"The Negro Problem", Race, and Classics in Higher Education

by Jackie Murray and Rebecca Futo Kennedy 

Dr. Jackie Murray and I recently wrote a short piece for ESPN’s The Undefeated reflecting on the history of Black engagement with the Greco-Roman past in the United States in light of the closure of Howard University’s Classics department. The original essay was bout 2500 words longer, of course, because Jackie and I are like that. What got cut (rightly for the venue!) was a more detailed discussion of the fierce debates between Emancipation and the end of Jim Crow over what right, if any, Black Americans had to higher education and how a Classical liberal arts education was linked to the idea of voting rights and full equality. We have decided to publish that material (which will appear in various other guises in books and articles we are both working on separately and together) here at the blog. We hope you will read it in tandem with our piece at The Undefeated. 

PS. Working with Morgan Jerkins for the The Undefeated essay was amazing. She is such an impressive editor and really got the best out of us. We recommend you check out her books. 

*** 

It is inarguable that without an education system made up of the extensive study of Greek and Roman languages and culture, the standard liberal arts education up until the mid-20th century, there could be no “American” culture. This includes African-American culture. Black abolitionists Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass immediately spring to mind, but a whole host of Black intellectuals and artists used their Classical education to undermine any and all uses of ancient Greeks and Romans to justify slavery and racism. Education in classics gave and still gives Black thinkers and artists fluency in the cultural language that undergirds the architecture of American empire to show that a white supremacist empire was and is, in John Levi Barnard’s words, an “empire of ruin.” For every white supremacist invocation of the classics there has been an equal invocation in the name of Black liberation, anti-racism, and equal rights. 

Early African American literature was not just an unrelenting series of up-from-slavery autobiographies and narratives. This is a common misconception. Much of the literature  produced in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction were focused on the contemporary experience of being Black in America, on racial oppression and terrorism after emancipation. Like white American literature of the time, it relied on classical forms and references as well as content, but more often than not American American writers tied their classicism to anti-racist arguments. W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk was not the only work of literature that advocated for Black classical education as a way to eradicate the color-line. Pauline Hopkins’ novels were all rooted in her knowledge of the classics and enshrined an anti-racist, Black-centered vision of the ancient world. In 1901, Charles Chesnutt drew on his deep classical training to write his anti-racist novel, The Marrow of Tradition, about the 1898 Wilmington race riot that ended Republican control of the legislature in North Carolina. 

Chesnutt’s novel is crucial to understanding the centrality of classics in the fight for Black equality. The struggle between his protagonist, the prosperous Black physician Dr. Miller, the son of a slave, and his antagonist, Confederate Major Carteret, who are both descended from the same white planter, exposes the moral bankruptcy of slavery and white supremacy and the false narrative of Black inferiority. Significantly, the virtues of Miller’s side of the family are enumerated by Mr. Delamere, “who read the Latin poets, and whose allusions were apt to be classical rather than scriptural.” Through Dr. Miller’s achievements in medicine, which could only have come with a classical education, Chesnutt makes the argument for the benefits that educated Black people can offer the Black community as well as US society in general. He even attributes to Miller a recognizable Black-centered vision of antiquity and inversion of the white supremacist march of civilization:

 “The negro was here before the Anglo-Saxon was evolved, and his thick lips and heavy-lidded eyes looked out from the inscrutable face of the Sphinx across the sands of Egypt while yet the ancestors of those who now oppress him were living in caves, practicing human sacrifice, and painting themselves with woad — and the negro is here yet.” 

Crucial to Chesnutt’s argument was a defense of the Fourteenth Amendment. As John Levi Barnard notes, Chesnutt’s novel fits within “a continuous tradition of [b]lack classicism as political engagement and historical critique across at least two centuries.” Like all anti-lynching activists and Civil rights leaders during the rise of Jim Crow, Chesnutt saw the resistance to Black education, especially Black classical education, for what it was, part of the effort to curtail Black voting rights in the south and to cement the apparatus of segregation in the South and even extend it to the North. And they were right. 

