https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/24/who
Last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the industry periodical for academia, published a commentary under the title “The Whitesplaining of History Is Over.” The first sentence went like this:
When the academy was the exclusive playground of white men, it produced the theories of race, gender, and Western cultural superiority that underwrote imperialism abroad and inequality at home.
The rest of the commentary cited women and minority historians who are steadily correcting that white male supremacist record compiled by white male scholars in the past.
The author, a historian at Stanford, wanted to present the revision work taking place as a story of triumph. But as you can see from the denigrating first sentence, there is no joy in her expression. She can’t get past her own bitter resentment. As I read the piece, I didn’t quibble with the thesis. Instead, I wondered, “How many 19-year-olds want to spend 14 weeks in a class with her?”
The year before, the classics web site Eidolon published a commentary by a professor at Denison University with the headline, “We Condone It by Our Silence: Confronting Classics’ Complicity in White Supremacy.” In one paragraph, citing the “Greek Miracle” that produced the extraordinary burst of genius in the arts, philosophy, and literature, the author terms it a myth and adds:
It is a myth that gets trotted out frequently in the pages of elite magazines by those among us who wish to promote the study of the classical world as valuable to the present and by those who may be (un)consciously trying to continue to hide the field’s racism and misogyny behind a sanitized story of (white, male, Euro-American) greatness.