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Doing Justice to the Classics

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Degrading Murals “Civilize” Native Americans with Latin Textbook

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In the fall of 2018 Dartmouth College decided to remove from campus a set of murals depicting Eleazer Wheelock meeting the Native Americans living in New Hampshire, where he founded the college in 1769. The murals have drawn protests since the 1970s for their racist depiction of Native Americans and the room in which they were displayed — a dining room for faculty — was closed in 1979. Since then the murals have been accessible only by special arrangement but were still located in a central location on campus that implicitly endorsed their representation of Native Americans as unsophisticated people who need to be “civilized.” The murals explicitly make Classical education part of this “civilizing” project.

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“Western Civilization” means Classics…and White Supremacy

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Earlier this month Iowa congressional representative Steve King, known for his xenophobia, support for white supremacy, and long history of promoting racist politics, was quoted by The New York Times asking “white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” No one has defended King for asking this about “white nationalist” or “white supremacist,” but Texas congressional representative Louie Gohmert said that it’s “a fair question” to ask “when did Western civilization become a negative?” and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott said “I am unsure who is offended by the term ‘Western civilization’ on its own.” If Scott were to look into it, he would find many different people, including classical scholars arguing that “Western civilization” is coded language for white supremacy, even in response to King’s latest remarks. But it’s important to keep reiterating the case. Just this month a member of the professional association for classical scholars prefaced a racist attack on a scholar of color by insisting on the need for classical scholars to protect Western civilization. And we need to reiterate not only that “Western civilization” refers to a racist ideology, but that those who use it as King does are referring to Greco-Roman antiquity.

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“Warrior” apparel invokes antiquity for violent White Nationalism

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“Warrior XII” sells t-shirts and other apparel that “embrac[e] the warrior mindset and the essence of what it means to stand on the thin blue line, serve in our military, or simply be a patriotic American.” The “12” of “Warrior XII” is a slang term for police. Their designs include slogans such as “I’ll control my guns, you control your kids”; “If you can’t be safe, be deadly”; and “Die a Hero, or live long enough to become the villain.” Warrior XII also sells several shirts that invoke classical antiquity, including designs such as “Spartan Helmet,”  “American Spartan,” and “SPQR.” As Pharos has documented, both the Spartans and SPQR are favorite sources of inspiration for white nationalists, and on closer inspection what might at first seem to be nothing more than a line of shirts for gun enthusiasts turns out to be a platform for xenophobia and coded white supremacy.

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Ancient fables said to prove that all women are “inveterate liars and deceivers”

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One of the foundations of misogyny is a set of generalizations about women that justify their oppression. Authors in the misogynist and increasingly violent “Men’s Rights Movement” like to prop up their hateful view of women by pointing to ancient evidence as “proof” that these generalizations are true. In an article entitled “No Fable,” the misogynist Douglas Galbi, whose personal webpage and contributions to A Voice for Men have been documented on Pharos, cites the example of the ancient Greek woman Thais to argue that all women are deceptive and value material wealth over everything else. Like the rest of Galbi’s work, this article is meant to support one of the fundamental (and fundamentally wrong) claims of contemporary misogynists, that it is men, not women, who are oppressed in what Galbi calls today’s “gynocentric” culture, and that this oppression has very old, even ancient, roots.

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Pursuit of truth said to be unique to the “White West”

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Altright.com is a website founded by white nationalist Richard Spencer that Pharos has previously documented. An article on the site entitled “The Will to Truth” argues that white Europeans should be considered superior to “the darker races” because “men of white descent” are the only ones who value the “Socratic idea of truth,” a possession that Europeans can “trace back, with justice, to our very origins in Ancient Greece.” It goes on to argue that “Should the White West perish, the love of truth perishes with it.”

