Friday
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, responding to rightwing attacks on Christopher Nolan for casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, has written an excellent article on “The Fear of Black Greeks” (gifted). The African American journalist asserts that “white people don’t own the accomplishments of ancient Greece” and accuses them of “stolen valor” when they lay claim to them.
While not mentioning how the German Nazis too claimed to be descended from the ancient Greeks, whom they mimicked in their architecture, Serwer finds modern examples of fascist thinking. For instance:
“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Stephen Miller declared in a speech at the funeral for the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.”
And:
[T]he right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly bellowed for the refugees to “go back to fucking Haiti” and said, “We know our country’s better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it.”
Observing that Miller was actually descended from “poor persecuted Jews from Eastern Europe, not ancient Roman senators,” Serwer writes,
But of course neither Kelly nor Miller “built this country,” and they have as much to do with, say, the writing of The Odyssey or the painting of the Sistine Chapel as I do—the fact that Kelly and Miller are white does not make these accomplishments theirs. People who espouse these views do not value the classics for what they can teach us about the ancient world or our own, but as bleached marble monuments to their own superiority.
Serwer’s article exposes the racial agenda that has always lain behind rightwing celebrations of western culture. When (as I reported yesterday) cultural conservatives in the early 1990s declared, “Jane Austen, not Alice Walker,” Walker, as a successful Black woman writer, had special resonance for them. Miller associating with the western heritage to establish his whiteness—and to whitewash his Jewishness—is a classic example of caste at work, as described in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Although claiming a lineage and legacy back to Athens wouldn’t have saved Miller from the death camps in Nazi Germany—nor even convince certain American neo-Nazis today—he thinks he can join the privileged American white caste by demonizing people of color.
Similarly, there are Trump-supporting Latinos, Muslims, southeast Asians, and even some Black Africans—I was told, when dining with Ethiopian-American friends last spring, of a MAGA Ethiopian complaining about shiftless African Americans—who think that bashing other minorities is the way to acceptance and inclusion. Of course, Martin Niemöller’s “First they came” poem comes immediately to mind.
Setting aside America’s caste system, Serwer points out that the ancient Greeks were not in fact white in the way rightwing Americans believe . Greece, he notes,
is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and “Aethiopia” are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in The Odyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as “black-skinned and woolly-haired.” As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is The Aethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.
I particularly like how Serwer himself embraces 5th century Athens. He mentions attending Duke Ellington, the arts high school in Washington, D.C., which caught my attention as my 14-year-old grandson will be attending the school this coming fall. (Alban is a superb violin player and is thrilled he was accepted.) Serwer recalls encountering classic Greek plays
as part of both my theater-history class and my English class. This being a public school in D.C., these classes were almost entirely Black, as were my teachers. My theater-history class was taught by Donal Leace, an actor and folk singer who made a tremendous impression on me. He taught us about the importance of these texts and how they shaped human storytelling, and I owe to him my lifelong appreciation for them. I have seen conservatives accuse liberals of dismissing the classics as the province of “dead white men,” but that was not what I was taught in the 1990s by Black teachers, in a Black school, in what was then a mostly Black city.
Serwer adds:
Shortly after graduating, I went to see Avery Brooks in The Oedipus Plays. I do not remember at the time interpreting his casting as an overt political statement, let alone thinking that anyone would consider these stories as the collective racial property of people born white thousands of years later, rather than as a form of sorcery allowing anyone in the present to speak to the past.
This is how literature, including the literature of the western canon, is supposed to work. People who use the classics to exclude others dishonor the very works they claim to uphold.
