What Would James Baldwin Do?
Classics and the Dream of White Europe
James Baldwin, author and civil rights activist, has recently re-emerged in American life. Not in the Frederick Douglass sense of someone “who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more,” but rather in his own words, gloriously preserved by Raoul Peck’s Oscar nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro (2017). Peck based the film’s narration on Baldwin’s own writings, including notes from his unfinished work, Remember this House, a personal account of the lives and violent deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. The end product is, as the LA Times noted, “like Baldwin … unadulterated, uncompromising and unapologetic.”
Although Peck has emphasized the decade-long search for the right format to use in bringing Baldwin’s words to life, the movie asserts its relevance for audiences today by juxtaposing historic footage of riot police and demonstrations with that of more recent events, such as the protests at Ferguson. At a time when the number of hate groups continues to rise and the prospective removal of a Confederate monument led flocks of white supremacists to rally openly in Charlottesville, Virginia — a sight Atlanta Black Star called “reminiscent of a KKK gathering” — Baldwin’s piercing analysis of the historic roots and dire consequences of American racism could not seem more trenchant.
Yet, for as much as he recognized the deep-seated connections of American conceptions of race to its own dark histories of slavery and segregation, Baldwin also articulated a strikingly global vision of American racism, and it is this feature of his work that I believe provides an important challenge to the field of Classics today. For Baldwin powerfully asserted that it was also the dream of a white European past—specifically of Greece and Rome as a site of white origin — that stoked some of the most destructive features of American whiteness.
Although cognizant of the importance, as a writer, of bearing witness to America’s violent racial impulses, Baldwin nonetheless spent much of his adult life outside the United States. When asked by a reporter why he had chosen to live in France in particular, Baldwin replied, “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France — it was a matter of getting out of America,” the predicament of being black in America offering, Baldwin thought, no other alternative than kill or be killed. But even as Europe offered Baldwin space to develop as a writer, it also gave him significant, and at times unsettling, perspective on America’s racial violence. Having visited the Swiss village of Leukerbad in 1951, Baldwin published an essay titled “Stranger in the Village” about his experiences there, an essay subsequently reprinted in Notes of a Native Son (1955)(which inspired a recent art exhibit). Initially recounting the astonishment his physical appearance causes the Swiss villagers, most of whom have never seen (in his words) a Negro, Baldwin soon casts the village as a microcosm of the West, a site onto which, Baldwin reflects, “I have been so strangely grafted.”
Baldwin eventually turns in the essay to an unveiling of the complexities and incoherence of American race, and he insists on the unique and inextricable bond between black and white Americans, professing that “[o]ne of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa.” Insisting that the white American man (I am adhering here to Baldwin’s original phrasing) must learn to live with the Negro “in order to be able to live with himself” (i.e., that whiteness itself invites both moral and existential hazard), Baldwin concurs with the blunt observation that, given historical phenomena like lynching and legal segregation, “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.”
Baldwin’s appraisal resonates terrifyingly still today; it would be hard to come up with an explanation other than racism as a form of white insanity in explaining the violent events of Charlottesville, not to mention the recent horrendous killing of a young black man over his simple refusal to step aside. But Baldwin also illustrated the gap separating black and white Americans by arguing for their divergent experiences of history.
History, like place, was a concept Baldwin often probed in his writings, and, in this essay, it allowed Baldwin to diagnose the vital position of the European past in the American white imaginary. For Baldwin understood well that the history that had shaped America’s racial practices involved not only the devastating experience of slavery, but also the memory—or we might say fantasy—of a racially pure European origin. So that, “if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past,” Baldwin argued, “American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.”
Even before Charlottesville, it was no secret that white nationalism was becoming increasingly visible and emboldened in the United States; public figures openly holding views of white superiority currently occupy some of our highest political offices and they have the potential for unthinkable impact on our public policy. My specific concern here, however, is as a historian — and I want to appeal to classicists to attend closely to the use and abuse of European history in today’s white nationalism, its use of an alleged European past to violently conjure the possibility of a state without black people.
The website (not to mention name alone) of the white supremacy group “Identity Evropa,” an organization based in Oakdale California, demonstrates well the specific allure of Europe in today’s white nationalism. Seeking explicitly to marshal Europe’s past as grounds for contemporary identity formation, the group at one point identifies its members as “part of the great peoples, history, and civilization that flowed from the European continent.”
