As Vassar classicist Dozier observes, white supremacism has long looked to ancient Greece and Rome to justify the insupportable: the separation of humans into races and the necessity of hierarchy, which \u201cmeans that white people should rule over others, and inferior people should accept this.\u201d Troublingly, there is some rationale for this: Aristotle took slavery as inevitable, Cicero was loudly antisemitic, Propertius was a proto-incel, and so forth. Moreover, classical scholars have themselves provided grist for the supremacist mill: A Johns Hopkins professor of a century back argued that \u201cthe orientalization of Rome\u2019s populace\u201d lead to \u201ca weakening of moral and political stamina,\u201d which is just the sort of thing that right-wing organizations have argued in defense of closing U.S. borders. (Will and Ariel Durant, who propounded \u201cxenophobic interpretations of the end of the Roman Empire,\u201d got greater traction out of the argument.) Equating America with ancient Rome is an old trope, and so is the inevitable lament that, just as Rome collapsed, so the United States is in inexorable decline. Yet, as Dozier notes, the supremacists miss certain key points, among them the fact that yesterday\u2019s civilizations would not recognize today\u2019s racial classifications, which knocks a strut or two away from the idea that the so-called Great Replacement theory has classical validity. So it is with the simplistic notion that Rome\u2019s loss of its \u201cethnic homogeneity\u201d\u2014which it never had\u2014\u201ccontributed to a decline in the qualities that established and maintained Roman power.\u201d In the end, Dozier urges, the idea that classical civilizations can be enlisted in support of \u201cmodern systems of oppression and violence\u201d is willfully wrongheaded.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As Vassar classicist Dozier observes, white supremacism has long looked to ancient Greece and Rome to justify the insupportable: the separation of humans into races and the necessity of hierarchy, which \u201cmeans that white people should rule over others, and inferior people should accept this.\u201d Troublingly, there is some rationale for this: Aristotle took slavery […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5313"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}