and Romans, presents the German peoples to a Roman audience. The Germans had been a bit of a thorn in the side of Rome for a couple of centuries at the time he wrote about them, though it seems that both he and other Roman authors also admired the Germans. They were represented as both uncivilized and idealized--a true "noble savage," uncorrupted by the debaucheries of Rome. 

The key passage comes fairly early on (Germ. 2):

I believe that the Germans themselves are indigenous (indigenas) and the immigration and receiving of other peoples (gentium) has resulted in very little mixing, because, in earlier times, people who were seeking to change their homes came not by land, but by ships. The Ocean beyond them is immense, as I would say, on the opposite side and is rarely approached by ships from our world. Moreover, not even considering the danger or the rough and unknown sea, who would leave Asia or Africa or Italy behind and seek Germany, which is wild in lands, harsh in climate, and unpleasant in habitation and in aspect, except if it was your homeland?  

You have to wonder if Tacitus, knowing how this paragraph would be used centuries later, would have considered changing it or deleting it altogether. Alas, the paragraph is there and from the re-discovery of the Germania in the Renaissance until now, Tacitus' comment on the indigenous and pure status of the German peoples and their connection to their homeland has wreaked havoc on history.

According to classicist Christopher Krebs, this book, once called by the historian Arnold Momogliano a "most dangerous book" and by the Nazis their "little golden book," informed their attitudes towards other Germans, towards those with disabilities, and towards foreigners in Germany--especially Jews.  Real Germans, pure Germans were (Tac. Germ. 4):

...infected by no marriages with other nations and exist as an individual and pure race which is similar only to itself. It is because of this that the build of their bodies is the same in all the people, even though the population is so large. They have fierce blue eyes, red hair (rutilae comae), huge bodies, and they are strong only on impulse.  

The Nazis would ensure that this is how Germans would look again (with a little "Aryan" twist--with blond hair instead of red--perhaps all those white marble sculptures fetishized by 19th century Germans encouraged them). Nazi policy called for the enforcement of racial boundaries, of a purification of stock, of a weeding of the less perfect and impure. They had to be removed from German land, eradicated.

SOIL: One of the things you may have noticed in the Tacitus quoted above is the connection Tacitus makes between the Germans and their homeland--it is a climate and landscape only a native could love. This isn't the only reference to the connection between Germans and their land. According to Tacitus, and in line with environmental determinism theories of the times, the land made the ancient German able "to endure hunger and cold" (Tac. Germ. 4).  

Tacitus flatters the Germans by pointing out their purity and relationship with the land, which enables it. For the Germans, there was also the appeal of classical Athens, whose sculpture specifically was idealized, most obviously demonstrated in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. The long tradition of Classical Athens as an ideal in German Romanticism has been well-documented. But how deep did it go?

The Athenians promoted the idea that they were autochthonous, which translates as "indigenous" or "born of the earth," and passed laws aimed at ensuring that only those who were of "pure" Athenian birth would benefit from Athens' wealth and power. I've detailed in an article in Eidolon how the Athenians' obsession with their own purity manifested in practice and civic ideology. The ancient Athenians provided modern Germans with mechanisms and an ideology that would allow them to fortify and preserve the purity Tacitus sanctioned for them. 

The "Soil" portion of Nazi ideology of Blood and Soil was not just about the German homeland as a source of German strength and racial integrity. It was also an ideal way of life,  that sat in opposition to cosmopolitanism--another opposition adopted by neo-Nazi's and their sympathizers, and underscored policies of colonization outside Germany. Blut und Boden (an idea that, again, preceded the Nazis in Germany) was a German-specific type of environmental determinism premised on the notion that Germans were superior and other  peoples were inferior, in part because of their ties to their land--because of the relationship between the German people and their homeland (the "Soil"). Again, as Heineman comments, “The Germans’ mystical, and deeply virtuous, connection to the land contrasted with the rootlessness of those who had no such ties, notably diasporic and cosmopolitan Jews. Nevertheless, this ideology allowed for settler colonialism, or the implantation of Germans in soil to which they did not have a historically deep connection. As the German population expanded, it would need more Lebensraum, or living space. Otherwise the Volk might be compelled to curtail childbearing and lose its Darwinistic battle with other 'races'.” Since the point was to expand the ethnically German population, not to extend German power over other “nations” (for example to exploit labor and extract resources), inhabitants of conquered lands would have to be removed and replaced by German settlers.

Another component of this policy was a focus of the German "peasant" population--farmers and freeholders in the countryside were considered more German than those infected with urbanity and cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism allowed for the "Germanizing" of foreigners (and of course threatened the “Judaization” of Germans), Lebensraum did not. We see hints of this in interpretations of ancient Athenian valorization of the hoplite as a citizen soldier who transitions from farmer to fighter, whose tie to the soil means he will fight that much harder for it. This "hoplite ideology" has a long history of being represented as a citizen ideal and as a mark of  the "traditional values" that allowed the Greeks (Athenians included) to enact the "Greek miracle." In this way, too, German Romantic Nationalism's elevation of  Classical Athens set the stage for Nazi policies that acted upon the racist fixation on the intersection between purity of descent (Blood) and the homeland (Soil).

***

After this little trip down knowledge lane, we can see why it might be confusing to have a bunch of Americans marching around chanting "Blood and Soil" for a land they aren't indigenous to. But, the idea of Lebensraum and the Athenian concept of autochthony both came with hefty doses of superiority complexes that manifested in imperial ambitions that allowed for the Blood to become more important than the Soil, and so allowed for those of the right Blood to assimilate the Soil of others. 

The idea that this is exclusively Athenian or Nazi, however, is mistaken. The Nazi ideology was built upon a century or more of idealization of Athens by the German Romantics and, this idealization was not unique to Germany. Wherever Athens was held in esteem and a central component of elite education, ideas of "Manifest Destiny" exist. For these contemporary white supremacists, Manifest Destiny happened and it happened at the expense of "white, European blood," blood that "soaked" the soil. That makes this land, in their twisted worldview, "theirs"--but only if one ignores all the African-American, Chinese, Mexican, Native American, or other of non-European descent whose blood was spilled in equal or larger amounts to make America what it has become. 

And that is where the irony comes in--for years they have believed in this fantasy, a fantasy promoted in our high school textbooks and TV and movies, that only "white" Americans participated in the building of our country. A fantasy crafted through the erasure of the contributions and oppressions of the participants in our nation's history who were not of European descent. As that narrative is increasingly revealed as the lie it is, they cry "revisionism" and "changing history." But it is the correcting of a lie, a lie that some people have been raised to believe is true--like the Tooth Fairy, only far more insidious. Blood and Soil and Confederate monuments are myths, so it's just a wee bit ironic that they march under their banners as if they were true.

UPDATE: after Charlottesville, American Vanguard split into two different organizations.  The bloodandsoil.org website now belongs to Patriot Front whose manifesto begins:

Many thanks to Lisa Heineman for fact-checking my German history.

Further Reading:

Krebs, C. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Krebs, C. “A dangerous book: the reception of Tacitus’ Germania.” In The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, edited by A. Woodman, 280-99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 

Translations from: KRG = Kennedy, RF, CS Roy, and ML Goldman Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources. Indianapolis: Hackett. 2013.