Curtis Dozier's "The White Pedestal"

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Dozier applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate, and reported the following:

Even as a person fascinated by the premise of this test, my jaw dropped when I looked at page 99 of The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. I wouldn’t say this page gives readers a complete picture of the book: you would barely know from page 99, for example, that the book examines the intellectual ecosystem of the contemporary phenomenon known to political scientists as “the intellectual radical right,” and you probably wouldn’t catch one of the main theses of the book, which is that “these people know more than you think.” But it does present the piece of ancient evidence that most surprised me when I was researching the book: an ancient treatise attributed to Aristotle that argues, among other things, that black skin is a sign of cowardice and duplicity. The conventional wisdom, among scholars and the educated public, is that because ancient Greece and Rome didn’t develop a theory of racial difference like that of early modern racist pseudoscience, the ancient world shouldn’t lend itself very well to appropriation by white supremacist activists. But there you have it, right there on page 99, an ancient text expressing something very much like the tenets of modern anti-Blackness. That one citation doesn’t tell the whole story of just how congenial the ancient Greco-Roman world (and the ways it has traditionally been interpreted) is to white nationalist thinking — for that you have to read the book! — but it’s a piece of the story that strikes most directly at the ways that too many people try to protect or insulate ancient Greece and Rome from association with white supremacist politics, thereby perpetuating the very thing they claim to abhor.

Learn more about The White Pedestal at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue