The Whitening Thief
Latent White Supremacy in Percy Jackson
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably at least heard of Percy Jackson. Maybe you’re not a fan yourself, but the series has permeated the zeitgeist enough that you’d have to have worked very hard to have missed it. And if you have missed it, well, I recommend becoming at least passingly acquainted with the series, because most college first-years these days grew up reading it. Oh, and also because it’s built on some deep notions of white supremacy.
For the uninitiated, the Percy Jackson series (formally known as Percy Jackson and the Olympians, by Rick Riordan) is effectively Harry Potter, but with demigods instead of wizards. Don’t worry, I’m not going to summarize the whole series here — just the first book,The Lightning Thief, where Riordan does his initial world-building. The basic premise is that the Greek gods are still alive and producing scads of demigod children to roam about the world slaying monsters and going on quests. Except! Big twist here: all of these divine offspring are in America. Because the Greek gods live there now. In America. In New York City, to be precise. Atop the Empire State Building.
Now why the hell would the Greek gods ever live in America? Great question. Here’s where it starts to get real ugly real quick. I’ll let Riordan take over here, speaking through the mouth of the centaur Chiron who had been previously disguised as a Latin teacher in a wheelchair—presumably to better hide his… horse parts? I’m not sure (The Lightning Thief, 72–3):
The gods move with the heart of the West. …What you call ‘Western civilization’… is a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it, or at least, they are tied so tightly to it that it that they couldn’t possibly fade, not unless all of Western civilization were obliterated. The fire started in Greece. Then, as you well know, the heart of the fire moved to Rome, and so did the gods. … [They] moved to Germany, to France, to Spain, for a while. Wherever the flame was brightest, the gods were there. They spent several centuries in England. …And yes, Percy, of course they are now in your United States. … America is now the heart of the flame. It is the great power of the West. And so Olympus is here.
Maybe that seems innocuous to someone? After all, you could argue that it’s just two paragraphs in a book Riordan explicitly wrote for his young son, and it could just be a hamfisted plot device to explain why the Greek gods are now in America.
Except.
This emphasis on the power of western civilization — a concept that didn’t emerge until the 19th century and was bound up in “imperialism and colonialism, white supremacism, classism and exceptionalism” — absolutely pervades The Lightning Thief, as does an explicit emphasis on its divine lineage. Chiron later refers to the modern era as “the time of Western civilization and the rule of Zeus,” and he equates the west with the very essence of civilization itself, prior to which there was only “darkness and chaos.” Hell, one of the book’s early battles is set atop the St. Louis Arch, known more properly as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, an edifice purported by the Undersecretary of the Interior John Carver Jr. to “reflect the impulse of the age it memorializes — westward expansion as ‘our manifest destiny.’”
So, we could pretend that it’s a coincidence that in a novel predicated on the Greek gods creating and shaping western civilization, the author chose as the site for one of the book’s most impressive battles a monument intrinsically linked to the concept of Manifest Destiny — that is, the notion that America’s westward expansion was divinely sanctioned. We could do that. But let me suggest that rather than being a coincidence, that setting — as well as Olympus’ new home atop the Empire State Building — purposefully emphasizes Riordan’s recurrent theme of American exceptionalism.
This exceptionalism is then explicitly tied to the Greek gods or their direct offspring who serve as the movers and shakers of world events. World War II is described as a “fight between the sons of Zeus & Poseidon on one side, and the sons of Hades on the other,” and among the list of notable divine offspring Riordan lists William Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. (And yes, it is only white men who are cited as famous demigods in this book.)
Creating a world in which the divine offspring of Greek gods shape the course of western civilization is already sipping at a pretty racist cocktail, but Riordan goes much further when he explains that all of these offspring are considered to be part of the same genetic bloodline. One character specifically says of the dozens of demigods assembled at “Camp Half-Blood” (No, I’m not making this up, that’s… really the name. For real.): “We’re all extended family,” and as Percy meets various campers, he repeatedly notices a “family resemblance.” To put this distinction between demigods and mortals into starker relief, Percy later receives a sword that can harm monsters and demigods, but learns from Chiron that “the blade will pass through mortals like an illusion. They simply are not important enough for the blade to kill.” (Emphasis added to highlight the absurdity of this sentiment.)
In short, Riordan has imagined that western civilization — which he here equates with Civilization Itself — has been shaped by a genetically distinct population with divine parentage who are all, to a person, more important than the entirety of the general population. We’ve now moved from sipping that racist cocktail to slamming the whole damn thing. Especially when you consider that all of these gods and demigods are white, and the only two (yes, two) people of color in the entirety of The Lightning Thief are monsters (Medusa and Charon) with foreign accents (I know).
It is perhaps tempting to write this off as a common — albeit indelicate — narrative technique. Riordan is writing for Americans, so he crafted a narrative focused on Americans. Just like Doctor Who typically focuses on white Britons, even though it’s about an intergalactic time traveler, and no one accuses that show of nationalism or racism. Even the ancient philosopher-poet Xenophanes recognized this phenomenon: if horses could draw gods, he wrote, their gods would look like horses. So what? If a white American author happens to present the Greek gods and their children as white Americans in order to better appeal to his audience, what’s the big deal? He’s hardly the first to do this and he’s surely not going to be the last.
