University of Iowa professor Sarah Bond thinks the white marble used in classical Greek, Roman and Renaissance statue is somehow related to the “white supremacist ideas today,” Campus Reform reports.

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Bond posits in an article just published in Hyperallergic that “many of the statues reliefs and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted,” by which she is suggesting that the white marble was colored in its original form.

Stretching matters even further, Bond goes on to suggest that “the equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe,” making it “a dangerous construct that continues to influence white supremacist ideas today.”

Bond sees the propaganda of white supremacy everywhere, ranting about a conspiracy where “most museums and art history textbooks contain a predominantly neon white display of skin tone” that she has infected “the way we view the antique world.”

This “assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white! — across the Mediterranean region.” Although Bond doesn’t complain about British actors playing so many Greek and Roman characters in popular films, she insists will those statues and pictures of white people are just “further ammunition for white supremacists today, including groups like Identity Europa, who use classical statuary as a symbol of white male superiority.”

Bond sees a large job ahead to rectify the errors of white supremacist art interpretation: “It may have taken just one classical statue to influence the false construction of race, but it will take many of us to tear it down,” Bond says, though adding optimistically that “we have the power to return color to the ancient world, but it has to start with us.”

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