“Learn Some F*cking History”
Classics isn’t the only discipline struggling with how to respond to white supremacist appropriation of its field of study. The same conflicts are brewing in Medieval Studies, and have been the topic of several recent posts on the wonderful In The Middle and Medieval POC websites (among others). But tensions within the discipline erupted spectacularly on September 15 when Rachel Fulton Brown, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, wrote a post on her Fencing Bear At Prayer blog with the title “How to Signal You Are Not a White Supremacist” attacking the work of Dorothy Kim, an Assistant Professor at Vassar.
Other scholars have done an excellent job explaining why Brown’s post is so problematic: the racist foregrounding of Kim’s body; the snide, punching-down tone about Kim’s professional accomplishments; Brown’s choice to actively bring Milo Yiannopoulos and his followers into the fray in an appeal so blatant that it cannot in good faith be called a dog-whistle. All of these critiques are important and necessary, and I urge you to read them if you’re curious about why this particular incident is so disturbing and not at all a typical spirited disagreement between two academics. Many of Brown’s critics particularly took issue with the belligerent, unprofessional conclusion of her post: “How should you signal that you are not a white supremacist if you teach the ‘medieval western European Christian past’? Learn some f*cking medieval western European Christian history, including the history of our field.”
Rather than piling on the excellent critiques of Brown’s argumentative rhetoric and tone, I want to focus on how her argument itself — throughout the piece, but particularly as expressed in that conclusion — is deeply, seriously flawed in a way that medievalists and classicists alike need to take seriously. Her argument, essentially, is that Medieval Studies cannot be racist or white supremacist because people with dark skin existed both in medieval Europe (although the example she used may not have been the best one) and in the discipline of Medieval Studies. Therefore, the Richard Spencer types who want to appropriate history to white supremacist purposes are wrong, and therefore white supremacist appropriation of history isn’t a concern.
This kind of claim — that knowledge and expertise about European history and the history of scholarship is the ultimate antidote to white supremacist appropriation — is used often in Classics as well. Unfortunately, it’s based on faulty premises. The underlying assumption of that claim is that white supremacist use of European history is essentially a failure of knowledge and education, when in fact it is an ideologically driven choice. No amount of data and evidence for ethnic diversity will ever convince these people that Europe in the medieval period comprised anything other than white crusaders screaming “Deus vult!”
Almost a year ago I encouraged my colleagues to call out historical errors of this type. While I still believe that work is necessary and important, I’m disheartened to see that some scholars believe that identifying basic errors is equivalent to fighting white supremacy. It isn’t.
I understand the desire to focus on the mistakes and inaccuracies of alt-right Classics rather than its underlying ideology. The ideology is disturbing and slippery, while the mistakes are often blatant and even funny. There’s nothing wrong with embracing that humor: without laughter, I don’t know how we’ll get through the next three years. But it cannot be mistaken for an end in itself.
In mid-April, a classicist I follow on Twitter shared a tweet with an image from the Trump rally at Berkeley. It was met with much amusement from the Twitter Classics community. The flag on the right of the image is clearly intended to display a quote from Plutarch. (You can see a better image of the flag here.) In Plutarch’s telling of the battle of Thermopylae, when the Persians ordered the Spartans to hand over their weapons, Leonidas replied “Come and get them” (molon labe). The phrase molon labe has been enthusiastically adopted by the pro-gun movement. Unfortunately, the flag does not say ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ: it says ΜΟΛΩΠ ΛΑΒΣ, molop labs, which means absolutely nothing. Presumably carrying a flag with ancient Greek on it was meant to make this particular protester appear intelligent to his comrades. I wonder if it worked.
The molop labs flag wasn’t the first example I’d seen of laughably sophomoric appropriation of Classics by the far right. Last October, the manosphere website Return of Kings published an article with the title “Republicans Use Trump’s ‘Pussy’ Comment As Pretext to Overthrow Democratically Selected Candidate.” Directly underneath was a subtitle that read “Et Tu, Brutae?” The article caught my eye because I’d used the same hero image, Vincenzo Camuccini’s “La morte di Cesare,” for an Eidolon article a few months earlier. But I was immediately struck by the subtitle. I ruminated over whether the use of “Brutae” rather than the usual “Brute” was intentional: was whoever wrote the subtitle claiming that the Republicans disavowing Trump were feminine and plural? If so, that would be a pretty striking use of Latin to make a subtle (albeit sexist) joke. Ultimately I decided that it was more likely that whoever wrote the title and subtitle just didn’t know how to spell the masculine vocative singular. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t have compared Trump to Caesar in this context, since the latter is a poor example of a democratically selected leader. The subtitle has since been deleted.
In the course of my research, I’ve discovered dozens of examples like these, from malapropisms to misattributions to boasts about having read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations in “the original Latin.” But to focus on those mistakes is to miss the point. Unfortunately, knowing how to decline Brutus’ name doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not you’re a sexist, white supremacist asshole. Neither does knowing the correct spelling for the aorist active participle of βλώσκω or the aorist active imperative of λαμβάνω. The alt-right’s ignorance of Greek and Latin and their hateful ideology don’t actually have very much to do with each other. Correcting their linguistic errors won’t suddenly make them understand that women and people of color have worth.
