Classics and Eugenics in the USA, with Rebecca Futo Kennedy

Abstract

Classical texts were the core of elite education in the United States from the founding of the country’s first university in the seventeenth century until the 1950s. They served as models for the crafting of the US constitution and proved foundational in the evolution of scientific thought on 'race' in America. Indeed, classical texts have been used time and again to justify enslavement, dehumanise Black and Indigenous people, craft segregation, and popularise white supremacist ideologies, all in the name of a white Euro-American or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ heritage. Why does ‘Classics’, as imagined by those who claim such heritage, continue to appear as part of far-right and conservative propaganda? And why are attempts to evolve the field to reflect the ancient world and its study more accurately met with fierce resistance? This week, Shivaike Shah speaks to Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy from Denison University about these challenging questions. Only by understanding the ways ancient Greek and Roman ideas served as a foundation for modern scientific racism, Professor Kennedy argues, can we ever seek to dismantle or even combat white supremacism in the United States. 

Bibliography

open-source

Curtis Dozier, Rebecca Futo Kennedy & Jackie Murray, ‘White Supremacy and Classical Athens: A Turning Point?’, Lepage Center Roundtable (2021)

Rebecca Futo Kennedy, ‘We Condone it By Our Silence’, Eidolon (2017)

Rebecca Futo Kennedy, ‘Blood and Soil from Antiquity to Charlottesville: A Short Primer’, Classics at the Intersections (2017)

Rebecca Futo Kennedy, ‘Classically White Supremacy--The American Dream of a White City’, Classics at the Intersections (2017)

Susanne E. Hakenbeck, ‘Genetics, Archaeology and the Far Right: An Unholy Trinity’, World Archaeology 51.4 (2019), 517-527

Denise McCoskey, ‘Bad to the Bone: The Racist Application of DNA Science to Classical Antiquity’, Eidolon (2018)

Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics

Erik Robinson, ‘“The Slaves Were Happy”: High School Latin and the Horrors of Classical Studies’, Eidolon (2017)

Sarah Teets, ‘Classical Slavery and Jeffersonian Racism: Charlottesville, One Year Later’, Eidolon (2018)

paywalled

Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)

Alastair Bonnett, ‘Whiteness and the West’, in Claire Dwyer & Caroline Bressey (eds.), New Geographies of Race and Racism (London: Routledge, 2008), 31-42

Karen E. Fields & Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London & New York: Verso, 2012)

Falguni A. Sheth, Towards a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009)

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.