As White Supremacists Try to Remake History, Scholars Seek to Preserve the Record

Photo by Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post via Getty Images

In the wake of yet another mass shooting, committed by yet another radicalized young white man, scholars are repeating a call to action that has been issued during the Trump presidency: White supremacists are distorting history. It’s the job of experts, who know better, to push back.

One of the most widely circulated historical claims, for example, was cited by the gunman in El Paso, Tex., before he opened fire on Saturday. In the first paragraph of a racist screed, which has been linked by law enforcement to the shooter, he references The Great Replacement, a book by the French writer Renaud Camus.

Camus argues that white people in France, and in Europe in general, are being replaced by Muslim immigrants, in what he calls “genocide by substitution.” Without this book’s influence, the gunman wrote, he would not have targeted “the Hispanic community.”

Such ideas have found eager support among white supremacists. In 2017, protesters at the Unite the Right Rally, in Charlottesville, Va., reportedly chanted, “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” A shooter who, in March, killed at least 50 people attending two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement” and was motivated by the conspiracy theory of white genocide. “As long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people,” the shooter allegedly wrote.

(Camus, on his website, sought to distance himself from the two shooters. His book could not have provoked such acts, he wrote, because they run counter to what his book recommends and conform to that which it condemns.)

Camus’s book is racist theory couched as academic analysis, says Sarah E. Bond, an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. Though the alt-right says it despises so-called left-leaning academe, its followers gravitate toward the few academics who prop up their racist and xenophobic views, Bond notes. White nationalists’ hypotheses are bunk, she says, so they go searching for the faux legitimacy of scholarship to prop it up.

‘It’s Going to Take All of Us’

The ideology underpinning white power has a broader goal, Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of Chicago, wrote in The New York Times. It links events — killings at a synagogue, harassment of immigrants, racist attacks — that otherwise are often perceived as discrete.

It is not enough to dismiss mass shootings as “horror beyond our comprehension,” says Belew. Rather, it is necessary to understand their meaning and “confront the movement that relies upon them.”

Confronting harmful ideas head-on is “the only thing we really can do” as academics, Bond says. The job of scholars is not just to disseminate new ideas, she says, but also to dismantle dangerous ones. That’s what happened after World War II, when academics like Hannah Arendt worked to dispute and undercut Nazi ideology. A more recent example, Bond says, is that of scientists who discredit climate-change deniers.

But there’s no such unified front in the humanities, she says. When white-supremacist theories gain traction, responses can be fractured. Scholarly organizations may issue a statement, but mostly, she says, it’s individual academics speaking out. Or not.

“These are all individuals trying to dismantle this gigantic death star,” Bond says. But there’s no vulnerable soft spot that one person alone can reach. To be effective, she says, “it’s going to take all of us.”

Scholars have a responsibility to make sure that students understand the past. The challenge of the current moment is that the past is being mobilized in “particularly political ways and particularly violent ways by these explicitly college-aged white men,” says Matthew Gabriele, a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech.

For example, white nationalists have flocked to medieval studies to adopt the discipline’s iconography and to stake out a mistaken vision of medieval Europe as an all-white space.

At the same time, Gabriele is clear about how much impact he and his fellow scholars can have. Aspiring mass shooters aren’t exactly filling up college classrooms, he says. And he acknowledges that taking one course is unlikely to convert someone from a hateful ideology.

Rather, he says, such courses can provide corrective context to students who might be sympathetic to white-nationalist ideas or have encountered them on message boards or on YouTube, or who simply don’t know any better.

When white nationalists look to the Middle Ages to find a heritage for whiteness, and encounter no resistance from scholars, “our complacency becomes complicity,” Sierra Lomuto, now an assistant professor of English at Macalester College, wrote in 2016 on a medievalist blog called In the Middle.

Bigger Awakenings to Come

Until a couple of years ago, the discipline had mostly shunned discussions of race and racism, she wrote in a more recent essay. Then came Charlottesville. At the rally, modern-day racists appropriated fake medieval culture by designing crests, wielding shields, and replicating versions of the Celtic cross. It was a wake-up call, Lomuto wrote, but there are bigger awakenings to come.

“If we want to be anti-racist, we need to start thinking more radically about how we can reformulate our field in our teaching, graduate training, and public outreach,” she wrote. “These priorities will necessarily require institutional change, and may even mean leaving behind this thing we currently call medieval studies.”

Like Lomuto, Curtis Dozier has been dwelling on a larger question of what it means to study his discipline in its current form. Dozier, an assistant professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College, started a website, Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, that documents hate groups’ online use of Greek and Roman antiquity. “Certainly we haven’t had any shortage of material,” he says.

When he started, Dozier says, he was a bit naïve. He assumed he’d be pointing out mostly factual and historical errors. These hate groups do make mistakes when writing about this history, he says. But they’re clear on the patriarchal and imperialist aspects of ancient society. In fact, that’s what appeals to them. “They don’t get wrong the oppressive aspects of Greco-Roman culture,” Dozier says.

It’d be difficult, but Dozier wants to see his discipline re-examine how it justifies the study of Greco-Roman antiquity. A basic reason to study ancient Rome has long been that its society was supposed to have been a high point in human history, he says. But that way of thinking, he says, can lead to some “unpalatable things.”

This year, for example, Rep. Steve King, a Republican of Iowa, said to The New York Times, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

What the congressman said next is something Dozier hasn’t seen quoted as much, but it speaks volumes.

King asked, “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

This article has been updated (8/6/2019, 11:45 a.m.) with a response from Renaud Camus.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.