Race: Antiquity and its Legacy

Abstract

How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person’s physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one’s skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories ‘Greek’ and ‘Barbarian’, and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as ‘black and ‘white’ in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern – across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal’s seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.

Retrieving the religion in racialization: A critical review

“…Also, early civilizations in modern day India and Egypt noted and documented differences in skin color (Gossett, ). Still, as many scholars point out, the use of this term in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and earlier periods does not mean that seemingly racial practices then are equivalent to racial practices today (McCoskey, ; Robinson, ; Snowden, ) . One of the ostensible differences between religion and race is that one can convert to a religion but not to a race.…”

“…Frank Snowden () argues that Greco‐Roman society did not have systemic discrimination on the basis of skin color. Denise Eileen McCoskey () argues that while it may not have been skin color, Greco‐Roman society seemed to have some conception of “race.” These scholars along with others focused on various parts of the premodern period (Gossett, ; Isaac, ) still, notably, use the term “race” to describe notions of bodily difference in this period while also making a clear distinction between those notions and contemporary racial ideas and practices.…”

Herodotus and the Black Body

“…In fact, the 2.104 passage demonstrates that Snowden’s definition of Blackness as an Aithiopian exclusivity is clearly incorrect. However, Snowden’s methodology is uncritically praised in Greco-Roman studies because he dismisses ancient Egyptian Blackness (e.g., Kelly, 1991; Levine, 1992; McCoskey, 2012).…”

“…Greco-Roman scholar Denise Eileen McCoskey’s (2012) Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy applies CRT methodology to Greco-Roman antiquity. McCoskey notes that race is a social construct that determines the features that matter for racialization of groups and, moreover, it is contingent on social and historical forces (p. 2).…”

Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community

“…While scholars of antiquity have long written about ancient notions of ethnicity, race and nationalism (Hadas 1950;Bickerman 1952;Jones 1959;Sherwin-White 1967;Snowden 1970Snowden , 1983Walbank 1972), the past few decades have witnessed a marked increase in theoretically and methodologically nuanced treatments of these categories as markers of both kinship and community in the Mediterranean world (Dench 1995(Dench , 2005Cornell 1997;Hall 1997Hall , 2002 Mitchell and Greatrex 2000; Goldhill 2001;Malkin 2001a; Gillett 2002;Geary 2002;Isaac 2004;Smith 2004;Zacharia 2008;Derks and Roymans 2009;Richter 2011;McCoskey 2012;Gardner, Herring, and Lomas 2013;Andrade 2013;McInerney 2014;Revell 2010Revell , 2016. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, historians, literary critics and sociologists, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have shifted their discussions of ethnicity away from essentialist, instrumentalist and primordialist conceptualizations of the category and instead have moved toward an understanding of the ideological, historical and discursive processes by which notions of national or ethnic kinship were constructed, maintained, altered and refashioned (Barth 1969;Armstrong 1981;Gellner 1983;Smith 1986;Banks 1996;Baumann 1999;Marx 2003;Brubaker 2004;Anderson 2006;Berger and Lorenz 2008;Hobsba...…”