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Announcing Pharos’s Onomasticon of Classical Pseudonyms and Avatars

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This week Pharos is launching a new initiative: the Onomasticon of Classical Pseudonyms and Avatars. It’s a list of names and images taken from Greco-Roman antiquity and used by those who espouse hateful politics. Many of these are authors who publish under classical names or use classicizing avatars on the sites Pharos documents. Others are people who leave comments on those sites (these are listed at the bottom of the Onomasticon’s list). Some, like “Lysander” or “Carnifex“, are figures who have attracted broader media attention. All of them are attempting to use the prestige of Greco-Roman antiquity to dignify their regressive views. An “onomasticon” is an index of names related to a particular theme; several ancient and medieval examples survive, such as Eusebius’ index of places mentioned in the gospels, or Pollux’s list of words and phrases in the Attic dialect of ancient Greek. 

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The First Year of Pharos

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by Curtis Dozier, Director of Pharos

The end of this month will be the one-year anniversary of the launch of Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics. I started the site as an experiment to try to raise awareness of what hate groups were saying about Greco-Roman antiquity online and to create a platform for classical scholars to point out the errors, distortions, and sometimes outright lies that underlie those appropriations. And I had a further goal: to try to articulate politically progressive and inclusive ways of talking about the ancient world as an answer Donna Zuckerberg’s call to “seek better reaesons for studying Classics” than the traditional notion of Greco-Roman antiquity as the “foundation of Western Civilization” that all the hate groups Pharos documents rely on as the bedrock of their admiration of the ancient world.

I’ve been delighted and humbled by the interest that progressively-minded audiences have shown in our work, both among scholars and the broader public. I didn’t know whether specialists busy with their own teaching and research would take the time to respond when I wrote to them to ask for comments on appropriations, but more than one hundred people have answered our call to contribute. I never imagined that The New Statesman and The Baffler would publish profiles of our site, that I’d be invited to be on Ohio State University’s History Talks podcast with scholars who have inspired our work, or that we’d be part of the conversation about the political awakening happening in Classical studies in The Nation, Ploughshares, or The New Yorker. So to everyone who believed in this project and encouraged me from the beginning — especially Donna Zuckerberg, my colleagues at Vassar College, and the contributors to our first “Scholars Respond” pieces who showed that yes, specialists do want to speak out against hatred — thank you.

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White Nationalist celebrates “European” Philosophers

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Eurocanadian.ca is a white nationalist site devoted to the “promotion and defense of the ethnic interests of European Canadians.” Pharos previously documented a review on this site of a book arguing that ancient Greek homosexuality is “a myth”, but the site also contains original content about antiquity, such as a ranking of  seventy-five of the “greatest” philosophers entitled “Greatest Philosophers are ALL European Men.” It’s a textbook example of confirmation bias: the author presents the list as a scholarly assessment but is really only interested in “proving” the intellectual and racial superiority of Europeans.

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[Archived] “Great Men Undone by Weakness”

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From the Director:
This article, originally published in 2018, has been replaced by an updated version, because the text below relied on and promoted anti-Black scholarship on Cleopatra and accepted white supremacist concepts of race. This was pointed out by Professor Shelley Haley (Hamilton College) in lecture at Durham University. I have preserved the original here as an illustration of how essential a critical understanding of the history and theory of race is to the practice of anti-racist scholarship.
– Curtis Dozier, Director of Pharos

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Mark Antony and Cicero, “great men undone by weakness”

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From the Director:
This is an updated version of an article that I wrote for Pharos in 2018. As pointed out by Professor Shelley Haley in a lecture at Durham University, the original relied on and promoted anti-Black scholarship on Cleopatra and accepted white supremacist concepts of race. As Prof. Haley noted, my discussion of race was much less well-informed than my discussion of misogyny, as is frequently the case with white feminists. This ignorance made it easy for unquestioned white supremacist perspectives derived from my acculturation as a white person and from my training as a Classical Scholar to lead me to lend academic respectability to anti-Blackness. The original post is available here as an illustration of what that complicity looks like. I would like to thank Professor Haley for applying her expertise, time, and energy to Pharos and to acknowledge the harm the original article has done.
-Curtis Dozier, Director of Pharos

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