" 
 :The debate we are talking about began in 1993 and abated by the end of the decade, thus I would consider it a ""prolonged, public, and heated"" disagreement"" and therefore think the word controversy is appropriate. The debate extended outward from academia and became a subject of national conversation because it related directly to larger concerns such as race, identity, and academic freedom. The debate spawned dozens of books, scholarly articles, and conferences and was consistently reported on in the press. A simple search of just the phrase ""Black Athena"" on JSTOR finds 642 scholarly articles published since 1987 when the book came out. The debate is, in fact, still ongoing. Lefkowitz published her book History Lesson: A Race Odyssey in 2008 and Bernal published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: The Linguistic Evidence, Vol. 3 in 2006. This in spite of the fact that both Lefkowitz and Martin are now retired from Wellesley and teaching entirely. As a result, discussion of this particular incident is not as common as it was fifteen years ago. But that doesn't mean it was an inconsequential, minor or irrelevant. I hope you were joking about the YouTube videos. Just because a topic isn't the subject of a great number of videos uploaded to YouTube doesn't mean it is not serious or important and I'm sure you know that.   "