White Supremacy and Classics Scholarship on Race and Ethnicity

This post is the talk I gave at CAMWS 2018. In the talk, I examined why Classicists avoid using 'race' or reject that race existed in antiquity and why this position has led those outside academia to reject scholarship on ethnicity in antiquity as ideologically driven, emboldening white supremacists and, ceding the debates on race and genetics to those who believe race is a biological fact instead of a social, political, and economic fact. They don't reject all scholarship, however, but cling instead to pre-WWII scholarship that accepts race as a biological reality and affirms their beliefs in the superiority of whiteness, of ancient Greek and Roman alignment with whiteness, and in the idea of race purity. **Images are from the slides used at the presentation.**

I want to begin from a couple of comments on a post on Dimitri Nakassis’ blog Aegean History. The blog post was Dimitri’s response to the recent article published in Nature on some genetics testing done of Bronze Age bodies. I won’t get into any of the genetics issues here and defer to Denise’s paper on the matter (now an Eidolon article), but I want to focus instead on the implications of these comments for engagement between scholars and public in any discussion about race and ethnicity in antiquity and the implications in modern race discussions.

First comment:

The follow up comment by a user who goes by “Afterthought”, explicates what is only inferred by Double Helix:

I start from these comments because I believe they sum up what is the communis opinio among white nationalist groups--that after the Holocaust, academics were told that race was not "real" and that they should not talk about it. “Anything by Aryans, anything but human inequality.” The debates on how an uncritical genetics has begun to reify race science are just really starting to heat up (Dorothy Roberts’ book is a must read), as we just heard. My interest here, though, is in the way Classical scholarship gets used and filtered by white supremacists--much of which involves the wholesale rejection, ignoring, or attacking of scholarship that questions race and race hierarchies as a biological reality.

The first part of my paper therefore examines the rejection of classical scholarship by white supremacists and then look at what scholarship does get cited and read by them. I’ll then consider ways we can try to get ourselves out of the bind of complicity with these habits of scholarly rejection and citation.

Let’s start by acknowledging that there is something to what Double Helix and Afterthought say. As many of you in the audience may know UNESCO was formed after World War II in 1945, in part as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust and the scientific studies and experiments that were a natural outgrowth and progression of what was acceptable race science throughout the preceding century.  In 1949, UNESCO was asked by the UN to create a program “to make known the scientific facts about race and to combat racial prejudice.” The UNESCO “Statement on Race” was first published in 1950.

The 1950 statement was composed almost exclusively by anthropologists and sociologists. Concerns were raised almost immediately by physical anthropologists and biologists, particularly those in the developing science of genetics, that they were not represented on the initial drafting, although they DID participate in several revisions done before the statement was finally published in July of 1950. They therefore issued their own statement through UNESCO in 1951. Subsequent statements were issued again in 1964 and 1967 and again in 1978. What were those statements? Why so many? What were the differences? And how have they been received among groups whose attitude seems to be reflected in the comments of Afterthought and Double Helix?

The statement from 1950 focused on “refuting the misconceptions that race determines mental aptitude, temperament, or social habits.” (Keel 2018, 118). It gives a biological definition of race, states that this is not to be confused with cultural/social/geographic/linguistic/religious practices, organization, etc. It argues for a distinction between “the biological facts of race and the myth of ‘race’” stating that “for all practical purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.”

The second statement from 1951 (SLIDE 6), published by a group of physical anthropologists, biologists and geneticists generally agreed with the 1950 statement, but provided a few caveats that left open the possibility that behaviors and aptitudes could, in fact, potentially be discerned through the study of genes.

They also wanted to retain the category of ‘race’ as a functional scientific category; and while large portions of the 1950 statement are retained word for word, gone is the statement that ‘race’ should be replaced with ‘ethnic groups’ and gone is the statement calling for a clear distinction between biological race and the myth of ‘race.’

And, while the conclusions are strongly stated and concur generally with the conclusions of the 1950 statement, wording throughout the statement--including references to ‘civilized’ groups and those of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ intelligence, of normalilty and, that race mixing leads to race extinction--provide cover for scientific studies conducted without reference to the possible social impacts that sociologists and anthropologists were so concerned with.

This debate still ongoing, if any of you have been following the Sam Harris/Ezra Kline discussions among others.

The 1964 and 1967 statements update the 1950 and 1951 statements in ways that mostly reflect what is still generally accepted today by sociologists/anthropologists and most geneticists. The 1978 statement comes more in the form of a list of articles of belief and includes a statement expecting scholars/scientists to make their data and information available and understandable to the public.

But what if the public isn’t interested?

These statements and the divisions between Sociology/Anthropology views and Physical Anth/Biology/Genetics views has left open a space for dismissal by white supremacist groups, particularly as they generally ignore the 1964 and 1967 updates. One place you can go look and see these views expressed (if you are really interested--I don’t recommend it) for how the white supremacists consider this issue is to Metapedia: The Alternative Encyclopedia. They have a page, of course, on the UNESCO statement. Let’s have a look.

The page then lists the authors of the statement, making a point to mark all the Jews involved) and gives a brief summary of the 1951 supplement and the 1978 revision (the page ignores the 1964 and 1967 revisions).

Note the language of this page compared to that of both the statements and the comments by Double Helix and Afterthought: The erasure of the word ‘race’ replaced with ‘ethnic groups’, the idea that these statements are ‘commands from on high’ or ‘marching orders’, the division between social science and natural science--that what social science tries to erase, natural sciences will restore.

Also, of course, the 1951 statement by physical anthropologists and geneticist’s states unequivocally (in the name of combating myths of biological purity) that race extinction or absorption is a result of race mixture--something you hear discussed repeatedly on white supremacist and race-realism forums--this statement supports the idea that inter-racial marriage = race genocide.

Which brings us, in fact, to the Classics. If UNESCO has issued marching orders, are we following them and what does that mean?

What I have found is that word on the street is to ignore or to treat as UNESCO propaganda pretty much everything written after WWII on the topic of race/ethnicity--not surprisingly. Why? Is there reason to believe that Classicists, ancient historians, archaeologists etc. are following the “marching orders” of UNESCO? If we can judge by our scholarhsip, it seems we are:

Over the course of the last 30 years, there has been something of an explosion of ‘ethnicity’ studies in Classics and ancient history. Jonathan Hall states that ‘ethnicity’ has been used since WWII as a substitute for ‘race’ as an attempt to distance such studies from the sins of pre-WWII anthropology.

He himself worked to move away from this ‘replacement’ approach and views ethnicity as more “the operation of socially dynamic relationships” instead of ‘ethnic groups’ that were just ‘races’ by another name, his concept of ethnicity is far more nuanced than how you will find ‘race’ discussed as by your average internet white supremacist or even, your PhD’d internet white supremacist--but it’s fairly easy to see this as admitting that the field has followed of the “marching orders” of UNESCO.

More subtle, and yet, also strongly mirroring the wording of the 1950 UNESCO statement is Jeremy McInerney’s introduction to the recently published A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (Wiley 2014):

McInerney, in the end, adopts the term ethnicity for his entire volume, without ever explaining why he chooses not to use race --a reader who knows the UNESCO statement could see why, though--he has been given his ‘marching orders’ and is following them. He also, of course, codes the use of 'race' as political and activist, ignoring that the decision to use 'ethnicity' was itself a political act.

These are two prominent examples among the many that make up what has been a prolific last few decades of scholarship on ethnicity or ethnic groups in antiquity where rarely is the language of race present (and reactions to 'race' and 'racism' being associated with antiquity has been harsh). While this may make us feel safe in our scholarly bubbles to talk about group identities free of the baggage of race and racism and race science, it has left academics open to dismissal as merely following the party line of propagandists at the UN and afraid to say what we really mean--fortunately, to white supremacists, genetics is making us face the ‘truth.’ This refusal to engage the language of race has also, unfortunately, left us safe from any self-criticism as a field of our complicity in the perpetuation of racism, something the Anthropological Association of America itself has realized about its own position:

"In its focus on muting race and racialized explanations, U.S. anthropology has historically paid less attention to racism. Racism was viewed as primarily an illusion about race, overlooking that structured racism itself gives importance to race. While anthropology has therefore often been used to protest structured racism, its institutional position as an anti-race science has often also insulated it from a necessary self-critique of the discipline’s own silences, exclusions, and practices around race."

Editorial note, “Race, Racism, and Protesting Anthropology” Open Anthropology: A Public Journal of the American Anthropological Association 3 (3) 2015.

So, this is a quick look at reasons why contemporary scholarship might get rejected in favor of older scholarship. Now for what kind of scholarship gets cited.

Unlike the more modern scholarship on ‘ethnic identity,’ there is one article that is repeatedly cited, reproduced, and quoted by white supremacists--Tenney Frank’s “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire” (1916). (SLIDE 17).

One may ask how such an old article continues to be so popular? Well, the repeated footnote is one method--we see this in scholarship all the time, where someone just cites a source directly from another author and footnotes that author’s footnote. But, with Frank, the perpetuation of his arguments and their move into standard discourse of white supremacism worldwide--here’s an Australian group--- has been more than a repeated footnote. Here, again, is Frank’s article as the subject of this blog post, which moves from Frank into British immigration debate.

There are dozens of these direct citations to Frank on WS webpages and blogs. There are also sites, such as the FAEM that provide ‘histories’ of the white race using Frank and which provide links to ancient sources that support the view that Romans shared their view of race--Juvenal and Aristotle are, of course, fan favorites.

Roger Pearson, a eugenics advocate and academic anthropologist in the UK and then US, republished Franks ideas in the 1960s in journal called “Western Destiny,” which has been reprinted in numerous WS webpages, blogs, etc.

And Frank’s essay itself was republished in 2005 in the Occidental Quarterly, a favorite journal of the the far right ‘intelligensia’--with 10 PhDs on its editorial board including psychologist Richard Lynn, whose work is foundational for Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve.

Another popular far right journal (and, like Occidental Quarterly, on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of white supremacist publications) is American Renaissance, whose special 2010 issue on race in antiquity has a series of articles, the first of which is focused on the hair color and “Nordic” decent of the ancient Greeks and Roman patricians--this time the rejection of post-1960s scholarship is explicit.

And lest we think that it is only far right journals that reproduce these ideas and this article and that it was not continuing to be mainstreamed in the post-UNESCO world, we have no further than to look than to Google Scholar with it list of citations (here are some recent samples)...

far too many of which are not critical, and to Donald Kagan and one of his textbooks, The End of the Roman Empire, published first in 1962 as Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Why did it collapse? and then republished in 1978 and then again in 1992 under the new title.

This textbook, as part of the “Problems in European Civilization” series reproduces a whole series of pre-1960s scholarship, including Frank’s essay. The textbook, used in Western Civ courses into the 1990s did not, even in the 1990s, comment upon the clear racism of Frank’s approach. When such ideas--that race mixture destroyed the Roman Empire--are mainstreamed in courses on Western Civilization under the name of a prominent ancient historian, should we be surprised that the ideas continue to be read, cited, and perpetuated long after they should have been buried on the so-called fringes as well?

And this is where things get fuzzy--if we follow the thread of Frank’s essay, it takes us not only into the fringes of the internet and so-called race realism, but into the mainstream of the teaching of the history of the “West”. Frank’s essay has had such longevity because those who read the UNESCO Statement on race as propaganda are able to align themselves to more conservative scholars in our field, and find respectability in the continued use of clearly racist and clearly biased scholarship under the moniker of Western Civilization--Frank’s central thesis, that mass immigration and “multiculturalism” was a cause in Rome’s demise appears repeatedly in statements by public scholars; Niall Ferguson and company are only one of the latest in a long line--the entire Brexit debate is a case study.

So, how can we combat this? Well, we have already started--a self-critical, self-reflective Classics is beginning to develop, one that is willing to engage its own concomitant development with imperialism, colonialism, and race science. We need to understand why we use the language of ‘ethnicity’ instead of race. We must continue to critique the idea of “Western Civilization” as the way to ground the Classics in our college curricula. We must be open to engaging the language of race once again in scholarship, as the American Anthropological Association urges (and as scholars like Denise, Shelly Halley, and others have already been doing). Maybe we need to give up the name Classics, with its inherent valuation and become something slightly different--this debate is happening right now among dozens of departments (particularly in small Liberal Arts Colleges).

We need to work as well at removing disciplinary boundaries--while we in Classics see ourselves moving the needle on discussions of ethnicity and race in antiquity, our colleagues in Political Science, Philosophy, and many History depts. are still teaching the views of earlier scholarship--they are engaged in different disciplinary approaches and some simply may not be ready to face their demons. How can we change that? How can we engage those colleagues? By writing outside of our disciplinary boundaries, by cross-listing, by attending their events, by offering ourselves up to visit their classes, what else?

