Black Athena, White Power
Are We Paying the Price for Classics’ Response to Bernal?
“The one who asks questions doesn’t lose his way.”
—Akan Proverb
In the mid 1990s, a few months before starting my first teaching job, I remember sitting in a lecture hall and listening to a talk on Ptolemaic Egypt. After the lecture, as we all milled about, a black woman from the audience quietly approached the speaker and asked: “Was Cleopatra black?”
Excited that this question, which had become the subject of growing intensity outside the academy, was being raised in the context of a formal classics lecture, I eagerly awaited the response. It came quickly and damningly, for the speaker simply waved a hand disgustedly. Then she turned her back.
It had occurred to me many times during my graduate school days that Classics and I were not exactly a match made in heaven: that I may have fallen down the wrong rabbit hole. But I will always remember that moment because it captured so precisely the dynamic I had been privy to many times before — one in which a senior classical scholar, oozing certainty and self-satisfaction, drew an unflinching line between the kinds of questions that could be entertained in Classics and those that could not. With public humiliation of the unwelcome interlocutor thrown in for good measure.
As I look back now, I realize that my feelings of alienation — my recurring sense that many of my colleagues’ questions were valued in ways that made no sense to me while the ones I wanted to ask were forbidden — cannot be separated from the fact that I came of age as a classicist in the time of Black Athena.
My goal in reflecting back on Classics’ encounter with Black Athena (beginning some thirty years ago now) is not to open old wounds — or at least not open them casually — but to insist that we cannot effectively combat today’s use of Greece and Rome by white nationalists until we admit our own role in bringing such ideology about, until we grapple honestly with the fact that in no small way Classics’ response to Black Athena is coming home to roost.
For those who didn’t live through it, the sheer scale of Black Athena’s cultural impact can be difficult to comprehend (but here is a nice starter bibliography). It was a time when questions about the roots of ancient Greek civilization — and especially its connections to Africa — were everywhere — from television documentaries to Italian dub trance music to the cover of Newsweek magazine.
Appearing in the same year as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Black Athena soon became part of larger conversations “about how to teach the foundational ideas of Western culture” in American universities. Although the subject matter of Black Athena was deceptively straightforward — as author Martin Bernal phrased it: “Black Athena is essentially concerned with the Egyptian and Semitic roles in the formation of Greece in the Middle and Late Bronze Age” (volume 1, p. 22) — such brevity of purpose belied the ways Black Athena sought not only to re-examine the early development of Greek culture, but also to raise pointed questions about the ways early classical scholars had produced a distinctly whitewashed version of Greek origins throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, one that emphasized the alleged purity of Greek culture as well as its superiority over Egypt.
Outlining the development of this approach to Greek history, which Bernal called the “Aryan Model,” in volume 1 of Black Athena, Bernal used archaeological and linguistic evidence in volumes 2 and 3 to argue for a “Revised Ancient Model,” one based in large part on the view the Greeks had of their own cultural origins (their “Ancient Model”), a view that acknowledged early phases of Egyptian and Phoenician colonization, as well as the continuing influence of these cultures on their own.
The reputation of Black Athena often precedes it, and misconceptions about the project abound. For one, although Black Athena was often seen as kindred to Edward Said’s Orientalism, Bernal strongly distinguished the two works, calling Said’s methods “literary and allusive” and his own “historical and pedestrian.” In drawing such a contrast, Bernal insisted that the “reality” of history could be distinguished from the discursive procedures that produce and elucidate it. More specifically, he believed that he could isolate the core of “historical truth” underlying a range of ancient narratives — a premise that led to problematic readings of both Greek myth broadly and individual texts like Aeschylus’ Suppliants.
In the same way, pointedly setting his ideas against current archaeological approaches stressing “indigenous development” (Black Athena vol. 1, p. 7), Bernal insisted on conquest and invasion as the primary mechanism for cultural change; among other things, this meant that he misguidedly endorsed the historicity of the so-called Dorian invasion (vol 1, p. 21) — an alleged “event” that remains central to white nationalist reconstructions of early Greek history, even as it has been discredited by classical historians in more recent decades.
Bernal’s treatment of race was often mischaracterized, for despite the work’s provocative title, skin color was actually quite peripheral to Bernal’s project. Indeed, Bernal seemed to many of his readers to hedge by stating simply that there were some Egyptian pharaohs “whom one can usefully call black” (vol. 1, p. 242). Bernal’s stance on Egyptian Blackness was panned in a footnote to Greg Thomas’ 2009 book Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil’ Kim’s Lyricism (evidence of the incredibly wide-ranging influence of Black Athena). When pressed to clarify his position, Bernal would later label Egyptian civilization “fundamentally African,” while declaring the population itself “mixed,” one that got “darker and more Negroid the further up the Nile you went.”
