Gift link in embed.
When some on the right speak of reverence for “civilization,” what they’re doing is trying to anachronistically justify the hierarchy of race they would like to see enacted today by rooting it in antiquity. You cannot cast Black people in The Odyssey, because The Odyssey is a pillar of “Western civilization,” which they consider to be white. This faction of the far right imagines antiquity as a kind of idyllic Jim Crow universe of utterly separate civilizations, one in which the integration they despise could not possibly exist.
He goes on to point out that one of characters in the Odyssey is described as “black-skinned and woolly-haired.” And that the racial hierarchy that white supremacists ascribe to the ancient civilizations was a much more modern innovation created to justify the African slave trade. Read the whole thing, as they say.
The racist backlash to Chris Nolan’s Odyssey is a kind of stolen valor, an attempt by the right to claim credit for achievements they had nothing to do with in order to justify racial hierarchy in the present. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) July 24, 2026 at 12:58 PM
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