WakeForestRanger
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…connecting the history we need to remember to the future we want to have.
Apparently the Johnston County School Board caved to the County Commissioner's threat to withhold 10% of their budget and approved the "patriotic history" curriculum. Again, I thought the problems Republicans had with CRT didn't include simply teaching racism and teachers couldn't lose their jobs for simply teaching about it. I guess not.
Apparently the Johnston County School Board caved to the County Commissioner's threat to withhold 10% of their budget and approved the "patriotic history" curriculum. Again, I thought the problems Republicans had with CRT didn't include simply teaching racism and teachers couldn't lose their jobs for simply teaching about it. I guess not.
As an archaeologist currently working on my doctorate, I have spent the last year examining the ways various groups, such as white nationalists, use pseudoarchaeology in their worldviews. Understanding this feels particularly important today, considering the recent increase of such groups in the United States. According to a 2019 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the number of white nationalist hate groups in the United States increased by 55 percent between 2017 and 2019.
Pseudoarchaeology comes in many shapes and forms but relies on the same core argument: People of the past did not have the knowledge, technology, and/or capability to achieve all that they are said to have accomplished, so someone or something else was involved. Ancient alien proponents will tell you Egypt’s great pyramids, for example, or Peru’s Nazca lines were really due to extraterrestrials, while hyperdiffiusionist proponents will tell you they were built by residents of Atlantis, or another “highly advanced civilization” that lived more than 13,000 years ago. Archaeologists are often accused of conspiring to hide the “truth” of these histories.
These pseudoarchaeological arguments may seem to be simply fun to entertain. But they are invariably heavily biased against Black people, Indigenous peoples, and other people of color (BIPOC), who are doubted to have been responsible for their own histories. Archaeological sites from Africa, Asia, and the Americas are often put forth as proof of external interventions, while the achievements of those who lived in ancient Greece or Italy, for example, are rarely questioned.
In other words, these arguments are often racist.
While arguments about extraterrestrial or Atlantean ancestors may seem outlandish, some people do believe in these arguments. Chapman University in California, which conducted the Survey of American Fears between 2016 and 2018, found in 2018 that 57 percent of their respondents believed that ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis existed (a 17 percent increase from 2016), and 41 percent believed that aliens visited the Earth in the ancient past (a 14 percent increase from 2016). These have become more than just beliefs: They’re realities for those who have embraced them.
Pseudoarchaeology is useful to white nationalism specifically because it casts doubt on the achievements of BIPOC communities, opening the doors to rewriting history through a white power lens. The SPLC has noticed this and written about connections between pseudoarchaeology and far-right ideologies such as antisemitism and white nationalism. White nationalism is a pro-white racial ideology that shares many interests with white supremacy, such as anti-immigration stances and beliefs that the interests of white people must be placed first.
White nationalists also encourage enhanced protections and rights to defend what they see as the “purity” of the white race, a pseudoscientific concept built on extremely reimagined views of history and genetic ancestry. A core belief of white nationalism is a conspiracy theory referred to as the “great replacement,” which suggests a “white genocide” is happening: that white people are nearing extinction and need to be protected.
Pseudoarchaeology contributes to the marginalization of BIPOC communities by denying their histories and instead reattributing them to mythical continents or even extraterrestrials. White nationalists use this denialism to rewrite—or rather “re-white”—history to bolster their own systems of power.
The public and the discipline must challenge pseudoarchaeology and the violent, white power structures that often use it to support their own goals. It is through these challenges that all of us can support recentering the voices of marginalized groups in telling their own histories and ensure those are the histories being heard.
I mean look at these fucking guys. Probably like looking in a mirror for Jh and Anus.
Pompeo's tweet was likely a response to a letter from the National School Boards Association asking Biden for federal assistance over their concern of school board protests being the equivalent of domestic terrorism and hate crimes: