Black Athena, 30 Years On
Why Bernal Still Matters to Classics
Nowhere in America are the walls of the political left thicker than on university campuses. Recent news articles and opinion pieces have lamented the ideological tyranny that governs the actions and reactions of students, faculty, and administration to anything that veers off of the avenue known, in its less savory form, as “political correctness.” The refusal to engage with one’s adversaries over conflicting views strengthens the isolationist, echo-chamber mentality amongst liberals that arguably contributed to Trump’s election win. Despite the post-war skirmishes by writers and pundits targeting the left for their mob mentality folly, the right fares no better: from Trump’s own “patriotic correctness” to the rise of the Alt-Right, it certainly seems, in the words of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year issue, that we live in The Divided States of America.
Whatever could one of Classics’ most notorious iconoclasts, Martin Bernal, have to offer American education in terms of addressing these combative social divisions? Bernal needs little introduction. Most Classicists will remember him for his contentious three-volume work, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Bernal argued for an ancient Greek heritage stemming from Egyptian and Phoenician roots — a heritage systematically dismantled by racist intellectuals from the late eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Black Athena ruffled countless feathers throughout the 1990s, with the majority of critiques aimed at Bernal’s unsound methodologies.
Less apparent, however, is the broader political climate in which the first volume of Black Athena, published in 1987, emerged. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a bellicose time in American society as left and right vied with one another in the so-called Culture Wars on US campuses. The Culture Wars, a term coined by the sociologist James Davison Hunter, encompassed the polarizing struggle between conservative and liberal values that each sought to define American education. In many ways, the liberal side won the battle on university campuses (the majority of tenured faculty today identify as “liberal” or “far left”), but is now losing the war in America and around the world. Bernal, as a scholar who sought to deconstruct dominant ideas of “Western Civilization”, was very much slotted into the camp of militant, “politically correct” liberals attempting to dismantle Eurocentric curricula.
After laying dormant for much of the early 2000s, the prickly issue of political correctness has risen once again on largely left-leaning American campuses — the 2015 Yale Halloween email scandal and the recent backlash against University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson comes to mind. The adamant refusal on the part of students and faculty to engage with alternative viewpoints is threatening to further entrench the ideological parochialism that only serves to wall off large segments of society from one another (e.g. “left versus right”). We need, more than ever, to teach students to engage openly with alternative points of view if we are to emerge from the next four years more socially united than divided. As Classicists, we also need to be very mindful about the ideological usage of the past amidst these polarizing struggles.
I recently explored the political siege mentality of the Culture Wars through a discussion in my Mediterranean Archaeology class about Bernal and one of his vehement critics from the late 1980s. This particular class discussion was centered on the question, “Who were the Phoenicians?” The question encompassed much more than how we identify them archaeologically. It was meant to compel students to ask why a people who had such a significant impact on the cultural, political, and economic topography of the ancient Mediterranean were largely left out of ancient Mediterranean history, except in their inevitable roles as the arch-rivals of Rome in the third and second centuries BCE.
So what do the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world have to do with these Culture Wars? Quite a lot, it seems. In modern times, the Greeks and Romans especially have been tugged back and forth between opposing camps seeking to reconfigure history to suit their ideological viewpoints. And nowhere is this more apparent than with Bernal and his critics. This particular class discussion on Bernal and one of his vehement critics laid bare the ideological usage of the past to my students and me — as well as the importance of using Bernal and his opponents to understand the origins of these polarizing struggles and re-evaluate our own stances within them.
As mentioned above, Bernal’s iconoclasm met with a range of critiques and responses throughout the 1990s. But the review of Black Athena, Vol. 1 from The New Criterion, by the Danish historian and then-fellow of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, David Gress, struck a special tone. Like later reviews, it tore apart Bernal’s scholarship. Yet it was also filled with accusations that Bernal was a communist. Most importantly, it ripped into the social activism erupting across US campuses in the late 1980s, and placed Bernal’s scholarship at the root of this problem, which, in Gress’ words, amounted to the “dismantling and distorting of higher education.”
“Black Athena is pernicious because it serves a political purpose hostile to the culture of scholarship” wrote Gress. “The main objective in the American university today is to attack and abolish core curricula on European thought and history on the grounds that they have nothing to offer the multicultural society of the future, tainted as they are with the ineradicable sins of sexism, racism, and chauvinism.” In asserting that the Greeks owed their roots to Egypt and the Near East, and that nineteenth and twentieth century Classical scholarship was essentially a racist, anti-Semitic enterprise, Bernal, according to Gress, was providing 1980s liberal academics with yet another battleground for anti-European, anti-humanist indoctrination.
Two strains of social thought run through this review that highlight the concerns of conservatives in these Culture Wars. One is the interest by scholars since the early twentieth century and especially since the Cold War in sharpening the definition of “The West.” Gress fleshed out his ideas on the subject later in his 1998 monograph, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents. In rebutting Bernal, Gress zeroes in on Athenian democracy, namely the concepts of equality amongst its citizens (isonomia) and free speech (parrhesia): “Egypt was a noble culture, but to assert that it had anything at all to do with Greek democracy is ludicrous.”
To be fair, Gress’ contribution in From Plato to NATO was to reorient the evolution of the West to a much longer series of developments over the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. Yet in the same year as From Plato to NATO was published, this assertion of a special “Western-ness”, born in fifth-century Athenian democracy, would be taken to extremes with Victor Davis Hanson’s and John Heath’s Who Killed Homer? Their work famously attacked Classicists’ so-called politically correct agendas, which the authors saw as eroding the discipline from the inside out.