When faced with criticism about his title, Bernal openly admitted that “African Athena” would have been more accurate, infamously adding that his publisher insisted on the title by stating: “Blacks no longer sell. Women no longer sell. But black women still sell!” (Arethusa special issue, pp. 31–32). The offensiveness of this cheery characterization was only exceeded by the form of Bernal’s attacks on the distinguished African-American classicist Frank Snowden, Jr., including a statement in volume 1 that “most Blacks will not be able to accept the conformity to white scholarship of men and women like Professor Snowden.” (p. 436).
Eric Adler has helpfully outlined the production and reception of Black Athena in his recent book Classics, the Culture Wars, and Beyond, drawing on interviews he conducted with many of the original participants. His general conclusion that the controversy was “transformed … into a forum for African American identity politics,” however, remains all too common among classicists, forming a strong consensus that persists precisely because it places blame on the questions that were raised — while also lazily stereotyping the interlocutors — rather than probing the consequences of Classics’ own dire shortcomings in response.
So let me put forth a different version of the controversy and its consequences, beginning with identification of a few of the ways classicists themselves failed to rise to the occasion.
For one, classicists’ response to Black Athena often remained bogged down in interminable detail, painstakingly focused on refuting Black Athena as an historical argument while remaining oblivious to Black Athena as a cultural phenomenon.
Of course facts matter, and Bernal himself happily dwelt in detail much of the time. He could, for example, be laser-focused on minutia like whether it was a Hyksos prince buried in a particular grave shaft at Mycenae. But he could also, unlike many classicists, frame his work in ways that addressed larger questions about the meaning of Greek history itself: what it meant, for example, to re-examine historical contact between Egypt and Greece without all the obfuscating desire to situate one or the other as innately “superior;” or what it meant, especially to those outside Classics, to chart the constitution and development of “western civilization” through its diverse populations rather than via bogus notions of purity (medievalists especially have been emphasizing the role of people of color in early European history in recent days, but it’s important to note that there were already attempts to highlight such presences back in the 1980s and 90s, including a special issue of the Journal of African Civilizations published in November 1985).
Still more problematic was the way so many classicists seemed to take the heated conversations around Black Athena so personally. I still hear colleagues repeat the mantra that the debates over Black Athena became so “angry and irrational” that most classicists “had no choice” but to withdraw altogether. Classics as a discipline has long been willing — one might even say eager — to foster brutal debates over something as small as, say, the emendation of a single line of Propertius, so what made these encounters so different? (Don’t worry; I know the answer.)
To those who still feel mistreated by “hostile” audiences during that era, I can only say that over the past two decades I have received the proverbial hand wave and back turn more times than I can count when trying to talk with my “amiable” — to borrow Adler’s term—colleagues in classics about race in the ancient world.
Mary Lefkowitz, co-editor of Black Athena Revisited (1996), a volume containing essays critical of Bernal by a range of scholars, was the classical scholar most willing to engage publicly with Black Athena. The deep animosity between her and Bernal can be witnessed in a wide range of venues. Although I believe Lefkowitz’s views epitomize Classics’ inability to engage honestly with the difficult questions posed by Black Athena, it is important to note that after speaking out she herself was targeted by anti-Semitic attacks, appalling episodes she wrote about in her personal account of the period, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey.
As Lefkowitz recounted it, she had “innocently” undertaken a review of the second volume of Black Athena for the New Republic and that had led her into a series of contentious — and eventually litigious — encounters with Afrocentric scholars at Wellesley where she taught. Lefkowitz subsequently attempted to sound the alarm about Bernal, Afrocentrism, and what she considered the assault on “historical truth” by publishing Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996).
Classicists at the time openly condemned Afrocentrism for its perceived political bias (this gem from 1989 illustrates well the tone, asserting in a review of Black Athena that the university was under attack from “black racist attempts to impose indoctrination in the place of teaching and scholarship”). Of course, they left unsaid what Page duBois has shown, namely that there were broad links between conservatism and Classics during this time. In his review of Lefkowitz’s volume, Bernal himself highlighted the fact that she received funding for her research from foundations that also contributed to right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation and National Association of Scholars.
Leaving aside the personalities and general climate surrounding Black Athena, it is Lefkowitz’s main premise regarding historical inquiry that I want to call out, since it is one too many classicists still endorse today: namely, that Afrocentrism pursued readings of the ancient world based in emotion, bias, and the need to build “self-esteem,” while Classics, tightly wrapped in the mantle of “objectivity,” rigorously sought the “truth.”
Such a dichotomy — that “emotional” people of color politicize history, while “reasonable” white people seek objective fact — was patently false in the 1980s, even as it became a staple in the arsenal of arguments defending the exclusionary practices of many disciplines. Needless to say, the notion that white people are somehow more conditioned for “objectivity” when it comes to historical thought is painfully false when set against the backdrop of white supremacy’s renewed nostalgia for the classical world.