Outside of the campus, we need, I think, to stop ceding the discussion about race and classics in public fora to white supremacists, especially to those who have PhDs (almost never in classics, ancient history, or archaeology) who can give a veneer of intellectual rigor to their internet publications and musing such as I’ve highlighted above. We need to figure out ways to engage more directly with the public, to persuade those who are open to persuasion, to provide information and new interpretations of old data to broader audiences, to accept the mantel of REVISIONISM as a good and necessary thing. And we need to take it to the public in as many ways and as often as we can and encourage colleagues to do so as well by counting popular publications, podcasting, media appearances etc. as actual scholarship and not as a nuisance.

His Western Civilization is not My Western Civilization

The Parthenon in Athens. Often viewed as a symbol of
"Western civilization," it shows up in lots of articles on the
"demise of western civilization."

I read something stupid on the internet today. I know--I should just stop reading the internet. But this was an article that had the potential to not be stupid--its an article in Politico by Mark Bauerlein on "This Is What It’s Like to Be the Only Trump Fan at Thanksgiving Dinner" [note: all quotations that follow are from the article unless otherwise noted]. I was kind of hoping that it would be a serious rumination on what it means to have supported and continue to support a man who has already done so much harm to so many people in our society and only promises more (yes, I've laid my politics bare here--sorry, not sorry). And you get a little of this. Bauerlein recognizes that there are real grounds for some of us (including his mother) to dislike the president as a person:

Any career woman, especially a single one, who entered the workforce in 1970 is never, ever going to look at Donald Trump as anything but a sexist bully. She remembers too many ill-mannered bosses and co-workers, condescending males who, when they didn’t hit on her, dismissed or exploited her. My mother made a go of it and put up with a lot. Those humiliations don’t fade.

And yet, beside that lifetime of humiliation his mother and countless other women, people of color, LGBT, and people with disabilities continue to face in the workplace and the world, he places "Western civilization" and its apparent demise. Specifically, he points to "identity politics" and his graduate school experience during the 1980s at UCLA. The paragraph is worth quoting in full for its absurdity:

When I first saw identity politics at work, I was a graduate student in English at UCLA in the 1980s. These were the years when the heritage of genius and beauty was recast as a bunch of Dead White Males. Western civilization slipped from a lineage of reason and talent, free inquiry and unsuppressed creativity, into “Eurocentrism,” one group’s advance at the expense of others, women and people of color. Art for art’s sake gave way to art for politics’ sake, for identity’s sake. I spent my 20s in a grimy room reading Dante, Wordsworth and Nietzsche—only to find when I went to campus that my intellectual giants had become objects of suspicion and derision.

This trauma clearly ran deep (deeper than his concern for systemic sexism and racism, apparently)! And so, when Bauerlein heard Trump's Warsaw speech, "and unapologetically hailed Western civilization, I felt a 30-year discouragement lift ever so slightly."

But, of course, he had to have voted for president before that speech, which makes his use of saving "western civilization" as a reason for supporting DT a bit disingenuous. There was a lot about what DT said before the election that clearly appealed to this nostalgia and discouragement, however, and it wasn't an "unapologetic defense of Western Civilization". Unless by "Western Civilization," Bauerlein means racism, sexism, threats, walls, and anti-intellectualism-i.e. Eurocentric men without talent or reason, seeking to limit and having disdain for free inquiry, hoping to suppress creativity, and do so to advance one group--ELITE WHITE MEN. The idea that DT freed Bauerlein to unapologetically read Dante, Wordsworth, and Nietzsche again (like DT has read them) is absurd.

Most images of Augustine of Hippo recast him as
"white" European, but he was from north Africa and
his family "Berbers," a group whose skin color was
unknown and likely mixed. The Roman playwright
Terence was also likely African and not "white."

DT's unapologetic defense during the election campaign was a defense of being a powerful white man "who likes walls, guns and threats." His threatening of immigrants and muslims, his dismissal and mocking of women he sexually harassed, his disregard for any "intellectual giants" or "heritage of genius and beauty"--these are the things that Bauerlein seems to have found appealing about Trump. The Western Civilization of DT is not a pleasant place for women, people of color, LGBT or many others--it is by white men, for white men. Here's a quote from a foundational text that underscores his idea of Western civilization:

"Numerous attempts have been made to establish the intellectual equality of the dark races with the white;and the history  of the past has been ransacked for examples, but they are nowhere to be found. Can anyone call the name of a full-blooded Negro who has ever written  a page worthy of being remembered?"

