White Supremacy as a “Turning Point in History”
The Lepage Center’s 2021–22 programming theme is “Turning Points in History.” To deepen our understanding of significant transitions in the present, the six-month series looks to past turning points to impart lessons for today’s world. The theme for the month of October was a critical investigation into white supremacy.
Since the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, historians have been working to push back publicly against white supremacists’ appropriation of history and historical symbols to legitimize their ideology. These efforts have become increasingly urgent since white supremacist groups played a central role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. In the first of two roundtables that explored the history and ideology of white supremacy, Dr. Jackie Murray, Dr. Rebecca Futo Kennedy, and Dr. Curtis Dozier considered the ways that ancient Athens is held up as both a model for democracy and a symbol of racial exclusion and hierarchy. In the second roundtable, Dr. Mae Ngai, Dr. Kathleen Belew, and Dr. Duncan Bell examined the global histories of white supremacy that shape our contemporary moment.
How do education and politics legitimize white supremacy?
In both roundtables, the role of education and politics in the perpetuation of white supremacy emerged as a central theme. The collaborative online project Pharos, directed by Dozier, documents instances of hate groups that draw material from the classics to fuel their racist, misogynistic, and homophobic rhetoric. However, as the scholars made clear, using the ancient Athenian past in this way is not necessarily a historical distortion. Although Athenians are often remembered as the inventors of democracy, Athens was a deeply exclusionary and hierarchical society with strict citizenship laws that created a permanent immigrant underclass and slave system. The city-state’s reputation as a model of democracy makes it particularly attractive to hate groups. According to Dozier: “They can point at it and don’t have to go against the dominant spirit of the contemporary world… You can have a flourishing democratic society like Athens that recognizes the need for racial purity, an immigrant underclass, hierarchical government, and the exclusion of civic rights for women.”
Murray emphasized that white supremacists also use “actual scholarship” to justify their problematic claims about the ancient world by drawing on older academic discourses framed in the context of colonialism. Scholars have a vital responsibility to resist white supremacist narratives, which have deep roots within the halls of academia. “Academic institutions have been absolutely central to the propagation of white supremacy over the last several hundred years,” stated Bell. The way history is discussed in scholarship and the classroom can serve to perpetuate or dismantle racist discourses.
Understanding the political context of white supremacist ideology is essential for effective resistance. “Historically, these are political movements,” Ngai explained, “They’re not like expressions of some human reaction to people who are different… It’s about politics, it’s about the distribution of resources, who holds power. If we understand that then I think we also have some purchase on how we can oppose it.” Bell pointed, for example, to the use of strict immigration laws as political tools used throughout history to institutionalize exclusion and discrimination, such as the anti-Semitic 1905 Aliens Act in Britain.
What role does history play in combatting white supremacy?
Despite the complicity of academic scholarship in legitimizing white supremacist ideas, historians and educators can play an essential role in resisting and dismantling the discourses of hate that are woven deeply into the social and political fabric. “You can study the past and understand the past but you don’t have to see it as a model necessarily or see it as something that should be emulated or glorified,” Murray explained. To learn from history, we must be capable of examining it through a critical lens, openly acknowledging the elaborate webs of power that continue to shape the present. To analyze and describe the motives of historical actors effectively, Belew recommended we develop a sense of “historical empathy” which resists simplified explanations and “calls on us to understand what these actors think they’re doing and what they think it means. Acts of violence in this context are not inexplicable, they are part of a larger political ideology.” Historical empathy does not require us to condone or defend unethical actions, it merely asks us to reconstruct why they occurred. The better we can accurately identify the complex motivations of historical actors, such as those who participated in the attack on January 6th, the better we can work toward combatting violence, prejudice, and white supremacy at their deepest roots.
Even in the frightening aftermath of January 6th, some scholars see evidence for hope in the present moment. Kennedy noted the shift in public opinion about upholding ancient Athens as a model for democracy: “The turning point is actually that we are now getting more of the public to recognize that these, in fact, are extremist views in our modern democracy.” Perhaps the difficult process of breaking away from unquestioned acceptance of historical ideals has begun and we can envision a better reality. Mae Ngai ended on an encouraging note, “I take hope and inspiration from my students. They don’t want to see a world of white supremacy and violence.”
RESOURCES
BOOKS:
Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-American, https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691194011/dreamworlds-of-race
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674034013
Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520382527/a-field-guide-to-white-supremacy
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674286078
Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393634167
Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691155326/the-lucky-ones
Martin Bernal, Black Athena, https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/black-athena/9781978804265
Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources, translated and edited by R.F. Kennedy, C.S. Roy, and M.L. Goldman (Hackett, 2013).
Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Immigrant Women in Athens
Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City, https://www.routledge.com/Immigrant-Women-in-Athens-Gender-Ethnicity-and-Citizenship-in-the-Classical/Kennedy/p/book/9781138201033
ARTICLES:
Mae Ngai, “Racism Has Always Been Part of the Asian American Experience,” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/we-are-constantly-reproducing-anti-asian-racism/618647/
Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Jackie Murray, “Classics is a part of Black intellectual history — Howard needs to keep it,” https://theundefeated.com/features/classics-is-a-part-of-black-intellectual-history-howard-needs-to-keep-it/
Rebecca Futo Kennedy, “We Condone It by Our Silence,” https://eidolon.pub/we-condone-it-by-our-silence-bea76fb59b21
BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND TEACHING RESOURCES:
“Hold My Mead: A Bibliography for Historians Hitting Back at White Supremacy:” https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/09/10/hold-my-mead-a-bibliography-for-historians-hitting-back-at-white-supremacy/
“Teaching Race and Ethnicity in the Greco-Roman World” by Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Jackie Murray: https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/eotalks-6-teaching-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-greco-roman-world-by-rebecca-futo-kennedy-and-jackie-murray/
Classics at the Intersection Teaching Resources: https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/p/teaching-race-and-ethnicity.html
Pharos Teaching Resources: https://pharos.vassarspaces.net/category/teaching-resources/
Pharos, “Onomasticon of Classical Pseudonyms and Avatars,” https://pharos.vassarspaces.net/onomasticon-of-classical-pseudonyms-and-avatars/
PODCASTS AND LECTURES:
Curtis Dozier’s podcast, The Mirror of Antiquity: https://www.mirrorofantiquity.com/
Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (lecture), King’s College London, https://youtu.be/NodFW6CW9qI
Interview with Jackie Murray on the Itinera podcast: https://itinerapodcast.libsyn.com/episode-12-jackie-murray
Jackie Murray, “Racecraft in the Odyssey and Argonautica,” Iowa Classics Colloquium, https://youtu.be/tukKGMnfNWI