Nor will correcting the larger, more pernicious misunderstandings suggested by these two examples. We could explain that their vision of Sparta owes more to the movie 300 than actual Spartan history, or point out the complicated reality of the much-fetishized ethnic purity of the Spartans. Both of those arguments should be made — but making them is not necessarily a way to effectively combat white supremacist appropriation of Spartan motifs.
It’s a step in the right direction to contextualize images like the one from Berkeley in the larger history of Spartan reception by the Nazis and the entanglement of white supremacy and a specific vision of Spartan history (and I’ve seen a few drafts of forthcoming articles for various outlets on that very topic). But even that isn’t enough. We need to do more. We need to understand what our expertise means in these situations — and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t mean at all.
In late March, Cambridge Professor Mary Beard published a piece for her Don’s Life column in the TLS with the title “The Latin Right.” In it she addressed the growing trend of appropriation of Classics by the far right, but argued that the trend wasn’t all that concerning because that appropriation was done so poorly. She pointed out that both Dutch MP Thierry Baudet and alt-right leader Richard Spencer badly misused Cicero quotes and argued:
Some of my colleagues often complain now about how the classical world has got hi-jacked by the political right. In one way, I suspect that there is nothing we on the other side can do about that (nobody owns the past). But in another way, we can point out how wrong (… and I mean WRONG here, not just misinterpreted) they get it … we probably don’t need to worry too much about these alt-Right guys hi-jacking Classics if they make such a mess of it. We just need to keep on pointing out the howlers.
The “keep on pointing out the howlers” approach — like Rachel Fulton Brown’s “learn some f*cking medieval western European Christian history, including the history of our field” — assumes that telling these people that they’re wrong somehow detoxifies their views. It’s an approach that I think is dangerously insufficient. As Konstantinos Poulis wrote concerning similar basic errors made by Golden Dawn:
J. Chapoutot has written that the historian’s task is to bring down the masks. Optimists in Greece thought that this would deliver a serious blow to the neo-Nazis of the Golden Dawn. It didn’t. Violence is seductive for some people, for some hundreds of thousands of people, it seems, more than we would imagine. The idea was that people would distance themselves as soon as we exposed Golden Dawn for what it is. It didn’t work out that way. We saw that some of the views expressed by the Golden Dawn are downright wrong or hypocritical. As we are now beginning to realize, though, through the Trump era, exposing a lie or a false claim is not as politically effective as we would think. We have to tune in to a very different mindset.
Someone tells you he is a bird. You answer “no you’re not” and he goes “chip chip.” Insisting that these are hands, not wings, is reasonable yet ineffective, it won’t do.
But the strategy is not only ineffective: it also moves the terms of the entire debate onto shaky ground, into the realm of expertise and historical fact. That ground may seem firm, but when it comes to confronting the alt-right it is actually extremely treacherous. Once you leave the realm of proficiency in Latin and Greek, expertise becomes much harder to assert — as Beard experienced later this summer.
The incident was well-publicized, but I’ll summarize it briefly here as well. The BBC ran a cartoon about life in Roman Britain that contained several characters who were people of color. There was then a backlash to the cartoon spearheaded by the infamous website InfoWars, with various far-right web personalities claiming that the BBC valued political correctness over accuracy. This led to a response to the backlash by several historians on Twitter who argued that there was in fact substantial ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.
Beard wasn’t the first historian to enter the fray when she tweeted that the video was “pretty accurate,” nor was she (at least initially) the historian to argue the point in the most detail. She was, however, the most famous, and as a result she became the target of a truly shocking wave of harassment. Beard is famous for engaging with her trolls, and for a while she gamely tried to do just that as the conversation devolved into, among other things, ad hominem attacks, a semantic debate about the word “typical,” and a number of extremely shaky arguments about genetic evidence for ethnic diversity in Rome.
As part of the wave of counter-attacks, InfoWars editor Paul Joseph Watson tweeted a video of himself supposedly debunking various historians’ claims. I wouldn’t recommend watching it, but if you do, the most ridiculous part is around 5:15, where Watson shares a few images from old textbooks about Roman Britain that are illustrated with drawings of white people. “So either Roman Britain wasn’t ethnically diverse by today’s standards and all these depictions of Roman Britain stretching back hundreds of years are consistently accurate in depicting that, or every single one of these depictions is wrong and this one BBC depiction from 2017 is accurate. Which is the more likely scenario?” he asks (in the most sarcastic voice imaginable).
This is the level of argumentation we’re dealing with: illustrations from old textbooks are taken as evidence of historical fact. Sarah Bond has recently written about the alt-right’s use of whitewashed images of and from antiquity (and also became the target of a harassment campaign for it), and the proof of her claims is right here: all of the literary and material evidence in the world means less than a few 20th century drawings of white people.