In their statement of “who we are” on their homepage, the group (notably all men, a “fraternity”) subtly appropriates the terminology of contemporary political movements, at one point, for example, calling themselves “awakened Europeans,” a clear echo of today’s “woke.” Elsewhere their statement contests some of the central tenets of today’s identity theory, rejecting the notion that identities are “mere abstractions,” i.e., social constructions, that can be “deconstructed.” (Lest anyone think their mobilization is only in the abstract, the group was involved in violent outbursts at protests earlier this year, with their founder evidently punching a female activist).
Of special relevance for classicists, Identity Evropa utilizes marble statuary when illustrating many of its calls to action, visually underlining the ways in which such narratives of white supremacy frequently rely on a very specific idea of Europe, one defined narrowly in terms of its perceived Greco-Roman past or “heritage.” (presumably their “v” in “Evropa” is also meant to allude to how the word would look in ancient stone inscriptions).
It hardly needs pointing out that the world of classical antiquity has often been used, in hindsight, as the foundation for various claims of white racial superiority. Indeed, as Martin Bernal demonstrated in the first volume of Black Athena, the very rise of Classics as a professional practice was often predicated on an attempt to situate the ancient Greeks as putative ancestors to a range of modern (European) nation-states or as the progenitors of an even broader entity such as “western civilization” itself.
In “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin marks the ways such claims had become commonplace by his time, succinctly calling “the idea of white supremacy” “the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West.” Such tendencies, of course, persist, and, in a much-discussed essay on this site, Donna Zuckerberg advocated in her “call to arms for all classicists” that classicists specifically challenge terminology like “foundation,” “Western,” “civilization,” and “culture” whenever they encounter it, recognizing such terms as “a slippery slope to white supremacy.”
But I believe we can take Baldwin himself as inspiration for adding another term to that list or, more precisely, for debunking the very idea on which all the others reside: the whiteness of ancient Greece and Rome. We can begin to unravel the alleged whiteness of classical antiquity by turning first to its marble sculpture, for such artwork turns out to be miscast as historical evidence of the “whiteness” of the ancient world. Indeed, as Sarah Bond has recently pointed out, classical sculpture was quite often lavishly painted, and the veneration of marble statues for their “simplicity” and “purity” (euphemisms for whiteness) turns out to be a manifestly modern rather than ancient aesthetic judgment.
Nor were ancient viewers presumably so naïve as to conflate marble with any approximation of “real” skin color in their art. The skin color of the ancient Greeks and Romans is actually not a disputed question in and of itself among historians — ancient texts and artwork clearly suggest that residents of the ancient Mediterranean, as today, had a wide range of skin colors (some of our best evidence for what ancient people might actually have looked like comes from ancient mummy portraits).
But this simple observation about skin tone, in fact, tells us almost nothing about ancient racial identities, for, as classicists have long acknowledged, skin color did not provide the basis for drawing racial boundaries in the ancient world (today, of course, although skin color often serves as a shorthand for race, there is consensus among most sociologists and scientists that race is a social construct, deriving not from any single physical characteristic, but from deeply rooted social systems and ideological structures). Most classicists today, in fact, treat skin color as relatively inconsequential when studying the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome.
But it might help to be more precise, for it is clear that the Greeks and Romans did develop terminology for denoting a range of skin colors. Such terminology, however, is primarily used to describe physical appearance. And although — from the Greek or Roman perspective — certain colors of skin might have been considered “different” or even unusual, there is no evidence that the Greeks and Romans used this skin color terminology as the means for sorting people into racial categories.
In other words, there is no reason to think that the word “black” in antiquity contains all the broader racial connotations and stereotypes the word holds today. For ancient writers, black is not Black. (How and when different ideas became associated with “blackness” throughout the classical period is the subject of an important dissertation project currently being undertaken by Yale student, Sarah Derbew.)
In producing such consensus about skin color, classical scholars have generally relied on the important work of Frank Snowden Jr. and focused, as he did in the 1970s and 1980s, almost exclusively on black skin color, on the question of “blacks” in antiquity. (Snowden notably gave close attention to visual evidence in his work.) Most classicists can recite Snowden’s findings, namely that people with black skin color in antiquity were not placed in stark racial opposition to, or discriminated against by, the Greeks and Romans because of that skin color.
But there is simply no evidence that the ancient Greeks or Romans collectively considered themselves “white” nor that they engaged in any kind of group identification as “white” with others in the space of what is Europe today. The idea would have been nonsensical to them. And classicists have by and large done almost nothing to challenge assumptions about the fundamental whiteness of the Greeks and Romans themselves (James Dee’s important article provides a notable exception.)
