In 1991, Mary Lefkowitz was commissioned to review Black Athena, Martin Bernal’s revisionary account of the relations between ancient classical civilizations and African culture. She concluded that the claims advanced by Bernal and by others about the dependence of Greek culture on, especially, Egypt, were overstated; subsequently she became considerably engaged in this debate, publishing a scholarly book and an edited collection of papers defending the same view. History Lesson, however, is a personal memoir, describing what happened next. It sometimes reads like the story of a small academic squabble, sometimes as a grim narrative of racial conflict and sometimes as a discussion of academic principle. This combination is both striking and revealing; and the principles matter. As a whole, the book is an object lesson in how racial politics can become confused with academic debate, and how much it matters to deal with that confusion with integrity and courage.

The squabble is familiar enough: in institutions minor slights escalate as their narrative is told and retold by each side. This squabble festered between two Wellesley College professors, Lefkowitz and Tony Martin, a Professor in the Department of Africana Studies. Lefkowitz discovered that Martin was teaching a course, “Africans in Greece and Rome”, whose title suggested that the influence of African culture was strong enough in the geographical centres of the classical world to merit a whole lecture series. This, in her view, implied that the course would teach as true that Greek civilization was “stolen” from Egypt; and this she maintains to be false. Accordingly, she tried to change the title of the course to “Africans in the Greek and Roman world”, a title she believed consonant with the manifold evidence for the wider ancient world, but not reliant on anything about a “stolen legacy”. Martin’s angry response was, surely, predictable; and his course title was reinstated. The disagreement could have rumbled on unnoticed for years, in a “he said . . . she said” manner; and clearly Wellesley College hoped that this was how it should be treated, as a dispute that turned on a matter of opinion. Lefkowitz, however, took this hope amiss, insisting that the view to which she was objecting was not supported by the evidence, and that to treat it (or its antithesis)as merely a matter of opinion was an affront to the proper ways of scholarship and education. She continued to take a public stand against what she saw as a traducing of proper academic principle.

Meanwhile, a different dispute had become connected with the “stolen legacy”: a growing body of polemic claiming that Jews were responsible for funding the slave trade, and so that the Jews, as a race, were hostile to giving Africa its rightful place in Western culture and society. Some of this work – for example, the anonymously published The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews – was castigated in the press for encouraging anti-Semitic attitudes among blacks. But The Secret Relationship was on the reading list of one of Martin’s courses; at Wellesley in 1993 he publicly defended it, and attacked Lefkowitz at the same time. Wellesley condemned the anti-Semitism that seemed to characterize that attack, in particular, in context, Martin’s identification of Lefkowitz as Jewish. But, citing a principle of academic freedom, the College continued to ignore the issue that still troubled Lefkowitz: the standing of the “stolen legacy”.

The matter escalated, with publications of various kinds on both sides, including various inflammatory “broadsides” by Martin, still accessible on the internet. In late 1993 Martin published The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley battlefront. Anticipating that, Lefkowitz wrote a piece describing the whole dispute. Here she cited – as evidence of Martin’s character – an unrelated incident in a hall of residence in 1991 when, allegedly, Martin had been violently angry with and racially abusive towards a student; and the student had been accused of racism against him. This incident – on Lefkowitz’s account and that of others – had been badly handled by the college, resulting in the student’s withdrawal. In her report of the incident she used material published by a recent graduate, in which some of the details of the incident were awry. Martin then (in late 1993) brought a suit against Lefkowitz and against the students who had published the incident, for libel, and against Wellesley for discrimination. Lefkowitz sought support from Wellesley, whose Dean castigated her for the mistakes of detail in her account, and refused to offer her any support; in the event she received pro bono representation from the Anti-Defamation League. As the wheels of the law grind slowly, she applied for summary dismissal in 1997; the case was dismissed the following year; and the consequent appeal by Martin was eventually dismissed in mid-1999. The cases against Wellesley and against the students were eventually dismissed in 2002.

No matter how open-mindedly one approaches this story – certainly Lefkowitz made several false moves along the way – it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that she was subjected to unwarranted pressure and abuse. The grimness lies in the subtext of her account – in just what it was like to stand alone against the hostility generated by the original squabble, and to do so in the minefield of accusations of racism. Lefkowitz describes, for example, an event at UC Davis in 1997, where the lecture she gave was followed by an inflammatory speech by Khalid Muhammad which was abusive and itself racist in its accusations of racism against her. It is not, of course, racist to talk about racism, nor racist to conclude that in some particular case there has been no significant racial abuse. But Lefkowitz’s insistence that there had been no abuse was indeed characterized as racist. Her story exemplifies the dangers, for any properly integrated society, not only of racism, but also of the use of the charge of racism as a weapon in disputes that are about something else. It also underlines the importance for institutions of dealing effectively with aggressive confrontation.

