In October 2026, Good Work Institute welcomed local writer Curtis Dozier to discuss his book The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. Curtis is an internationally recognized expert on how extremists and hate groups invoke Greco-Roman antiquity to promote their politics. He’s been documenting examples of this for the past decade on his award-winning website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, and earlier this year published The White Pedestal based on his research.

This thought-provoking conversation reminded me that ideas are powerful. Which ideas are amplified matter. Some ideas lead to systems of oppressive power that create tremendous suffering. Someone asked Curtis if he gets pushback for his critical (and courageous) research and writing on how the classics have been used to justify white supremacy, xenophobia and misogyny. We learned that people accuse him of mishandling history, treating it not as a scholar but as a political activist. His response to that really struck me. When scholars act as if history is apolitical and continue a tradition of uncritically amplifying ideas that oppress and harm groups of people, they are choosing to maintain the status quo. And that choice is a deeply political act. But it’s on the wrong side of justice. In his book and in this talk, Curtis offers an example of looking deeply into the harmful things happening around us and making a choice to disrupt normalizing the status quo. Let’s amplify and practice ideas of sharing power that lead to just systems that generate equality and liberation.