James D. Anderson in his monumental study, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, observes that any Black institution in the early 1900s that emphasized classical liberal education was attacked as impractical and “not geared to prepare [Black] youth for useful citizenship and productive efficiency.” He quotes Wallace Buttrick, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and an assessor for the General Education Board (GEB) who opposed funding Black schools that taught a classical liberal arts curriculum. Expressing views that resonated with Booker T. Washington’s, Buttrick advocated that Black schools be “‘Hamptonized’ (as far as is practicable),” eliminating Greek and Latin, “to say nothing of piano music and the like.” Buttrick (along with most of the GEB) supported segregationism and white supremacism.

Buttrick’s use of “Hamptonizing” captures the dominant white supremacist ideology about the purpose of Black education: to train Black youths to perform their role in the social hierarchy and in the caste system based on the principle of a division of labor according race for their economic advantage. In other words, Hamptionized Black institutions were not supposed to produce Black intellectual or political leaders, but a source of cheap underclass labor.  

We tend to think that the debate over Black education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was solely between Black intellectuals in either Booker T. Washington’s camp or W.E.B. Du Bois’. This is far too simplistic a picture that ignores the extent to which white supremacists and segregationists were invested in the outcomes of the debate. The General Education Board was founded in 1902 with a large endowment from John D. Rockefeller, Sr. with the goal of supporting public education for all without distinguishing race. Except in the south. There, the only way the GEB was permitted to operate and fund schools was if those schools were segregated, and the Black schools restricted to vocational training. As Anderson again highlights, it was the dedicated position of the GEB to “attach the Negro to the soil”, an educational accommodation to the economy of the Jim Crow south that sought to prevent Black laborers from moving to urban centers. This position was advocated most vocally by Robert C. Ogden, one-time president of the GEB and a president of the Hampton Institute, an HBCU that advocated for vocational and specifically agricultural education for Black Americans.  

But even the GEB’s segregationist accommodation was not enough for some southern whites. Mildred Lewis Rutherford, the Historian General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy ran a parallel cultural campaign against both Black suffrage and Black education in the South using an education curriculum designed for white students that painted an idyllic image of the Antebellum era, promoted dangerous negative stereotypes of Black people, and delegitimized Reconstruction Amendments, especially the Fourteenth. She also effectively canonized popular literature that instilled fear and sparked violence against the “uppity” classically educated Black man. Rutherford was the woman most responsible for indoctrinating generations of Southern school children in the mythology of the Lost Cause. She established Thomas Dixon’s notoriously racist novel The Leopard’s Spots (1902)––later revised as The Clansman (1905), which became the basis of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915)––in the canon of Southern literature to be read by school children along side a host of other pro-Confederacy and white supremacist works. In her influential The South in history and literature; a hand-book of southern authors, from the settlement of Jamestown, 1607, to living writers (1907), Rutherford devoted a chapter to Dixon’s biography. 

Dixon himself was well aware of the efforts of Black intellectuals to tie classical education to the eradication of race prejudice and the fight against black disenfranchisement. A year after Chesnutt published The Marrow of Tradition, Dixon published The Leopard’s Spots, his own fictionalized retelling of the same 1898 race riot as a direct response. It’s title alluded to Jeremiah 13:23––“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard its spots?”–– and recalled for those who had read Chesnutt’s, which attributed racist views to his character Major Carteret: “These pitiful attempts to change their physical characteristics were an acknowledgment, on their own part, that the negro was doomed, and that the white man was to inherit the earth and hold all other races under his heel.” 

Dixon’s novel and the plays based on it provoked a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. By presenting Black men, especially classically educated, vote-wielding black men, as lecherous threats to white womanhood and menaces to society in general, Dixon deliberately sought to entangle the debate over Black education and political equality with white terrorist violence. His works, which were wildly popular among white northerners as well as southerners, corresponded with an uptick in lynchings. In 1905, a staging of the Clansman turned into a race riot that prefigured the Atlanta massacre that would happen a year later.