But the hypocrisy of such characterizations of Afrocentrism were palpable even then. For one, I personally never understood the burn Lefkowitz intended in the subtitle of her book. If we wanted to point a finger at all the groups who have conflated myth and history over the centuries, we would need to compile a very, very long list — one beginning with the ancient Greeks themselves. And even as they used “objectivity” as a weapon against Afrocentrism, Lefkowitz and other classicists of that era took their own deep admiration for the ancient Greeks as completely natural. Bringing her own personal outrage to the fore, Lefkowitz proclaimed in one essay that “[T]he Greeks, least of all peoples, deserve the fate to which the Afrocentrists have subjected them” (“Ancient History and Modern Myths” p. 22, emphasis added).
Many classicists not only openly revered the ancient Greeks, but intimately identified with them as well, casting themselves and the Greeks as mutually withstanding the assault of Bernal and his adherents. Insisting that “there is simply no reason to deprive the Greeks of the credit for their own achievements (p. 7),” Lefkowitz asked, for example, “what (if anything) can be done to contradict the calumnies that are being spread about the ancient Greeks and about all of us who study the ancient world?” (pp. 10–11). Calumnies!
The title of Glen Bowersock’s review of Not Out of Africa and Black Athena Revisited likewise illustrates — or perhaps parodies — the general indignation among classicists of that era: “Rescuing the Greeks: A classicist defends the traditional version of Greek cultural achievement.” Rescuing from what, exactly? That isn’t a rhetorical question — I’m seriously asking. From any attempt to situate the ancient Greeks within the markedly diverse world of the ancient Mediterranean rather than on some kind of island, churning “achievements” out of their awesome — and definitely made in Greece — culture machine?
More significantly, though, by relegating Black Athena to the sphere of “identity politics” and “culture wars,” such outrage strategically allowed Classics to evade the many serious intellectual challenges posed by Black Athena. Black Athena may not have been convincing in all the answers it provided, but it nonetheless raised fundamental questions about the processes and not just alleged “products” of cultural formation — and also the distorted ways scholars try to “keep score” and “give credit” to different ancient groups. In short, it raised fundamental questions about how we do history itself.
And clearly that “doing” has not been neutral. Indeed, until classicists comprehend the myriad ways ancient Egypt has been used over the centuries as a stand-in for deliberating — and often repudiating — the capacities of all Black people (e.g., Robert Young “Egypt in America”), they will never begin to understand why people outside academia were so suspicious of their motives at this particular time. There is a reason participants at a town hall in New York City equated Lefkowitz’s denial of an Egyptian role in Greek cultural formation with the aims of the notorious Bell Curve. Since the rise of the modern university, scholars have often perpetuated and justified inequality through various disciplinary structures and academic jargon; why should Classics be any different?
Admittedly, I can’t myself quantify the role of Egypt in the evolution of ancient Greece’s institutions and varied cultural expressions (was it 38%? maybe 62%?), but I can say that treating “cultural achievement” as a zero-sum game is not only dangerous, but also intellectually naïve. The Greeks were in material contact with Egypt from a very early period, and, perhaps more significantly, they thought deeply about Egypt and explored their relationship to that older civilization in diverse genres including art, literature and philosophy. How could Egypt not have contributed in significant ways to Greek self-definition and cultural development over time?
But most classicists did not want to take up the difficult and often messy questions that were being posed. They preferred to insist that the Greeks should not, could not be questioned at all, least of all by certain people (you know who I mean). In doing so, they reinforced a powerful yet solipsistic image of the ancient Greeks — and also classicists themselves — as exceptional, self-created and self-sufficient, not to mention besieged on all sides by angry black people and their allies. Is it any wonder white supremacists have found this image of ancient Greeks so alluring and classicists themselves such prospective allies?
There are two additional ways classicists’ response to Black Athena helped supply the grounds for white nationalism’s current appropriations of the ancient world. Perhaps most obviously, classicists gravely erred in re-inscribing Whiteness onto the ancient Greeks. Confronted by the question “Was Cleopatra black?” — when they didn’t recoil altogether — classicists responded in essence, “No, she was Greek,” thus reaffirming a false and dangerous equivalence between “Greek” and “non-Black.” And just think of the possibilities for meaningful conversation if a question like “Was Socrates Black?” provoked curiosity rather than derision (starting with a sincere attempt to understand the interlocutor’s grounds for such a claim; black, after all, is not the same thing as Black).