But what happened next is even more bizarre: a few members of the alt-right, including science fiction writer Theodore “Vox Day” Beale, began mocking Mary Beard’s credentials. Mary Beard. One of the most eminent classicists alive, author of more than ten books (including some best-sellers), professor at one of the top Classics programs in the world.
It was an eye-opening moment for me, because many of my own trolls mock my credentials — or, as they see it, the lack thereof. (I can already imagine the responses to this piece and its title: “Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, needs to take her own advice. and also she’s Jewish.” See, trolls? I did your work for you.) And on some level I’ve always worried that someone of my position (i.e., a recent PhD with only a small amount of work published in traditional academic venues) isn’t the right person to make the arguments I think need to be made. But what happened to Mary Beard forcibly brought home for me that there is no level of traditional academic achievement I could reach that would satisfy the trolls. One’s expertise will always, always be the first thing these people will work to invalidate.
It never fails to amuse me that people like Watson throw around the accusation that people are “politically correct” like it’s a Draw Four Wild card they’ve been holding onto in a game of Uno. But in this case, there’s not much room for debate. Mary Beard isn’t “politically correct”: literary and material evidence suggests that she’s correct, no adverb needed. But it doesn’t matter.
Once you’re arguing about expertise with these people, you’ve already lost the skirmish. They will either declare your expertise meaningless or decry you as a pedantic gatekeeper, or both. I have to remind myself of this every time somebody tweets something at me about how I probably don’t even know ancient Greek. (Although such accusations are thrown around within the discipline to invalidate certain kinds of traditional scholarship as well.) Sometimes I’m tempted to challenge them to a competitive sight reading contest or send them a copy of my dissertation, but what would that even prove? I can’t convince them that they’re wrong about me any more than I could convince them that they’re wrong about history. They’re impervious to evidence.
None of this means, of course, that Beard (and all of the others) were wasting their time when they engaged with InfoWars on Twitter. That engagement was a waste if the goal was to convince Paul Joseph Watson of anything, but there’s still a wide audience of people who aren’t hardened keyboard warriors of the alt-right who can be convinced that an accurate representation of historical diversity matters. But productively responding to people like Watson will have to mean more than just correcting his shallow understanding. It will mean taking a serious look at those textbooks he cited and thinking critically about our discipline’s long complicity in whitewashing history. The classicists of the past have a share of the blame for shaping an alt-right-friendly vision of European history without diversity. As inheritors of that tradition, the classicists of today have a responsibility to do more to rectify those mistakes.
I suspect that what really set Rachel Fulton Brown off was how Dorothy Kim called out the responsibility of medieval scholars — particularly white medieval scholars — to combat white supremacy. Nothing exposes white fragility like the suggestion that you may have an ethical obligation to do something you haven’t been doing. It causes a crisis of self image: this person says I’m perpetuating racism if I don’t do X, and I haven’t been doing X. But racists are bad people, and I’m a good person. Rather than sitting with that discomfort and working to do and be better (which is what actual good people do! nobody expects anybody to never make mistakes, they mostly want you to learn and do better in the future!) they respond with angry defensiveness and decide that the person who pointed out the responsibility is being unfair and unreasonable.
This dynamic is obvious in Brown’s response, where she labels Kim’s race an “advantage”:
But, of course, as she herself points out, she doesn’t have to say anything, because of who, physically, she is. (In her words: “This is not a problem for me by the very mere fact that I am a woman of color. My actual body waves the ‘highly ridiculously unlikely-to-be-a-white-supremacist’ flag in the classroom.”) … She does not explain how those of us who do not have her advantages are to cleanse ourselves and our academic subject of this stain, only that we must cleanse ourselves — or else!
But why locate this issue in our raced bodies? Locate it in our credentials, which may be meaningless to the alt-right but should at least mean something in academic communities. Kim may not have as much of a responsibility as her white colleagues do to do the work of combating white supremacy in Medieval Studies, but she’s done it again and again anyway. A quick search shows just how much she’s done. Meanwhile, a quick search of Brown shows that she’s written pieces with titles such as “Three Cheers For White Men” and called Milo Yiannopoulos’ critics “spineless cunts.” So if she wants to signal that she’s not a white supremacist, she does in fact have some work to do. (And, as Dan-el Padilla Peralta argued recently, pointing out the existence of scholars of color in her field is a terrible way to do that work.) A great start to signaling that she’s not a white supremacist would be to apologize and actually listen to Kim for a change.
Of course, Brown is right about one thing: we should all learn some fucking history. The unexpected renaissance of Nazism in 2017 has proven just how important knowledge of history is. But knowing history will never, ever be enough, and critique of white supremacists with a weak grasp of history must go beyond pointing out simple errors. This is not a small problem, and there are no quick fixes. The only solution is for the disciplines of Classics and Medieval Studies to recognize and grapple with our own complicity in the problem itself.
If you are interested in signing one of the open letters in support of Professor Kim, they can be found here.
Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton, and her writing has appeared in Jezebel, The Establishment, and Avidly. Her book Not All Dead White Men, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in Fall 2018.