In my own research, I have attempted to identify the ideological foundations of ancient racial formations. While my conclusions are too many to enumerate here (I can say that one prominent ancient racial theory relied on geography and climate), suffice to say, that when confronting white nationalists, one of the easiest and most effective rejoinders to their dream of a homogeneous white European past is this simple fact: the ancient Germans and Gauls were as racially different from the Roman point of view as the ancient Ethiopians. Just as the ancient Scythians (located generally to the north of the Black Sea) were as racially different from the Greek perspective as the ancient Egyptians.
In 1995, Noel Ignatiev published his seminal work How the Irish Became White, documenting the concrete strategies adopted by the Irish community in America to gain entry into the category of “white,” a conscious process that, Ignatiev argued, involved the Irish community actively distancing itself from an African American population with which it shared many economic disadvantages and with which it had long been identified by outsiders.
A foundational text in the field of “whiteness studies,” Ignatiev’s work astutely demonstrated the ways in which “whiteness” is far from any innate or objective “reality,” nor any historically static and unchanging category, but rather an identity that requires invention and mobilization. It demands a process of becoming rather than being; moreover, the procedures and outcomes of becoming white, of claiming whiteness, are deeply reliant on their own time and place for their meaning and power.
As an antidote to dreams of a white European past, then, the corollary of Ignatiev’s study would certainly be welcome, something like: How the Greeks and Romans Became White. But I can provide, perhaps, some hints before that work is complete.
It happened long, long after antiquity was over, and almost certainly coincided with the rise of the new “science” of race in the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when skin color was being strenuously promoted by intellectuals in a range of disciplines as the pre-eminent marker of racial difference (perhaps not coincidentally, this was also when classics was itself taking shape as an academic enterprise).
In fact, we can see the potent use of the ancient Greeks as the paradigmatic example of whiteness, with marble statues already elevated to the shorthand of that elision, in the infamous diagram of racial hierarchy from Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind published in 1854.
Although the Greeks feature prominently in such modern schema, there was no corollary for them in antiquity. There was no ancient “science” invented for placing black people lower in the evolutionary order than white people (much less any desire to divide the world into “black” and “white” in the first place) — and any attempt to implicate classical antiquity in today’s project of white supremacy would surely be met with absolute confusion by the Greeks and Romans themselves. But still assumptions about (and the desire for) Greek and Roman “whiteness” persist; as Nell Irvin Painter notes in her important work, The History of White People, “(t)he blond-ancient-Greek narrative may no longer be taught in schools, but it lives on as a myth to be confronted in these pages.” This doesn’t mean the ancient Greeks and Romans hold a uniquely enlightened position in terms of global history; far from it. They had their own brands of racial logic and the means for violently enacting them, but that is a story for another time.
In “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin pointed out the sheer futility of the nostalgia residing at the heart of white supremacy, noting that “No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger.” He concluded even more powerfully: “This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” Our goal, as classicists, should surely be to finish the disassembling of this dangerously misguided dream of white Europe. To join hands with Baldwin and add: it was never white in the first place.
The task is not easy, as previous opponents and victims of white supremacy can attest; but we can take from Baldwin additional inspiration for meeting such misconceptions head-on.
In 1963, journalist Jane Howard spent five weeks with then-thirty-eight year old James Baldwin as he embarked “reluctantly, but doggedly” on a “whistle-stop speaking tour” following the publication of his bestselling work, The Fire Next Time. In Howard’s subsequent profile, she recorded Baldwin’s verdict on what he wanted the impact of his work to be: “Most contemporary fiction, like contemporary theater, is designed to corroborate your fantasies and make you walk out whistling. I don’t want you to whistle at my stuff, baby. I want you to be sitting on the edge of your chair waiting for nurses to carry you out.”
As classicists, we occupy a unique position in relation to people’s fantasies of the past and especially its presumed whiteness; we curate a world that people feel they fundamentally know, recognize and, let’s face it, often love. But along with that is the responsibility to disappoint and even shock — to tell people what they don’t know about antiquity, to emphasize what made that world so different from our own.
Perhaps no site of difference between then and now is more important in our current political climate than that of race. It cannot be said often enough: the ancient Greeks and Romans did not perceive race the way we do today. Most significantly, they did not in any way identify as, or invest any racial meaning in being, “white.” We need to stop corroborating assumptions that they did with our silence.
So, as classicists, let’s make it a priority to state clearly and repeatedly: if Europe was a world in which black men did not exist, it was a world in which white men did not exist either.
We need, in other words, to worry less about audiences leaving whistling when we talk and write about the classical world and, instead, have a lot more nurses on hand.
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.