Even as classicists were condemning the racialized “agenda” of Bernal and his followers, it’s clear that many were themselves deeply motivated by the need to defend a genealogy of so-called White cultural achievement, although they rarely expressed their motivation so openly and honestly. When Lefkowitz proposes that “it is not simply a matter of doing justice to the ancient Greeks and their modern descendants” (p. 11), however, does anyone at all think she is referring merely to modern Greeks when she deploys the term “descendants”?
Given such profound contradictions, classicists’ treatment of race in the aftermath of Black Athena was the epitome of self-deception and bad faith. For even as they implicitly endorsed conceptions of Greek Whiteness, classicists adopted a widespread consensus, one that lasted for decades, that the terminology of race was simply not applicable to the ancient world. It was in such a climate that I learned, to my own consternation, that even the attempt to study Africa could be viewed as off-limits. (When a papyrologist — a papyrologist! — tells you that your graduate funding should be “reviewed” simply because you attended an African Studies conference, you can’t help but realize something is deeply wrong.)
There were serious intellectual (not to mention moral) consequences for perpetuating such vast damnatio memoriae of the very word. There is, to be honest, a very high correlation between people who confidently endorse the sentiment that race is not relevant to antiquity with people who do not know what “race” actually is. While classicists were dropping the word “race” from our vocabulary in a fit of pique in the 1990s and 2000s, just about every other field in the social sciences and humanities (and even in the natural sciences) was probing it critically and arriving at a more sophisticated understanding, one based in history and social construction rather than biology. I can still remember the shocked silence (followed by uproarious laughter) I encountered when explaining to friends in other departments in graduate school that “we just don’t talk about race in Classics.”
Finally, even as they were insisting on the profound link between Greek cultural origin and Greek identity, classicists remained resolutely unwilling to grapple with the origin of the field of Classics itself and to consider what a field founded on racist ideals might need to do to take full responsibility for its past. As was frequently acknowledged at the time, most classicists agreed with Bernal’s general sociology of the field — that the rise of Classics as a modern discipline had indeed intersected closely with a range of racist projects. But tackling one of the questions that emerged from such an accounting was not as straightforward: how could Classics not be racist given its origins?
Too often, classicists chose to treat this question as an insult rather than opportunity for self-examination, answering with the equivalent of, “We’re not like that anymore” (often with an implicit “how dare you!”). In other words, classicists emphatically relegated such attitudes to our past, treating the racist foundations of our field as if they had somehow dissolved over time and were no longer part of the canon we read or implicated in the theories and models we use to think with.
But, of course, such ideas — ideas so fundamental to the shaping of Classics as a disciplinary practice — don’t just expire; they need to be dug up and discarded with intention. What if we had turned the question “how could Classics not be racist given its origins?” into a call to action instead of attack, pursuing an informed and honest reckoning, then attempted to put that answer into practice?
Instead, classicists withdrew behind disciplinary walls, literally turning our backs on all the people who had become interested in ancient history again because of Bernal. Engaging in wishful thinking about how far the field had come, we allowed nineteenth-century “Aryan” models of Greek origin and “achievement” to fester.
These ideas have now returned with a vengeance. So, too, the wink and nudge at Greek Whiteness was seen for what it was, and today’s white nationalists feel justified dismissing any insistence on the multiculturalism of the ancient Mediterranean as mere “identity politics.” I think we recognize the pattern; it was once our playbook, after all.
The promise of Black Athena continues to burn brightly, evoked as inspiration in fields as diverse as Business and migration studies. Sean Meighoo, in fact, powerfully uses the Bernal debates to open his recent work The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales. Although two scholarly retrospectives appeared in 2011 (Black Athena Comes of Age and African Athenas: New Agendas), the discussion around Black Athena has nonetheless gone almost completely silent in Classics itself.
Yet “western civilization” is once again the subject of intense racialized scrutiny. And Bernal himself seems prophetic in anticipating the desires that drive today’s politics, once professing, “My enemy is not Europe, it’s purity — the idea that purity ever exists, or that if it does exist, that it is somehow more culturally creative than mixture. I believe that the civilization of Greece is so attractive precisely because of those mixtures.”
As a field, I wish we, too, had been able to see this coming and so better prepared for it all those years ago. But faced with questions we didn’t like, we lost our way, and it is no small irony that today’s white nationalists have capitalized on some of our own arguments and evasions in crafting their vision of antiquity.
But there may still be time — time to face up to our past and confront our own culpability in reinforcing an image of the classical world that helps embolden white nationalists, even as we work so adamantly in other ways to combat them.
Let’s start over with a simple question: which false premise has had more disastrous historical consequences, that Cleopatra was black or that the Greeks were White?
Denise Eileen McCoskey is a Professor of Classics and affiliate of Black World Studies at Miami University (Ohio). She is the author of Race: Antiquity & Its Legacy, and past recipient of the John J. Winkler Memorial Prize. In 2009, she won the American Philological Association Award for Excellence in Teaching at the College Level.
