White marble and white supremacy

In a recent article, Professor Sarah Bond, of the University of Iowa, reminds us that classical statues were painted in lifelike colour (they must have resemble Madame Tussaud's) and argues that "the equation of white marble with beauty" contributes to "white supremacist ideas today". 

“The assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white! — across the Mediterranean region - [provides] further ammunition for white supremacists today, including groups like Identity Europa, who use classical statuary as a symbol of white male superiority.”

This is not just another crazy America story but an example of a very important trend in current thinking. It's connected to the reasons why many clever Americans thought Donald Trump, by extolling the West in his Warsaw speech, was racist.


I suppose these all began with the civil rights movement and the 1960s and like the 1960s social revolution went hurtling on at increasing speed, picking up the heretical communist ideas of the Frankfurt School on their way. Now the enthusiasm and idealism of the 1960s has gone but the ideology has remained as extreme and has taken over not only the Democrats but influenced the Republicans too.

The danger by the way is not from Marxists, even heretical ones, but from liberals.

The academics are possibly the biggest problem the West (apologies for using a polemical term) faces today, after mass migrations. The two are interconnected, of course.

Other examples of academic malignity are legion. To the making of books about the subject there is no end. But the source of the white marble story, www.campusreform.org, has many, many more examples.

Here is a useful and blackly funny Twitter feed, to which the late and much missed Peter Risdon drew my attention. The Twitter account has now been discontinued because academics complained and the anonymous tweeter felt his career might be endangered if his identity were discovered.