Sound familiar? That is from 1849 by well-known justifiers of slavery Nott and Gliddon. But it might as well have been Rep. Steve King from earlier this year:

"I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out,” King said, “where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”"

Images of, for, and maybe even by women abounded
in antiquity. They have not traditionally been
taught as part of "western civilization."

Or, as ancient historian Donald Kagan said in 2013:

that "the world has been more shaped by the experience of the West than by any other, and therefore the products of Western civilization are of broader consequence and significance than those of other great civilizations."

If Bauerlein wonders why people treat the construct of "Western civilization" as limited to and invested in the power of only white men, there it is! Who is excluded? Anyone who isn't of European descent, apparently.

But, there is so much more in the classical past and other texts and arts that are viewed as its foundation of western civilization that the gatekeepers (the Dead White Men and their minions) have suppressed. The Western civilization of DT, and Steve King, and, apparently, of Mark Bauerlein, is one that creates hierarchies that place the words and actions of European, elite men at the top while those of others (women, non-whites) are excluded, hidden, dismissed, derided, ignored. (much like those career women Bauerlein of the 1970s and 1980s sympathizes with). According to Hanson and Heath in Who Killed Homer, to include the vastness that is the ancient Mediterranean is to kill classics.

This is what the culture wars started and what many of us who are its children continue to do--we examine the concept and content of Western civilization and don't shy away from its unpleasantness. It is at the core of why we study it. We want to broaden what civilizations are deemed worthy of study, to break down the hierarchies that pretend that only the words of "Dead White Men" are worth study. In fact, part of my goal is to show how it isn't just Dead White Men who make up the foundations of our culture. Those voices--because of who they were, because of their identities as not powerful 'white identified men--have historically been excluded from the canon. We want to let them in. It doesn't destroy western civilization, it destroys a simulacrum of civilization that poses as all of what our culture contains. We expand the idea to be more inclusive while acknowledging that it isn't the only culture worth study and that it isn't necessarily inherently valuable.

The identity politics Bauerlein bemoans are the very politics that made these truths evident and for many of us actually made European (and, for me, Classical) civilization worth exploring--because we didn't have to pretend those exclusions and prejudices and horrors didn't exist. The culture wars invited in those of us against whom this vision of Western civilization was wielded as a weapon. And what many of us found was a world below the surface, a suppressed world, that was not about "guns, walls, and threats" dressed up in the guise of "genius and beauty" but a world of actual beauty, of diversity, exploration, experimentation, reflection, and, yes, war, and politics, and prejudice, and violence, and sexism. The critical approaches the culture wars brought to these issues allows for examination of how those -isms form. It allows for the exploration of identities and how they are formed. It opens up alternatives even to the exclusions, to the "walls, guns, and threats" that have underscored the "western civilization" of rich white men historically in the US.

Tomb of an immigrant family to Athens. They
lived in Piraeus, the port of ancient Athens.

I, too, went to a California university during the culture wars (UCSD) and I had a required first year course on the breakdown of western values! I became a classicist despite this! In fact, I chose to study (and make a career out of) the “intellectual giants” Bauerlein worshipped and seems to have felt he was shamed over liking because we were allowed to question them and look at them with new eyes and different perspectives. Because we weren't asked to simply worship them. Because we were allowed to see who was excluded and to discuss why the exclusions happen, why being included in identity matters and why identities are such fragile, fractured, and necessary things. It's why I teach and write about identity in the ancient world today.

The very questioning Bauerlein says he saw as a rejection of western civilization and tradition, many of us saw as invitations to participate in the very texts and cultures that had been used to exclude us. What I saw in college during the culture wars wasn’t a Greece and Rome that belonged to old white men, but an invitation to look beyond that construct and see more. And instead of 30 years of discouragement, I and many others have devoted those same years to pursuing the study of these texts and the questions they raise more deeply. If an elite white man felt that the presence of a first gen woman in the conversation was destroying civilization, if he viewed the questions of black men or hispanic women on where they fit into that narrative as a demise, then clearly it is a civilization worth destroying.

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.