Indeed, the other strain of thought apparent in both Gress and Hanson and Heath is the emergence, in the late 80s and early 90s, of the phantom menace created by the right to vilify the left known as “political correctness”, a weapon so bluntly yet deftly wielded by the Trump machine in the 2016 campaign. To Gress and his contemporaries, Western education was a noble enterprise under siege from anti-intellectual activism on campuses: “the chief problem in the academy today isn’t European cultural arrogance but its opposite.”
In a recent article for The Guardian, Moira Weigel traces how the term “politically correct,” originally used amongst left-leaners as a critique against excessive orthodoxy, became the Gatling gun of the right in the early 1990s, used to paint a dastardly picture of liberal elites who had nothing in common with working class America. This caricature sought to alienate Democrats from their bases, as much as it was also a counter-attempt to infuse the academy with conservative agendas and think tanks.
As Weigel notes, anti-political correctness, while fading from public view in the early 2000s, has made a comeback in the final years of the Obama presidency, largely in wake of movements against sexual violence on campuses and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Once again, writers have drawn up vitriolic pieces against campus activists, whom they often refer to as “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs). Their attacks are leveled particularly at students, painting them either as angry mobs who attack any who raise even the slightest voice of dissent with tactics likened to France’s post-Revolution Reign of Terror, or else as coddled, self-entitled multiple-trigger-warning-needing millennials who refuse to engage with anyone who might have an opposing viewpoint on the grounds that it makes them feel unsafe.
Juxtaposing Bernal and Gress in the classroom allows us, as students and educators, to question how Classics fits into the current iteration of these ongoing Culture Wars. These conflicts are far from over: with the election of Trump, many conservative advocacy groups and think tanks, such as the National Association of Scholars, are poised to regain ideological ground on US campuses with calls to scale back Title IX enforcement and abolish affirmative action in college admissions. This is not to suggest wielding Bernal as some political weapon à la Gress, of course; rather, it is meant to use our teaching of history to compel students to think very carefully about the dangers of provincialism, whether on the left or right, while also exploring how the present seeps into our reconstruction of the past. Contrasting Bernal and Gress also invites us to think broadly about how we conceive of the amorphous idea of “Western Civilization”, and the cui bono of attaching the Greeks and Romans to this concept (while excluding others).
Indeed, hyper-diffusionists like Bernal came largely from outside of Classics, as Suzanne Marchand and Anthony Grafton note in their article, “Bernal and His Critics”. Those entrenched within the discipline, and whose influence has been much more insidious, have been far more likely to man the opposing bastion, namely that of independent evolution, or the assumption that ancient Greece was culturally and ethnically autonomous. This argument stretches beyond Classics and into much broader assumptions about the existence of a dominant Western Culture, extending from Greece to Rome, up into Medieval Europe and across the north Atlantic: hence the catchphrase “From Plato to NATO”. And this assumption about a special “Western Civilization”, alongside the vitriol against political correctness, has now become ammunition in the pockets of the Alt-Right.
In another recent article for The Guardian, Kwame Anthony Appiah rightfully questions our persistent idea of a singular “Western Culture” that Hanson and Heath and others are so insistent on harnessing to the ancient Greeks: “The values of liberty, tolerance and rational inquiry are not the birthright of a single culture … these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a western destiny.” It is no longer enough to build Long Walls from Athens to Washington (or London, or Sydney), in an attempt to assert what Appiah calls a “golden nugget” of Western identity that, positively or negatively, carves out Europe, America, and the former Commonwealth states from the rest of humanity: “[culture] is a process you join, a life lived with others.”
A life lived with others, indeed: “diversity” is the buzzword of the hour on North American campuses today, and universities are increasingly places where a multitude of cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds come together to live and work in the spirit of higher education. Yet despite this flourishing diversity, recent events, like those mentioned at the start of this article, threaten to further entrench a sense of ideological parochialism in universities in the wake of the Trump victory. This is not to blame, of course, the students who spoke out against Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto professor who refused to use non-gendered pronouns: Peterson’s hour-long YouTube diatribe provoked reaction, namely because it was a diatribe, not a conversation. Instances like these only beget further alienation and impassioned reaction.
For this reason, it is vital to teach students to listen to and converse thoughtfully and openly with both ends of the pendulum: the Gresses and the Bernals of this world. Ultimately, engaging with these extremes brought my students into conversation with one another, and encouraged them to listen to opposing viewpoints they did not necessarily share. And it is this meaningful engagement with opposing extremes that make people less extreme over time, as Wikipedia, of all things, has shown us.
But it is not enough to teach our students to think beyond their own political stances — Classicists must also be vigilant about the ideological usage of the past. Despite the problems with Bernal’s actual scholarship, after all, the debates he opened up compelled Classicists to take a hard look at the history of the field and whose purpose it was serving. With the renewed effort on the part of conservative groups to reassert ideological ground alongside the further entrenchment of left-wing provincialism on North American campuses, it is vital that Classics remains cognizant of how the field fits into debates about diversity, identity, and ideology. Certainly, recent scholarship on the matter suggests that scholars are starting to think carefully about how Classics and the humanities more generally might thrive in the contemporary academy.
Cordoning off the Classics from attacks of political correctness is not the way forward any more than accusing the entire field of Classics as being a racist enterprise is. We might be 30 years on from Bernal, and almost 20 from Gress and Hanson and Heath, but now, more than ever, we need to engage our students and ourselves in serious discussions about how we use the past to justify the societies we build today, whether they be ones full of walls or bridges.
Megan Daniels is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at a liberal arts college on the west coast. She enjoys teaching about archaeology, religion, and ancient empires, as well as baking copious amounts of cookies for her colleagues. She currently works on field projects in Turkey, Tunisia, and Greece.