In August of the same year, Dixon wrote a feature length article in the Saturday Evening Post, “Booker T. Washington and the Negro” that was ostensibly an attack on Washington’s writings and edited work on education––Up from Slavery (1901), The Future of the American Negro (1900) and The Negro Problem (1903). The article was also a broadside against Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Kelly Miller (Howard alumnus, faculty member, and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard from 1907 to 1918). As far as Dixon was concerned, “no amount of education of any kind, industrial, classical or religious” would make a black man equal to a white man. His attack shows that he not only read Washington, Chesnutt, Du Bois, and Miller but that he perfectly understood that the rift among them was not about the goals of Black education––the eradication of racial prejudice––but about how strenuously and how openly social and political equality should be demanded. By labeling the eradication of racism with “amalgamation”, i.e. white genocide, Dixon used the crisis over Black education as an opportunity to stir up in the mainstream press the same racial paranoia and hatred that his novels and plays were stirring up. As John David Smith details, Dixon’s attacks only intensified as the NAACP became an important organization and against W.E.B. Du Bois specifically after the publication of his monumental Black Reconstruction in America (1935).

We focus on Dixon and his attack against Black education because most Black leaders at the time wrote and spoke out against him and his works, and because his works produced deadly real-world effects in the form of racial violence, lynchings, and even bombings. Drusilla Dunjee Houston, writing for the Black Dispatch about the Tulsa Massacre, directly linked Dixon’s novels and plays and their glorification of the KKK in the lead up to the event to the racial hatred that fired the horrific attack. The education white students received in high schools and colleges across the South shaped their acceptance of racial segregation and susceptibility to condoning or even participating in the acts of racial terrorism that defined the Black experience in the early 20th century. 

Even when Black people migrated from the south, they still had to fight to gain access to the same kind of liberal education offered in predominantly white northern schools and colleges. In many cases, knowledge of Latin––rarely taught outside private schools––was an entrance requirement. In other words, classics functioned as a gatekeeper, restricting access to top-ranked universities, the training grounds of future leaders, the elite, white men (and occasionally women) who became the new Alexanders and Caesars of politics, industry, and the military. College campuses  buildings with large white columns, random inscriptions in Latin or ancient Greek, and statues reminiscent of ancient bronze and marble sculpture.    

Under Jim Crow, in both the white schools and at both northern and southern universities, the Latin textbooks they studied were (and still are) filled with stories of “happy slaves” that describe beatings of “lazy slaves” as morality lessons. As historian Lyra Monteiro has shown, in the years before the Civil War, a white supremacist grammar of landscape and architecture also developed connecting whiteness to neoclassical architecture, modern designs that incorporate elements of ancient Greek and Roman architecture, especially monumental white columns. The wealthy, slave-owning elite constructed visual echoes of the architecture of ancient Rome on plantation mansions and civic buildings, like the US Capitol, to justify their slavery based empire.

As US colonization of the continent moved westward, new universities and colleges took up the same classical curriculum; the white settler colonialism of these colleges reflected in the neoclassical architecture of their churches, libraries, and lecture halls. The Jim Crow-era Confederate statues evoking Greek and Roman statues of emperors and generals, were also part of this white supremacist visual rhetoric that culminated in the neoclassicism of the World’s Fairs, especially the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, visited by nearly 20 million people, which intentionally excluded African-Americans from showcasing Black progress since emancipation. And, neoclassical Confederate monuments began to proliferate not just the southern landscape. Dixon’s work operated within this racescape of popular “white” classics. The effectiveness of the “Birth of a Nation” propaganda campaign that he spawned relied in a large part on this unholy alliance between classics and Social Darwinism (“survival of the fittest”) that dominated race thinking at the time. 

Black leaders pushed back against this racist discourse. They centered a more accurate interpretation of Greek and Roman antiquity in their argument for the power of education to uplift the formerly enslaved. Kelly Miller undermined the racist Social Darwinist premises of Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots. In his open letter, he argued that so far from being at the bottom of the so-called hierarchy of civilizations and intellectually inferior by nature, as contemporary racist thinking held, black people had achieved heights in literature, art, sciences as well as in the professions in a mere generation after emancipation. His own classical education and achievements proved that Black students taught in Negro schools and colleges were just as adept at Greek and Latin as the best white students who had their education at elite schools. 

The anti-Black terrorist violence and repression that Dixon and others stoked was deliberately designed to keep Black people in an inferior economic and social place. Consequently, it led to the great migration North in the 1920s. Significantly, it is this move north that gave many of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance access to the classical education curriculum. In Miller’s contribution to the anthology credited with launching the movement,The New Negro, compiled by Alain Locke, chair of Philosophy at Howard, he pointed to the original intentions of Howard’s founders to educate students to reach their full-potential through liberal arts education. Ironically, his claims about the disparity between the endowments white universities receive and those Howard receives are echoed by Carter and Hogan. However, Miller decried the over-privileging of the professional and vocational training at the expense of education in the liberal arts.