As readers of Eidolon no doubt already know, the promotion of a (falsely) white ancient Greece and Rome is not limited to The Lightning Thief. White people love narratives wherein Greeks, Romans, and their gods are white. And when books/films/graphic novels that promote this idea of a mythical Great White Antiquity keep getting made, they concretize the dangerous fantasy that Western Civilization is founded on White Greatness. And where there’s a whiff of White Greatness, white nationalists — eh, more accurately white supremacists — are not far behind, and these narratives start to get implicated in justifications for their ideology.
The result is a vicious circle of racism that starts when latent notions of white supremacy (which are everywhere) permeate modern narratives of classical antiquity, narratives which in turn justify actual goddamned Neo-Nazis who claim to be the ideological (or literal) heirs of Greece and Rome. And the most insidious part of these profoundly white depictions of Greek and Roman culture in popular media is that their own racial artificiality or politics is rarely noted by the general public.
Since depicting (or casting) fictional/historical characters as white is the assumed default for many Americans, these depictions have been typically treated as occupying a neutral, apolitical position. This kind of thinking is fortunately changing, but we still have a long way to go. Only in extreme instances — e.g. the chest-thumping uber-patriotism of 300 (2007) — are the politics of a film about Greece or Rome widely questioned, and even then they are often dismissed. More typically, viewers and readers simply do not notice, let alone critique, presentations of antiquity that are predicated on white supremacist ideology. These notions float under the radar and are accepted as normal, largely because they have been around for so long that few think to question them, and those that do are often met with intense resistance. After all, why wouldn’t all of the gods in Wonder Woman (2017) be white? And what could possibly be wrong with promoting the Greatness of Western Civilization?
When I bring up the white supremacist narrative at the heart of The Lightning Thief to students and colleagues, they are almost always incredulous at first. It’s only after I’ve laid out its issues point-by-point that it finally sinks in, and when it does their reactions are invariably a blend of shock and embarrassment. “How could I have missed that?! I’ve read this book to my children!” There should obviously be no shame in unintentionally missing the white supremacist tropes in Percy Jackson, or in any other media. They are ubiquitous and have been absolutely, utterly normalized. However, it is well beyond time that we stop condoning narratives of ancient Greece and Rome that promote — latently or not — the rhetoric of white supremacy.
We have a civic and professional responsibility to push back against these racist representations in our classes, at our conferences, and in our published scholarship. The reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in popular media has long been dismissed by many as unworthy of serious scholarly attention. This has begun to change in recent decades, but it needs to change even more given the massive cultural impact such narratives are capable of having. The original Percy Jackson series has sold over 175 million copies worldwide, has been translated into 42 languages, and spent over 500 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list — and, anecdotally, easily 90% of my incoming first-years have read it. With numbers like that, it is professionally irresponsible for us to ignore it.
The field of classics cannot keep pretending like we’re above popular culture and its reception of Greek and Roman antiquity. Look, I love philology. I can recognize the value of deep research into Roman linguistic phenomena, and I know the seven people who read my article do, too. But when the film 300 grosses over $450M in worldwide sales, I need to be able to acknowledge the value (maybe even the necessity) of engaging with that as well. As a field we cannot afford to stay silent; to remain silent is to remain complicit.
More than that, though, we need to create and promote works that are reflective of the ethnic and racial diversity that we know existed in ancient Greece and Rome.
Perhaps surprisingly, let me return to Rick Riordan as a positive example here. For all of the problems inherent in The Lightning Thief, Riordan himself has shown impressive and admirable growth over the years. His characters have become far more racially and ethnically diverse, and he received the Stonewall Award for “exceptional merit relating to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender experience.” Moreover, he is spearheading the Rick Riordan Presents series, which aims to publish “great… authors from underrepresented cultures and backgrounds, to let them tell their own stories inspired by the mythology and folklore of their own heritage.”
That said, Riordan’s later growth doesn’t excuse The Lightning Thief’’s problems. A the end of the day, it’s still a text rooted in white supremacist ideology, and I’m not going to rush out to buy it for my niece. On the other hand, I’m not going to tell you to skip it, either. In fact, you probably should read it. First off, if you try to avoid all media that — intentionally or unintentionally — perpetuates racist or white supremacist ideology, good fucking luck. Second, it’s far more valuable, I think, to be familiar with these narratives so we can recognize and counter their underlying ideology all the more readily.
Still, Riordan offers a remarkable model for us to follow — professionals and enthusiasts alike. If we can, we should be telling inclusive narratives wherever we have an audience. We should be working discussions on the ethnic pluralism of ancient Greece and Rome into our courses, writing socially and racially conscious textbooks with diverse characters, hell, we should be making art: paintings, sculptures, comics, films, you name it. And if we can’t make good art ourselves , we should be encouraging those who can. We can’t afford not to.
In my work on this subject, I have reached out to Rick Riordan and Hyperion Press for comment but have received no response.
Maxwell Paule is an associate professor of Ancient and Classical Studies at Earlham College and the author of Canidia: Rome’s First Witch. When he is not teaching or working on the reception of classical antiquity in modern media, he is usually baking bread.
