Race, Gender and Sexuality: Ancient to Present.

Abstract

On March 19, 2022, the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Culture (CSREC) at the Washington School of Psychiatry presented Race, Gender and Sexuality: From the Ancient Mediterranean to Contemporary Intersectionality via Zoom. Addressing structural racism in the discipline of classics, the rhetorical question was asked, when did classics become White, indicating that today’s racial categories did not exist in the Greco-Roman world, where sexual orientation and gender identity were also more fluid than is commonly believed. Addressing America’s propensity for erasing the cultures White Europeans “found,” challenged the hegemony of the Greco-Roman in American mores, affirming the resilience of indigenous cultures by pointing to the resurgence of Mayan Quechua, now a lingua franca in Latin America. How did this hegemony evolve? The “discovery” of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Apollo Belvedere ushered in the Enlightenment/neo-classical idealization of what were perceived to be classical forms–accurately, in the case of neo-classical buildings such as America’s capitol, but inaccurately in the case of Whitened sculptures that were originally polychromous. For example, Titian’s Andromeda is White, but she was actually from modern-day Ethiopia. Ironically, in light of contemporary racism and sexism, men in the art of the classical era, at a time and place when men were viewed as superior, were portrayed as darker than women. White Europeans constructed race by positing biological difference to serve ends of conquest and domination, whereas recent scientific scholarship evinces less than .01% variability attributable to “race.” We learned that classicist Frank Snowden’s revelation that dark-skinned Africans, generically labelled “Ethiops,” were valued in antiquity. Most slaves were what we would today call White, though xenophobia—viewing other cultures as “barbaric”—was rampant. Alluding to the whitewashing of Ancient Egypt— Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, for example— Stark credited Fred Wilson’s busts of Nefertiti in various shades of darkness. Emphasizing the importance of more recent and accu-