Have you responded to blackinasia's response to your answer on "blackness"=/=slavery in graeco-roman antiquity?

owning-my-truth:

medievalpoc:

I am not in the business of telling Black people how to feel about any of my posts on constructions of Blackness. Part of the problem inherent in my writing this blog is that because I am not Black, my writing might be taken over the writing of Black people on the same topic, because of the mistaken idea that writing about things that don’t affect me makes me more “objective”.

Moreover, there’s nothing in that post that I disagree with, other than a slight misunderstanding over my primary point.

To address questions about my sources and statements, 1. I didn’t say Romans did not have a construction of Blackness. I felt like that was clear from what I said, but maybe I could have been more clear. The point of my post was that skin color was not conflated with slavery.

2. I used sources that “conflict” because there is no cut-and-dried conclusion on whether the Greeks’ ethnocentrism was a form of proto-racism, especially in regard to anti-Blackness. As blackinasia states, the debate over translation rages on, much less debate over the connotion of those translations. Which leads to

3. I use Snowden as a source to demonstrate the documentation of contemporaneous racism in the translations of primary sources from the 1940s. In other words, I use him because he is one of the only ones to have said: the historians of my time are mistranslating documents from the Ancient World to reflect their OWN biases, not those of the original documents they are translating. That’s doesn’t mean that Snowden was exempt from his own racist assumptions or essentializing what he and others considered Black features or characteristics, and the language he uses is offensive because it is outdated.

^That’s important because it shows us how we ended up with the ideas we have about the ancient world and race now. There isn’t some kind of time-vacuum between 300 B.C.E. and 2014 C.E.; each successive generation or era added a “layer” of interpretation, and we are building on those layers. NONE of those layers are objective, and neither is what we write about it now.

That is why I’m quoting sources that are as primary as possible, touch on the Renaissance, go to the Enlightenment, then the 1800s, then 1916, then the 1940s, then modern academic sources, then modern media.

I think the only place of actual disagreement would be that “Aethiops” translates to “burnt-face”. That was actually exactly what I was saying when I cited Snowden, that these translators were inserting their own prejudice into the texts!!!

That translation, if you go to the Wikipedia page, directly cites Henry George Liddel, who wrote A Greek-English Lexicon. This guy was born in 1811. That translation is from the 1840s, which is almost 300 years out of date.

So, yeah, if you believe Henry George Liddel, and “middle-complected” Greeks were going around calling dark-skinned people from North Africa and India “Burnt-face”, there is definitely a case to be made for color prejudice among Ancient Greeks, although not, as has been agreed upon, an association with slavery.

I’m not trying to make a definitive conclusion on whether one can generalize Greek ethnocentrism as proto-racism or not, which is why I presented multiple dissenting opinions on that.

I’m trying to get people to REALIZE WE’RE USING 300 YEAR OLD TRANSLATIONS AND PRETENDING THEY’RE OBJECTIVE.

More transparency in academic research, distinguished readers. :)

Medievalpoc again not providing a counter-translation and creating a debate out of thin air that to my knowledge does not exist. This isn’t just some “random” translation from 300 years ago, because the following is quite well established:

Αἰθίοψ (Ethiopian) = [Origins] αἴθω ”I burn” +ὤψ ”face”

So, yes, the literal translation is “burnt face.” I’ve also double checked this with my friend who is getting a masters degree in Classics Studies and has studied Ancient Greek as well, and he confirmed this for me as well. 

And, if that’s the case, I’m wrong. Which I do not particularly have a problem with being.

Making a call for people who are actually experts in the field to analyze their sources and mine isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s exactly what I hope for every single day, because I’m not omniscient or an expert in a lot of things I touch on.

Accusing me of “creating a debate out of thin air that to your knowledge does not exist” is the absolutely best compliment I think I have ever been paid.

That was the entire point of this post. I WANT people to question ideas that are “well-established”. Especially those ones! I want people who know more than I do about their fields to take another look at what they think they know, and uncover what, if anything, there is to uncover.

It’s honestly the most gratifying response I can imagine. If proving me wrong was important enough to you to motivate you to find out for yourself, then I’m still nothing but overjoyed to be wrong. And I’m glad you decided to ask your friend, too.

RE: the conversation about Roman slavery, class, and race relations. I'm a classical studies major and it really bugs me when we get into conversations like this and frame it in the context of US race relations. To Romans, there were functionally only two races - Roman and non-Roman. They did not give a flying crap about skin color as long as you worshipped their gods (or made a pretense of it), paid their taxes, followed their laws, and fought on their side.

Yes, I am aware it “bugs” you. It “bugs” a lot of people.

I’m noticing a pattern, and the people it “bugs” the most are almost always academics. I am assuming you actually read the conversation, but you still sent this message, so I guess I’ll just say it all over again.

Racism today affects how we view the past.

Racism in 1930 affects how we view the past.

Racism in 1850 affects how we view the past.

Racism in 1787 affects how we view the past.

The knowledge we currently possess has been filtered though all of these centuries before it got to us, and each century between us and the ancient world has shaped how the knowledge was passed on.

Every conversation we have about Roman slavery, class, and race relations is affected by not only these factors, but who we are as the people researching, reading, and exploring these materials.

Where did your information come from? How did you form these opinions and ideas? Someone wrote a book. You read it. Someone with authority you trust told you. Knowledge was passed from human being to human being. It doesn’t come from some kind of Supreme Universal Authority, it comes from human beings. Human being are not objective.

In plain terms-in previous eras, these histories were purposely racialized because the authors who wrote them were racist, and lived in an era where furthering white supremacy was highly encouraged and well-compensated.

Instead of challenging, confronting, or refuting this influence, the reaction has been “Hey, let’s just drop it already“ from most of the disciplines involving history (which is honestly just about all of them).

Instead of trying to curtail or ameliorate the voices that infused white supremacy into our education in the first place, most people seem a lot more comfortable shush-shushing the voices that want to point out that that happened. To confront it head-on, and explore how this influence continues to shape our ideas, our worldviews, and our knowledge of the past.

It bugs you. Good! I’m not comfortable, you’re not comfortable, so let’s go digging because no one promised anyone the truth is a comfortable pair of well-worn shoes that fit everyone exactly the same.