Racism, History and Lies
Free access
How white supremacist ideology functions as a justification and ongoing template for domination. Narratives of supremacy in textbooks, novels, movies, advertising, comics, public monuments, and maps. Assumptions embedded in naming and language: “the March of Civilization,” “barbarism,” “progress.” What is communicated by phrases like “Old World” and “New World”? What is left out in talk about “The Ancient World,” “the Classics,” “the Canon.”
We’ll look at pseudo-scientific race theories: Caucasoids and Others; whitening the Egyptians; stereotypes of Indigenous peoples in the Americas; Black South Asians and Australasians, and how narratives of “vanishing” peoples cover up historical genocides. With several glimpses of the cultural achievements and treasures from places and cultures that most people are never taught about.
Presented by Max Dashu from the Suppressed Histories Archives. This video is offered open access because the subject is too important to put it behind a paywall. It needs to be available to everyone. If you would like to support this work, you can do so via www.patreon.com/maxdashu or via the donations tab on the Suppressed Histories site.
Your Instructor
Max Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to research and document global women's history, reflecting the full spectrum of the world's peoples. She uses images to teach, scanning the cultural record: archaeology, history, art, orature, linguistics and spiritual philosophies. From her collection of some 50,000 images, she has created 130 visual talks on female cultural heritages, foregrouding Indigenous traditions, with attention to patterns of conquest and domination. She is internationally known for her expertise on ancient female iconography, matricultures and patriarchal systems, medicine women and shamans, witch hunts, and female spheres of power.
Dashu's legendary visual talks bring to light female realities usually hidden from view, from ancient female figurines to women leaders, priestesses, clan mothers, philosophers, warriors and rebels. Her courses scan the cultural record—archaeology, history, art, orature, linguistics, and spiritual philosophies—making this knowledge more accessible to all education backgrounds.
Dashu has been presenting her visual talks for more than four decades, at universities, conferences, museums, community centers, bookstores, galleries, libraries and schools, in North America, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Austria, Australia, Mexico and Guatemala.
Max Dashu's book Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1000 (Veleda Press, 2016) has been acclaimed as a sourcebook on European ancestral traditions. Her forthcoming book on women in Hellenic myth and history is Vol II in her 16-volume series Secret History of the Witches.
Dashu has published in various journals and anthologies, including Goddesses in World Mythology (Praeger 2010) and the Encyclopedia of Women in World Religion (ABC-Clio 2018). She created two videos: Women's Power in Global Perspective (2008) and Woman Shaman: The Ancients (2013). Her daily posts on the Suppressed Histories Facebook page are followed by 181,000 people, and 72,000 more have viewed her articles on Academia.edu.