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.

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.

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.  

How is the Ancient Mediterranean Diverse If Everyone There Is "White"?

In my last blog post, I pointed to the slippery nature of the category "white" and its use to dismiss arguments for the diversity of the ancient world. I have a later blog post planned on the category of "whiteness" in antiquity, so I won't go into too much detail here, but it should be noted that, when commenters appeal to the over-arching racial category of "white" in order to co-opt a whole slew on non-European peoples into their narrative of white supremacy, they often do so by trying to turn the ancient Mediterranean into an "Anglo-Saxon" fantasy land through the use of technical language of out-dated physical anthropology.

As is pretty much accepted as fact by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and biologists alike, race is a social construct that is not grounded in any biological facts. The "science of man" emerged from colonialism and slavery. The terminology is still used by physical and, in particular, forensic anthropologists, but the scientists pretty much all agree that 

"Race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation" (Race Reconciled, 2009: 2; special issue of The American Journal of Anthropology)

The  pseudo-science of race even in its own day was considered highly questionable and was abandoned almost entirely around World War II. Nevertheless, the internet (and some die-hard ideologues) persists. For example (from a FB comment on my last blog post),

“not africanoid its negroid. Its a valid descriptive term among physical anthropologists. African is a geographical term not a race. We North Africans are "Africanoids" too=caucasoid Mediterranean”

Note the terms. They exactly mirror the terms shown in the 1950s encyclopedia entry pictured above. Those terms derive from 19th century race scientists like Blumenbach, but are also incorporated non-Europeans into the category of "white", based on the linguistic category "Indo-European", conflating language family trees with made up biological categories, none of which are reflected in skin tones and none of which are considered very useful or accurate today (despite their perpetuation in popular fiction).

This is not to say that there are no legitimate physical variations among humans. Even the ancient Greeks recognized this reality. Take the Attic vase pictured. Represented is the myth of Andromeda. Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus, a Phoenician (he was the son of Phoenix) and of Casseopeia (maybe an immigrant like Cepheus, maybe not). They were the mythical king and queen of Ethiopia. Andromeda is the figure being supported by the two smaller boys. Cepheus is the seated figure--they are both represented as "Persian" types--the hats and animal print pants are your typical dead give away. 

The physical features of the Phoenician characters, however, are indistinguishable from how Greeks would represent themselves--as Perseus is represented standing in travel gear near Cepheus. The other figures are all "Ethiopians" marked by their facial features (though clothed Greek-style). Here is another version of the same scene, though the painter uses skin tone instead of features as a marker for the "Ethiopian" characters and clothing (again) for the Phoenician.

What is the point? The point is that there IS recognizable physical variation in humanity, but that physical variation does not make "race" more than a socially constructed reality. And that physical difference didn't mean that some of the people were somehow inherently better than others. I put "Ethiopian" in quotation marks because, technically, all the character except Perseus in the vases are Ethiopian--Andromeda, Cepheus, and the rest. 

The Greeks recognized physical difference, but generally didn't think the people who had them were any more different from them than people in another family or in one Greek city-state and another (they used the same term, genos for everything from ones direct offspring to a household to women to a generation to what we might refer to as an ethnic group). The flexibility of such terms shows their constructedness. Those who appeal to biologically rigid categories of "race" don't seem to understand their fallacy. They appeal to physical anthropology as a defense for dismissing the realities of diversity in the name of coopting all historically "important" cultures to "whiteness". In reality, "white" only came to encompass the Mediterranean in the 1930s or 1940s at the earliest. 

But, what basis in fact do the appeals commenters make to these categories of race science and physical anthropology? In an in depth review (from 2013) of a special issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2009) titled "Race Reconciled" at Living Anthropologically (which you should read regularly if you want to say you know anything about what is happening in physical anthropology circles), we learn that leading physical anthropologists find skin color incapable of denoting race, cranial measurements only useful for locating possible geographic region of decent, and, the relationship between geographic descent group and genetic phenotype as "subjective". Use of skin color itself is called "arbitrary and subjective" and the scientists state that no actual group clusters or "races" can be discerned by skin color. One author, John Relethford, author of the textbook The Human Species, states of "race" that it is

“a culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation” (Race Reconciled 2009:20).

This is not a new idea, of course (see link above)--the linked anthropology issue came out in 2009, which means the research was being done long before that and builds upon decades of earlier research. And, even Relethford's connection of craniometrics and genetics is increasingly being demonstrated to be inaccurate. For over 30 years now, as the articles at Living Anthropologically show, calls have been made within the field for admitting to the subjectivity and ideological underpinnings of racial classification by forensic science.

In another of the articles, titled "Understanding race and human variation: Why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race" the conclusion is that forensic scientists are so good at categorizing bones by race because the categories are, essentially, made up. Forensic scientists could just as easily invent a new classification system for humans and define our differences through that. In fact, the author attributes the ability to categorize bones by racial groups to "institutional racism". Another article in the volume asserts that the methods of forensic anthropologists themselves lead to racist classifications. The image below, from Nott's 1854 Types of Mankind might give readers a clue as to what type of racial bias has been present. Nott's so-called "science" was considered illegitimate and motivated by prejudice when it was published. The anthropologist to whom the book was dedicated (Samuel George Morton) essentially disavowed it.

What does this all mean in terms of people who dismiss diversity in antiquity? Well, the same commenter who had recourse to the pseudo-scientific language of race science to try to co-opt all Mediterranean peoples to their own whiteness showed their cards by committing all three of the actions I identified in my post. First, the individual posted a link to my Eidolon article and charged I advocate "changing history" in the name of "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS" [their caps] and in order to build the self esteem of minorities. Additionally, the individual used an appeal to "genetics" (out-dated physical anthropology discussed above that not even physical anthropologists support) to manipulate the category of "whiteness" to dismiss my points. 