“The ideal is not a working man, but a man working; not a business man, but a man doing business; not a school man, but a man teaching school; not a statesman, but a man handling the affairs of state; not a medicine man, but a man practicing medicine; not a clergyman, but a man devoted to the things of the soul. Only upon such a platform, the writer submits, could Howard University justify its claims as the national University of the colored race.”

Kelly Miller strongly advocated for the kind of classical liberal arts curriculum that he studied himself and was adamant that if Howard University aspired to a national Black university, it must be “a conscious and recognized center of the higher life and cultural interests of the race.” And he did so knowing that teaching classics at Howard was an affront to white supremacists who fought to deny Black students access to it, even with violence.

Miller’s view reflected those of his generational peers––Chesnutt, Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Anna Julia Cooper––who were all opponents in some form of Booker T.  Washington’s Hampton-based education plan. Washington (who was taught classics by Miller!) saw little to no value in Black students following the classical liberal arts curriculum. To be sure, he rightly understood that white people in the South saw the “negro uplift” that Miller, Du Bois and other were advocating to be linked to Black demands for political and social equality. He, however, erroneously assumed that Black people who only aspired to economic equality would somehow be spared the racial violence that those aspiring to social and political equality experienced. Accordingly, Washington encouraged the vast majority of Black students to pursue training programs that met the demand for jobs that the white industrialists were willing to offer Black workers within the emerging racial caste system.

[this was also cut from/condensed in the ESPN essay]

The humanities give students what Black classicist and political scientist Danielle Allen today calls verbal empowerment. In the tradition of W.E.B Du Bois and others, Allen emphasizes that the critical reasoning skills that come from exposure to different perspectives and modes of thought are what an informed citizenry thrives on in a democracy. Classics is a microcosm of humanities education, its interdisciplinary scope encompasses all the liberal arts––history, language, literature, philosophy, art, natural sciences, and more. And because, as we have mentioned, ancient Greece and Rome have been made to serve American white settler colonial racescaping, a robust humanities education that includes the Classics, gives students, not only an additional vantage on human dilemmas from outside our modern pinhole-camera, but also the capacity to read, deconstruct and overwrite our cultural programing, as it were, in more equitable and just terms. 

Being able to learn from the mistakes of history, being able to imagine a more just future does not come from whatever job training the next economy is clamoring for. The insight into how to change our world for the better comes from studying history, reading and writing literature, contemplating and making art, learning languages and different ways of thought. Thus verbally empowered, the debt-peons among today’s college graduates, even if they can’t effect real change in the world, can at least fend off the relentless anti-democratic white supremacist messaging bludgeoning of their psyche day in and day out. As Du Bois recognized long ago, to deny an full education (which to him included a strong classical education) only served to perpetuate illiteracy and poverty among Black and poor white people alike. 

As a discipline, Classics is undergoing a reckoning with its investments in whiteness. Some administrators see this moment as an opportunity to prune away more of the humanities at non-elite schools. Classicists have never really tried to justify the field’s existence without reaching for elitist and even racist discourses. However, cutting Classics at a place like Howard demands a response that makes no such appeals.

The loss of the classics program will contribute to the very educational apartheid that Hogan and Carter highlight. Today a tiny wealthy (predominantly white) minority notoriously hoards educational resources––their money secures access to the most prestige-conferring institutions, which, not coincidentally, offer the fullest array of arts, sciences, and humanities. Poorer colleges and universities feel pressured to close their Classics departments or public high schools to eliminate their Latin programs. But these cuts only relegate Classics to predominantly white, elite-serving institutions, which process, of course, the reinforces the racist construction of Classics as “for whites only.” 

This system is driven by the super-rich donors and corporate CEOs who sit on boards of trustees of elite- and non-elite-serving institutions, protecting the brand of the former for their offspring by pushing the latter to become glorified training centers for debt-laden graduates who will eventually flood the job-market of the very industries they represent, driving up the profits by driving down the wages of college-educated labor. University presidents are rarely ever academics who prioritize quality teaching and research. They are almost always pseudo-CEOs who are paid true one-percenter salaries and who treat higher education like widget-making for the labor market. Since their edu-factories that are supposed to produce highly-skilled, heavily indebted, and docile workers, in their calculus the arts and humanities, and classics in particular, are first to go. In Howard’s case, we are told that a department like Classics is too costly to maintain––a ridiculous claim on its face. What we aren’t told is that a president making 7 times what a full professor makes and an administration with a budget that dwarfs that of several departments two and three times over are too costly to maintain. 

