Doing Justice to the Classics
On April 27th, 2021, Pharos director Curtis Dozier delivered a lecture entitled “Classical Athens and Contemporary White Ethnonationalism” at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. A video of that lecture, including the extensive Question and Answer period, is now available at the Harvard Classics Department’s webpage.
Read moreEditor’s Note: In this article, Pharos welcomes Jeremy J. Swist as a guest contributor to share his expertise concerning the function of Classical themes and imagery in the work of metal bands that identify with the “National Socialist Black Metal” subgenre of heavy metal music or otherwise engage in white supremacist politics. Interested readers will find more context and analysis of this topic in a lecture that Dr. Swist delivered earlier this year.
Heavy metal music and its culture (henceforth referred to as metal or one of its many stylistic subgenres such as black metal and death metal) have long attracted controversy, even becoming the subject of moral panics, due in no small part to the genre’s traditional valorization of transgression and sensual liberation. As a medium for often incendiary rejections of the status quo, metal can also become a haven and charismatic platform for right-wing ideologies expressed with unabashed racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism, including lyrics and imagery drawn from classical antiquity.
Read moreAfter a flier announcing the formation of an “America First Caucus” in Congress was leaked, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene first confirmed her involvement before abandoning the idea a few days later. Greene is known to Pharos readers for wearing a Molon Labe mask while defending the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and to everyone in America for her promotion of racism and conspiracy theories. Thus it came as no surprise that the Caucus’ flier was brimming with racist and xenophobic dog-whistles. Of particular note to historians was her claim that America is “strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” since “Anglo-Saxon” is a historically incoherent term that originates in American nativism (which was also used as the name of a major scholarly society until 2019). What has not received as much attention is that the same flier invoked the Classical world as well.
Read moreThis page collects examples of articles on prominent white supremacist websites that invoke the ancient city states of Athens and Sparta in support of hateful politics. In connection with the recommendations on our “How to use Pharos in the Classroom” page and our recommended discussion questions, they are intended to spark discussion and further research about the ways that ancient history is used to legitimize hateful beliefs, and about the historical and ongoing complicity of the discipline of Classics in providing the basis for these beliefs through the promotion of an idealized and/or sanitized version of that past. We have provided links to PDFs of the articles extracted from the sites on which they appeared. Links to archived versions of these articles are available to instructors upon request at pharsoclassics@vassar.edu.
Read moreThis page collects examples of articles that illustrate how modern white supremacists and misogynists use Greco-Roman antiquity to justify their gender politics. In connection with the recommendations on our “How to use Pharos in the Classroom” page and our recommended discussion questions, they are intended to spark discussion and further research about the ways that ancient history is used to legitimize hateful beliefs, and about the historical and ongoing complicity of the discipline of Classics in providing the basis for these beliefs through the promotion of an idealized and/or sanitized version of that past. We have provided links to PDFs of the articles extracted from the sites on which they appeared. Links to archived versions of these articles are available to instructors upon request at pharsoclassics@vassar.edu.
Read moreIt is essential that students of Greco-Roman Antiquity understand that Classics has deep connections with white supremacy if we are to avoid reproducing and strengthening this connection in our classrooms. Pharos’ documentations of contemporary white supremacist appropriations of ancient history, including our thematically organized curated collections, are one tool instructors can use to help students begin to recognize this connection and reflect on how they can disrupt it.
Read moreThe murder of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020 brought national attention to the Movement for Black Lives and its demand for justice for Black people in the United States. However, as most people of color already knew, Floyd’s murder was no isolated incident: 164 Black people were killed by police in the United States in the first eight months of 2020 alone. And police brutality without accountability is only one example of our white supremacist social order, which also perpetuates, for example, racial disparities in wealth and life-expectancy.
In a society so riven with anti-Black policies and structures, everyone has an obligation to resist. This obligation extends to our work as teachers of Classics. Writing in reaction to Floyd’s murder, Pria Jackson wrote in Eidolon that “White Classicists MUST resist and do the work. Every. Single. Day. To unlearn white supremacy in themselves, to unwrite the white supremacist narratives they discover, and to unteach the white supremacist ideologies they will invariably discover in students who approach Classics as a white history.” Her essay is a must-read for its articulation of the complicity of Classics and white supremacy, for its insistence on the fact that “white supremacy is already in your classroom,” and its diagnosis of the refusal of many white Classicists to acknowledge both.
Read moreFollowing the domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, white supremacist websites were awash with conspiracy theories, praise for the rioters, and false equivalencies between their violent insurrection and the summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations. One contributor to the white supremacist site Counter Currents, however, expressed his disillusionment with President Trump, calling it “unforgivable and inexcusable for him to condemn and abandon the supporters that answered his call and attended this rally.” It is hard to tell how widespread this disillusionment is among white supremacists with a president who did more than any other recent elected official to advance their agenda, but this author suggests that after being “betrayed by Trump,” “it is time for white Americans to form a new identity and a new mythos.” What follows is a call for totalitarianism wrapped in the veneer of Classical prestige. “In many ways,” the author writes, “the Roman poet Virgil did these things for the Roman Empire and the Roman people.”
Read moreOn January 6, 2021 a group of domestic terrorists, encouraged by the outgoing President of the United States, attacked the U.S. Capitol Building. Capitol security offering so little resistance to white rioters attempting to enter a government building made for a striking contrast to a year of police attacking Black Lives Matter demonstrations, 93% of which involved no violence at all. The white supremacy that motivated the attackers soon became clear as well. Although most of the people and groups Pharos has documented work primarily online, the attack on the Capitol saw violent terrorists in the seat of our nation’s government displaying familiar Classical symbols. This post will attempt to collect examples of these. Many of these have already been noted and discussed in a wide-ranging essay by Spencer Alexander McDaniel on many of the symbols seen at the Capital attack (not just Classical ones). If you are aware of any examples not included here please send them to pharosclassics@vassar.edu or contact us on Twitter.
Read more2020 has been a year in which the increasing visibility and influence of overtly white supremacist groups in the United States continued, including those whose use of Greco-Roman antiquity Pharos documents. But it was also the year that a police officer murdered George Floyd (and many other Black people) and that the Coronavirus Pandemic took a disproportionate toll on communities of color. As the insidious and deadly operation of racism and structural inequality at the heart of mainstream American institutions and social practices received widespread attention from white people who are ordinarily sheltered from it, I wasn’t always sure whether Pharos met a need. When police officers can kill Black people with impunity, when our nation’s economy and public health system treats Black and Brown lives as disposable, the latest essay about Juvenal on an avowedly white supremacist website did not always seem worthy of attention. Our country has a huge problem with overt racism, but we have an even bigger problem with the racism embedded to the point of invisibility — if you’re white — in every aspect of our society.
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