All of this amounts to an attempt to dismiss the last 50 or so years of scholarship on race and ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean and in anthropology as "revisionist" But that shouldn't be a bad thing. My fellow scholars and I are revisionist--we critically examine the past scholarship, bring in new evidence, and address methodological biases in order to correct the misrepresentations and manipulations of the 19th and early 20th centuries done in the name of appropriating Greek and Roman (and Egyptian and Persian) cultures for a mythical and supposedly superior "Anglo-Saxon white race". The general public doesn't seem to be ready to let it go. But, wouldn't it just be easier to admit that the world is and always has been full of people with differences and that this is ok? Instead, people clinging to the world view that "whiteness" is a biological reality march around carrying tiki torches in the name of their superiority, chanting "Blood and Soil" as if they were not immigrants in this land we call America. 

The Ancient Mediterranean Was Diverse. Why Do Some People Get So Upset When We Talk About It?

At this point, anyone who reads about things classical on the internet knows of the dust up over the BBC video on Roman Britain and its inclusion of a Roman soldier of African origin. If you need a quick refresher, you can check out a short article at Indy 100 (from the Independent) and another at The Atlantic. Then you can appraise yourself of the subsequent internet abuse heaped on historian Mary Beard when she involved herself in the discussion. This brawl over diversity in the classical world is one of a series that have occurred in recent months and echoes those surrounding Sarah Bond's article on painted marble in antiquity and the white supremacist motives for removing the paint and Donna Zuckerberg's call for a consciously more inclusive approach to Classics--the comments in both articles are amazing demonstrations of ignorance and virulence on one side and exasperation and resignation on the other. 

Janiform of African from Syracuse, Sicily.

These controversies in Classics mirror a broader questioning of the value of diversity in the US and British populations that have manifested in recent political elections and policy proposals--from Brexit to the Trump administrations proposals to restrict travel, build a wall on the US-Mexico border, and change the way visas are granted to work in the US. The rhetoric of inclusion has even been changed in the way the US government discusses citizenship--no longer is their a grant to help with "Citizenship and Integration", but "Citizenship and Assimilation" and the Department of Justice is looking to investigate Affirmative Action in colleges as if they believe that too many non-whites are getting into US colleges. 

The dynamics at play in the broader political world and Classics seem, in some ways to be related as it is not professional classicists who are up in arms about discussions about the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean--we have all sorts of archaeological, literary, and, increasingly,  genetic evidence to show this was the case. Those who are upset by the "un-whitening" of the ancient world are casual, non-professional consumers of the ancient world and, in some cases, scholars in other fields who have no professional expertise and no more knowledge than the average college student or who want to privilege unreliable evidence (like genetics) over all other types of evidence. What these individuals have in common, however, is a shared world view in which the ancient Greek and Roman worlds are filled with white people and that they, therefore, belong to white people--and underlying this assumption is another assumption that the ancients knew what whiteness was and considered themselves a part of it.

 I have written elsewhere on how the field of Classics can be complicit in the construction of this narrative by playing up the "foundations of western civilization" angle and downplaying the racism and misogyny in some of our ancient sources--an approach that lends credence to white supremacy groups. People seem less bothered by the notion that the ancient Athenians were racist. In fact, that is one of the appeals. Some people get very upset, however, when scholars point out the variety of ways they weren't racist and were, instead, open to diversity. 

Clay figures of African characters from the theater in ancient Syracuse, Sicily. 

What these people often have in common is a flexible understanding of whiteness that sometimes includes people of Near/Middle Eastern descent and sometimes doesn't. If they want to prove that there were no black Africans, they emphasize that north Africa in antiquity was "white"--according to the US census, Near/Middle Eastern counts as white, not "of color". This makes it convenient to assume the cultural achievements of ancient Egypt, Persian, the Phoenicians and their colonies, etc for "whiteness". However, when one speaks of ancient and medieval Islam, all the sudden, those same people are no longer "white". Why? Arab peoples are considered white in the US census, but non-white when religion is mentioned. So, in modern terms, racially, they are white, but culturally "other"--if one assumes that the US is a "Christian nation", which is debatable; the Founding Fathers intentionally left religion out of the picture, but it is a majority Christian population. This makes one wonder how the ancient Greeks and Romans--definitively non-Christians--can get to be the foundation of a civilization that seems to hold Christianity as a key identifier and how they get to be "white" in this particular sense. It also makes one wonder why so many people are so invested in a white Greco-Roman antiquity.

A further commonality of many of the individuals who are unsettled or even angry at the notion of a multiethnic/multiracial Classical world is that they will typically try to argue that the un-whitening of antiquity is political correctness run amok or the imposition of modern ways of thinking on the ancient world--as if the ancients had no concepts of race/ethnicity. When you hear the argument that talking about the diversity of the ancient world is some sort of liberal political correctness, you can fairly easily gauge the ideological position of the person--that language is straight out of the Karl Rove and now Pres. Trump playbook for dismissing academic expertise and for undermining any study or discussion that might counter a narrative that white, western civilization is ancient in its foundations and superior to any others. 

And, this, at last, gets us to the question posed in the title of this post--why do some people get so upset when we talk about how diverse the ancient Greek and Roman societies were? Because if Classical antiquity is the foundation of western civilization and they were multiracial/multiethnic societies, then the idea that western civilization is a white accomplishment based on a history of white superiority is called into question. And if you truly believe that your own identity is bound to being white and to this historical narrative of whiteness, then finding diversity and inclusion at the roots of western culture means that maybe your whiteness fetish is problematic and the drive by those who embrace it to exclude other religions, traditions, skin tones, etc. from our society is most likely good old fashioned modern racism and not inherent in our destiny after all.