The closure of Howard’s Classics department as well as other humanities departments in public and non-elite colleges threatens to entrench educational and economic disparity. Poor and working class students go into debt to get training in a job that will be obsolete before they ever become solvent. Whereas if they earned along the way the skills that the humanities cultivate they would be more flexible and able to make earn in the long run. The (predominantly white) sons and daughters of the one-percent don’t have these problems: by virtue of their wealth, privilege, and status, they get access to the full range of educational options and graduate college as the heirs of “Western Civilization”, just like their Gilded age counterparts. 

Why Culture War?

Some brief Sunday morning thoughts on Culture Wars. Not really developed and surely not original. But it woke me up, so writing it out seemed the best way to deal with it.

Population management: It isn’t just race, but gender, sexuality, class, disability--these are all ways of placing people into categories and using these categories to manage populations. The management of these populations is in the service of dominant groups in order to maintain power. Individuals can be coopted into power or be granted access to power, but the presence of those individuals neither undermines nor erases the fact of the population management system--they are the exceptions (granted in Plato’s Republic, for example) that demonstrate the myth of meritocracy that underscores the logic and propaganda of those with power. 

Gender, sexuality, race, class, disability are all systems of oppression in so far as they put people into categories that then position people as groups hierarchically in social, political, and legal practice. This serves people at the top of the hierarchy, who then use media and education as ways to naturalize the system and obscure its operations.  

Institutions of higher education and education in K-12 schools need to be controlled because over the course of the last few decades, areas of study have emphasized examination of the systems of oppression in an attempt to both reveal their function and dismantle them. Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Black Studies, etc--these programs all undermine the standard narratives that were traditionally provided by Econ, Anthro, Soc, Poli Sci, Bio/Genetics, Psych, and humanities programs in general that served the needs of population management. 

Example: Who is served by the standard use of the stock market and import/export measures and GDP to decide the health of an economy? Certainly not those who do not have capital or access to it. Certainly not those intentionally excluded (i.e. the working classes, i.e. the majority of the population). Who is served by the notion of humans as economic “rational actors”? Certainly not anyone except those who want to present their models of economic development as embedded in human nature, when they are, in fact, systems intended to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. News programs like NPR and schools of economics in higher education generally support and naturalize this narrative. 

Culture Wars are one way to stamp out opposition to and revelation of the systems of oppression at work.

‘Socialist” is a Culture War slur tossed at anyone who questions the system, thanks to the use of media and higher ed to suggest that caring for a society generally and distributing wealth to those whose labor produce it is a social, economic and political bad. Using media and education to convince those left out of such distribution is a primary tool for population management. They do so using other forms, like race and gender and sexuality.

Culture Wars around abortion are designed to obfuscate the ways women are oppressed through societal structures around reproduction (child care, health care, etc). “Bathroom laws” and “Girls' Sports laws” are ways of emphasizing the clear gender division that is necessary to maintaining the fiction of the “natural” order of men over women and reproduction as women’s primary (and only, really) natural function. 

Culture Wars around race create a dominant block around whiteness that encourages ignoring the realities of economic and gender oppression as it functions in society in the name of shared racial superiority. The current attacks on “Critical Race Theory” are intended to prevent learning about the histories and realities of the use of “race” as a tool for population management. The propaganda pushes for the designated "white" part of the population to willingly sacrifice BIPOC communities in order to preserve a minimum of other privileges (which are not really privileges, just tiny morsels tossed out by those with power). If you can’t talk about race, you can’t reveal or understand its function. If you can’t see or understand it (if you are “colorblind” or “don’t see race”), then there is no work to be done to dismantle it. 

