Donald the Dumb
Should Have Taken Art History

Donald the Dumb is a racist and a xenophobe. He doesn’t like anybody who isn’t as white as Norwegians. I pointed out in We Are Family that all present-day Norwegians came out of Africa. In fact, all people throughout the world are descendants of Africans. In reality, there is only one race, which is called the human race.


How our family inhabited the world


Apparently, our fake president was too busy tweeting to realize that we all came from Africa. Hence, this in another attempt to help educate Donald the Dumb who said, “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.”


Who is really smart of the two?


Therefore, allow me to help Donald the really smart Dummy to get closer to Einstein. This is my attempt to tutor our fake president. Let’s begin my lecture with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s comment, “We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.” Therefore, we will start with the arts. These are some of the famous Greek sculptures and the Parthenon along with a Roman sculpture, since the Romans merely attempted to copy the Greeks.


The Parthenon



The maidens on the porch of the Erechtheion



Athena



A Kore



Augustus


So, this is my first question that I would ask Donald the Dumb, “What do you see, from your viewpoint, that is common on these various art treasures? Okay, allow me to restate the question, “Since you really like people who are as white as Norwegians, do you see anything that you admire about those photos? Correct. The Greeks would have liked Norwegians also, right?”

Wrong. Even the sculptors of the Renaissance like Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Donatello made that same mistake. Actually, the word, Renaissance, means rebirth of the Greek classical period. During the heyday of the Western world during the Greek classical period, they were into colors or what is often called among art history scholars polychromy. Now, they have used UV light to disclose the actual colors that the Greeks and Romans used on their statues. However, Vinzenz Brinkmann said, “It turns out that vision is heavily subjective. You need to transform your eye into an objective tool in order to overcome this powerful imprint. In other words, we in the modern world discriminate against the colors used by the Greeks.”


UV light shows the colors


Marco Leona added another insight, “It’s like the best-kept secret that’s not even a secret.” All that one needs to do is to look carefully without even the UV light to assist you. You can see flakes of colors in the sculptures and other artistic objects.


The high relief without and with the colors


The following building and sculptures that I showed you, Donald, are as they were originally.


The Parthenon



The maidens on the porch of the Erechtheion



Athena



A kore



Augustus


Additionally, we have, in the West, a racial prejudice against nonwhites in the arts and life in general. Johann Winckelmann, the father of art history, maintained “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” and that “color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty.” Hence in the arts and life, white is beautiful.

While racism was prevalent during the Greco-Roman period, the color of a person’s skin wasn’t relevant. They had slaves from Gaul (France) and Germany who were the same color as the Greeks and Romans. Also, in Homer’s Odyssey, Athena reinstated Odysseus’ looks: “He became black-skinned again and the hairs became blue around his chin.”

Even in the British Museum, which stole the Elgin marbles from the Acropolis in Greece, spent hours polishing the statues in the 1930s to erase any color from them. They were shined until the Elgin marbles were as white as pearls.

In the early 60s, I went to Muskingum College. I took The Arts, which was a required 10-hour art history class in my junior year. At the end of that year, Louie Palmer, my instructor, asked me to be his teaching assistant in my senior year. Essentially, I retook The Arts, taught a handful of subsections each week, and wrote and graded the midterms and finals for both semesters. That experience had a profound effect upon me. However, little did I know that I would be teaching art history to Donald the Dumb over a half century later. Hey, Donald, did you get this art history class? We all descended from people from Africa.