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Kind of Blue

(8,709 posts)
Fri Apr 5, 2019, 11:12 AM Apr 2019

White at the Museum

In a segment titled “White at the Museum” aired yesterday (April 3) on Samantha Bee’s satirical program on TBS, Full Frontal, the Lucas Brothers respond in a light-hearted way to white nationalists’s use of Greek and Roman statues in their propaganda as a proof of the superiority of white culture. But if they end up watching this episode, alt-righters would be disappointed to learn that the whiteness of their beloved statues is but a myth. https://hyperallergic.com/493470/a-satirical-take-on-the-whiteness-of-classical-sculpture/

Features Sarah Bond, Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Iowa, and Assistant Professor Chenjerai Kumanyika from Rutgers University, researcher, journalist, an artist, who joined in on the fun of destructing the myth of whiteness in antiquity.


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White at the Museum (Original Post) Kind of Blue Apr 2019 OP
even the myths themselves are not white DonCoquixote Apr 2019 #1
Exactly right! And Medusa in the same story Kind of Blue Apr 2019 #2

DonCoquixote

(13,728 posts)
1. even the myths themselves are not white
Fri Apr 5, 2019, 11:58 AM
Apr 2019

You will never see "clash of the titans" the same way when you read that andromeda, shown as the typical blonde damsel in distress, was the princes of ETHIOPIA, which was then considered a rich and powerful land.

Kind of Blue

(8,709 posts)
2. Exactly right! And Medusa in the same story
Fri Apr 5, 2019, 01:27 PM
Apr 2019

is of African origin, as well as The Furies known in the Hellenistic world for their coal-black skin and serpents for hair (dreads) as that of Medusa. There are so many, many hidden gems. A new one for me is that the first Greek sibyls where originally African prophetesses.

“But my own belief about it is this. If the Phoenicians did in fact carry away the sacred women and sell one in Libya and one in Hellas, then, in my opinion, the place where this woman was sold in what is now Hellas, but was formerly called Pelasgia, was Thesprotia; and then, being a slave there, she established a shrine of Zeus under an oak that was growing there; for it was reasonable that, as she had been a handmaid of the temple of Zeus at Thebes, she would remember that temple in the land to which she had come. After this, as soon as she understood the Greek language, she taught divination; and she said that her sister had been sold in Libya by the same Phoenicians who sold her.

I expect that these women were called 'doves' by the people of Dodona because they spoke a strange language, and the people thought it like the cries of birds; then the woman spoke what they could understand, and that is why they say that the dove uttered human speech; as long as she spoke in a foreign tongue, they thought her voice was like the voice of a bird. For how could a dove utter the speech of men? The tale that the dove was black signifies that the woman was Egyptian.”
Herotodus, the Greek Father of History

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