“bleached marble monuments to their own superiority”
By 
One one level, Elon Musk and his similarly racist fellow travelers picking a Christopher Nolan film as their latest dumb culture was really stupid, especially when they tried to convince themselves that it wouldn’t be popular. But as Adam Serwer observes, they couldn’t help themselves based on their own deranged premises:
In Donald Trump’s America, however, many on the right loathe this film. Trump’s disregard for rules and institutions is the reason his supporters love him, and this film argues that such disregard has disastrous long-term consequences. The film can easily be interpreted as a conservative critique of Trumpist radicalism. That, however, is not why so many on the MAGA right have attacked it. The actual reason they hate the film is that there are Black and trans people in it.
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, joined the online tantrum over the casting of the actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, whose presence in Troy justified Agamemnon’s invasion. The trans actor Elliot Page plays Sinon, a poor boy from Ithaca who is brave enough to travel with Odysseus in place of the cowardly aristocrat Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson. Antinous lies repeatedly about his willingness to go to war in order to hide the fact that Sinon went in his place. One may detect in this a subtle critique of the reactionary masculinism represented by those crashing out over Page’s casting. There are those of us who talk about being brave, and those of us who have to be.
Musk called Nolan an “anti-White racist,” while other conservatives complained that Nyong’o was simply too ugly to play Helen. Although many tried to couch their complaints in critiques of the film’s historical inaccuracy, The Odyssey is a fantasy film that features magic and monsters. Moreover, these outbursts regularly occur whenever Black people are cast in popular feature films and series. Some reactionaries will always find a reason to demand all-white entertainment, regardless of whether there are mermaids, hobbits, or lightsabers involved. Their real problem is with people they consider beneath them getting roles that show them as the equals of white people—or really, specific kinds of white people. No one was complaining about the casting of actors of British, Australian, and German descent in Troy more than a decade ago; after all, they were largely blond.
The stakes are perhaps higher with The Odyssey than with The Lord of the Rings or The Little Mermaid, given the right wing’s tendency to treat the great accomplishments of human civilization as the exclusive patrimony of white people, and to project contemporary politics onto Europe in antiquity. “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Stephen Miller declared in a speech at the funeral for the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.”
People “from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel,” are coming to America, Miller fumed on Fox News after the Supreme Court narrowly upheld birthright citizenship, “and they can just come into the country, have a baby, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?” This is a sort of racial stolen valor, which takes for white people of any background every accomplishment from ancient Athens to the Atlanta airport.
Similarly, after the Supreme Court determined Trump could revoke temporary protected status for Haitian refugees, the right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly bellowed for the refugees to “go back to fucking Haiti” and said, “We know our country’s better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it.”
But of course neither Kelly nor Miller “built this country,” and they have as much to do with, say, the writing of The Odyssey or the painting of the Sistine Chapel as I do—the fact that Kelly and Miller are white does not make these accomplishments theirs. People who espouse these views do not value the classics for what they can teach us about the ancient world or our own, but as bleached marble monuments to their own superiority.
Pace Cornel West, when MAGA freaks talk about the canon, they don’t mean that people should actually read/watch the classics, they just mean “history belongs exclusively to white people.” Culture makes them reach for their AR-15.