"Western Civilization" as Dog Whistle
“The core curriculum must be grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization,” - Gov. Ron DeSantis, 1/31/23
We covered this back in 2019 at The Washington Post, when a different fascist ranted about “Western Civilization.” It has a specific history in modern nationalism and racism. We wrote that:
Although the histories of Europe began as national ones, thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries looked to 4th-century Germanic tribes as their pure, white ancestors. In alliance with the “scientific” study of the past, scientific racism, the international slave trade and colonialism, this approach began to change the way people understood the past. No longer individual nations — and also no longer simply “Europe” because of the need to include North America — these thinkers used the term “the West” to encompass one (supposedly) common heritage that explained why white men ought to rule the world. Western civilization, then, became the story of an unbroken genealogy that stretched from Greece to Rome to the Germanic tribes to the Renaissance to the Reformation to the contemporary, white world.
But acknowledging that problematic history of the phrase doesn’t mean we have to ignore the history of Europe (obviously), instead:
Both of us have spent our careers teaching, among other things, courses called “Western Civilization.” But when we do, we seek to show our students that there is value in exploring the conceptual category of the “West,” as long as students learn that there are many different Wests, all of them located in particular moments of time, few of which have anything to do with the actual past. The real story embedded in the history of Western Civilization is a tale of permeability, of movement and change.
That might have been the first time the two of us used the word “permeable” in our joint writing about medieval Europe, but not the last. It’s one of our favorite descriptions of the kind of history we do - and it’s precisely the kind of real, true history that DeSantis and Republicans are trying to destroy.
Republicans do not want to teach history. They want to teach myth. Boring myth at that. Give me Dionysius and the Bacchanals or Artemis and the hunt.
What is going on in Florida is straight out of the Nazi playbook. And the dog whistle of "western civilization"--no doubt of the Will Durant variety that alas the History Channel still flogs as "real" history--is just the beginning. I am very disappointed that so many organizations--including the College Board--are caving in front of the De-Insantis-anity. I heard on NPR this morning that it totally gutted the AP Black History course, removing anything having to do with the 1619 Project, Black Feminism, Black LGBTQ+ authors, Intersectionality, and CRT. It also jettisoned important authors and scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Langston Hughes (because can't have a queer Black man's work listed--even if he was closeted), etc. I admit that my first impulse was to encourage any colleagues teaching anything in Florida to add those authors and topics instantly into their curricula.