Bernal and others were surely right to claim that the ideology of those interpreting ancient texts was bound to affect how they read them. It is equally true, surely, that this is what happens all the time. We come to reading a text or to interpreting a past event or to interacting with friends and colleagues with assumptions whose place in our thinking we do not see, so that they are difficult to locate and to inspect. That does not imply that there could be a view which brings no assumptions at all with it, any more than it implies that there is no such thing as truth, however imperfectly grasped. Disagreement and debate are the best methods we have to deal with this – to see things from someone else’s point of view is vital for a balanced judgement of past or present. But then how we conduct debate and discussion is fundamental: to do so carefully and with propriety is not merely a matter of manners, but essential to the process of coming to understand. Neither aggression nor special pleading has a place there.

Lefkowitz has a clear view of the nature of truth: that relativism is false (she has no time for postmodernism, either), and that evidence and experience reveal to us matters of fact. And she is uncompromisingly committed to the truth, too, especially in the context of education. The obligation to tell the truth, she insists, overrides other purposes. If Aristotle could not have stolen his ideas from the library at Alexandria (because the chronology makes it impossible), to say that he did, even for the purpose of empowering those who identify themselves with the culture of Africa, is simply wrong.

Is she right? Does the obligation to tell the truth override the uses to which a falsehood might be put? Lefkowitz seems to suggest two sources of that obligation. The first is that in teaching we undertake to show our students and to share with our colleagues general methods of coming at the truth, methods which would be distorted by the deliberate telling of useful myths. The second seems to be an obligation we owe to the ancients themselves: to treat them and their doings fairly and decently.

Her opponents, she maintains, are guilty of both these wrongs – their failures of truth, in her account of it, have both factual and moral content. She sees it as her duty, therefore, to resist those who would merely represent as true what suits their purposes, however high-minded.

It seems to me bizarre to suggest that somehow we owe it to Plato and Aristotle not to accuse them of pinching their ideas from the Egyptians; unless you define objective harm in an extraordinary way, they must be undamaged by anything we might say, millennia later. Our primary obligations are to the living, among whom our interest in history is, in part at least, our attempt to understand ourselves. For that, we shall need to be truthful, so far as we can, and resist the replacement of a truth by a socially useful falsehood. If we are to understand each other across racial divides, that had better not be done by telling a history that is not true. Furthermore, perhaps we do not need to calculate whether the truth is, overall and over time, more useful than benign falsehoods, if we suppose that truth has an intrinsic value of its own. This may be an uncomfortable thought, not least for metaphysical reasons; but it surely underlies most of our strong commitments. Truth just matters; and that this is so is part of the purpose of any university worth its salt. Universities are in the business of explaining how complicated it is to arrive at truth, and how hazardous; and of showing the whole academic community that the hazards do not detract from its value. It is a consequence that methods of inquiry, and modes of discussion, which are likely to distort the truth, or to turn people aside from fear, should be foresworn. This applies to prejudice wherever it occurs (Bernal is right), and it applies, too, to accusations of prejudice, where those accusations might be designed to engender fear.

Lefkowitz focuses attention on just how far a principle of academic freedom could justify what happened. But with freedom of this sort – the freedom to say what one thinks without fear – there comes also responsibility, not only to colleagues and students, but to the wider world. In part this is responsibility to the truth, and to our methods of finding it out; and in part this is about how we go about saying what we think. For what we say itself affects how we think: speech is not merely the bare transmission of the truth of the world out there. To suppose otherwise is the source of thoughtless derision of “political correctness”; but responsible speech is essential to our dealings with each other. Whether by unthinking idiom or by careless inference, we can do harm to others, or to ourselves. Consider the language of racial hatred to which Lefkowitz was herself exposed, when her opponents suggested that since she is a Jew, she said what she said because she was a Jew; and thus that this was merely the manifestation of some ancient hatred of the Jews for black people. This is what it is to stereotype; and it harms not only by virtue of the particular stereotypes on offer, but also by virtue of the thought they import – that stereotypes do indeed explain. This does untold harm in race and gender relations; care with how we speak, “political correctness”, is part of how we can avoid that harm. But that care needs to be even-handed, to be taken without regard to the injustices of history by both sides to a debate. It was a failure to do so that caused such trouble and distress at Wellesley in the 1990s. It is to the College’s discredit that it let it happen.

Mary Lefkowitz
HISTORY LESSON
A race odyssey
202pp. Yale University Press. £18 (US $25).
978 0 300 12659 4

Mary Margaret McCabe is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at King's College London. She is currently a Leverhulme Trust Major Research fellow.

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