Because higher education has been moving in the last 50 years towards systemic critiques of power and of the mechanisms for population management, higher education must be contained and, if needed, the critical studies, dismantled. Humanities was once a bastion of power and privilege. As it has intentionally become more critical in its relationship to systems of oppression, it has been repeatedly attacked and undermined. These attacks play out in the media in no small part because of the investment by elite power in maintaining its control over its tools for population management--why does “Classics” matter enough to warrant debate in the national press? Because it has always been a tool for race, gender, and class control. As it more firmly slips out of the control of traditional power, it must be either brought back to heel (as in the past with yokings to Great Books and Western Civ curricula) or destroyed (along with critical race, gender,sexuality, and class studies). 

Happy Mother’s Day. 

How are you feeling?

Not that anyone asked, but I have feelings. Confused ones, some not particularly generous ones, some overwhelming in their fragility, some close to joyous, but tinged with sadness. Feelings abound and have been abounding for some time all around this one part of my life. i.e. I'm not sure how to feel these days about being part of the discipline variously called "classics", "ancient Mediterranean studies", "ancient studies", "ancient Greek and Roman studies", etc. It has nothing to do with the content or rabid White nationalism. It has to do with the way we act towards each other under the heading of "professionalism".

On the one hand, over the last few weeks, we have seen some of the worst type of racism rear its head under the guise of "civility" and "professionalism", where colleagues who are part of the elite Establishment and prestige networks have been trying to use those networks and their connections to hinder the work of, silence, and harm our current SCS president, who just happens to be the first Black woman president, and one of only a handful that have come from Small Liberal Arts colleges in my memory (though I will be honest that there are numerous past presidents I have never heard of). On the other hand, I witnessed an event last night that represents to me the best of what a field can offer if it chooses--community, care, even love. These two hands sit in constant tension and make me want to withdrawal into just a tiny corner, the corner of my direct relationships, but even here the ugly sometimes intrudes.

I've been struggling with how to address the recent round of racism (the round that followed the still not quite expired previous round of the Discourse) because it has been ugly and is characterized by attempts of a small group within the discipline to use institutional power and authority to enact their harms. The failure of the institutional mechanisms to bend to their will as easily as they likely found it did in the past may be a further cause of consternation for them. The result is multiple ham fisted public statements by various people trying to justify their actions and choices either with hardly credible appeals to "liberalism v identity politics", rationalizations of "professionalism", or even charges of "reverse racism". And now there is word on the street that a group of past presidents of the SCS, unhappy that the interloper has not been properly put in her place (i.e. somewhere other than her current place) are planning a letter proclaiming that the SCS do so or else. The fixation on one, or perhaps two, unrelated tweets, reveals the petty, personal shallowness of the whole affair. Of course, it is true that aspects of the tweets caused one or two people to have feelings, but the reactions and behavior around those tweets is far uglier and unprofessional than anything within them. Everything about the reaction screams anti-Black racism. All of this has me trying not to gag.

I do not understand how anyone in our field can call themselves intelligent or astute or how we can trust their powers of analysis when they cannot see even through the lens of "optics" how bad it is for a whole gaggle of White or Whiteness-invested prestige wielding Establishment power players in the field to be using their names, networks, and institutional authorities to attack a Black woman colleague. And doing it so disingenuously. Because, of course, their bald uses of power and privilege are civil and professional. Except, of course, when it isn't. Because nothing screams "professionalism" or "civility" to me like screenshotting a tweet and attacking (or planning attacks upon) them among a "small group" of powerful, established members of the field. Except, of course, when attempting to undermine any authority being SCS president may have by declaring that the one currently holding the position is "illegitimate" over and over in personal and even professional communications--primarily because they think they themselves should be or should decide who is the proper president through institutional CHANNELS and not membership at large through a petition process and then popular vote. Except, of course, when using a public FaceBook group for a professional org to accuse "some Black classicists" of being anti-semitic while simultaneously using "other Black classicists" as cover (the worst sort of "I have Black friends"). All of this has me trying not to gag. 

Did we not just live through the collective White backlash against a Black US president? Did we not just try to have some sort of reckoning with the continued fact of anti-Black racism in America? Do we not see how the dynamics work? Are we incapable of seeing the racism when we ourselves are enacting it? When it is dressed up in personal grudges or civility politics and claims to professionalism? Can we not see how this is our Tan Suit™? Did we not live through the clearly and evidently unbalanced world of "antifa is the real enemy" BS? Why are we reenacting it in our discipline now? We are always a bit behind the times, sure, but the current displays to me are just stunning in their self-indulgence and lack of self-awareness. All this has me trying not to gag. It also makes me want to withdrawal even further from the mechanisms and institutions of the discipline than I already have. 

But then something happens to remind me of all the very amazing people in this field, of the ones whose slow and steady and careful work and care make the spaces around them better for everyone, even though they owe this to no one and are often the ones most vulnerable in their positions or being. Last night, the AAACC-WCC held a Solidarity Against Anti-Asian Violence event over zoom. And there was truly solidarity in that space, a community of care. It was a good reminder that these are our colleagues as well (not only the Establishment ones) and they are the future of our field so long as the rest of us care enough to not drive them out, so long as the rest of us try harder to not use whatever power and authority we have to punch down at them (feel free to keep punching up or across). So long as the rest of us don't insist on taking over spaces with our loud voices, our "well, I've been an ally for a long time so you all know I am good" self-perception and self-promotion. So long as we do the work to make our actions match our words. So long as they can feel, truly feel, that they are valued, that they and their work matters. 

But how can they know this or feel this or think this when those above, at the very top of our field can't stop themselves from continually making it clear that they only value their own voices, their own work, their own positions and those whom they see as like them? When they actively try to engage our governing institutions in silencing, harming, violating those they deem unworthy, illegitimate, and a threat to the Establishment? I woke up this morning exhausted, worried about my family and friends, angry still. I wrote the first part of this post with that anger in my heart. But as I wrap up, I am filling up my heart with the faces and words and laughs of those friends and family. They are the ones who keep me going in the field. They are the ones who deserve our efforts and thoughts and energies. 

This is how I am feeling today. 

"Classics": What is it, Who studies it, Why we do it?

 I was asked to give opening remarks for the evening General Assembly on Day 2 of the Ohio Junior Classical League convention on March 6, 2021. Here is the text. There are many links I could add, but since it was an oral presentation, there are no citations. Apologies!

Hello, everyone! I am Rebecca Futo Kennedy and I am a professor of ancient Greek and Roman studies at Denison University here in Ohio. I am pleased to have this opportunity to address you all today, especially since this is the THIRD attempt for me to do so--the first time, I came down with the flu and couldn’t be there in person, last year, the convention was, of course, cancelled due to COVID. So, third time seems to be the charm. 

I’ll start with a confession: I did not know what the Junior Classical League was until a few years ago. That is kind of amazing, if you think about it, since I got my PhD in 2003 and have been a professor since then. We didn’t have Latin or Greek in my high school. The only ancient Greek or Roman text I’d ever read until college was selections from Homer’s Odyssey. We didn’t have any Greek or Roman history at any stage. All my knowledge of myth and history came from films and TV. 

I was a first generation college student who took ancient Greek because I wanted to understand the history of the early Christian church and ancient Judaism. I became a “Classical Studies” major because I slept through a final exam in one of my required history courses and was too ashamed to ask the professor for a make up exam. I tell you this because the fact that I am zooming into you now as a tenured professor and published scholar is kind of amazing. Because one of the things I learned starting in graduate school was that "Classics" was not really for people like me. It wasn’t until grad school that I also realized that it didn’t seem to be for non-White people either. As I have moved along my career, these two statements seemed to be reaffirmed as more and more true. 

As some of you may be aware, “Classics” has been in the news a lot lately. The New York Times Magazine did an article on my colleague Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a strong voice for those of us in the discipline who re working to make it this thing we call “Classics” more inclusive of ethnically and economically diverse students and professionals as well as opening up what we mean when we say "Classics” so that what we study more accurately reflects what the ancient Greek and Roman worlds were like. 

So, in light of this, what I want to do today is provide a bit of a provocation, something for us to think with--whether we are students or teachers or family members of this thing we call “Classics”: 

I want us to consider three interconnected questions: What is “Classics”? Who is “Classics” for? Why do we study it? 

 

Grave marker for Jewish woman named Faustina from Rome.

What is it: Some people think that "Classics” starts and ends with the study of the Greek and Latin languages. We learn the language so that we can read a few select canonical texts like Homer or tragedies and Virgil and Caesar--mostly literature from 5th century Athens and Late Republican and Augustan Rome. Some people recognize that there is a lot more out there that is worth reading, whether for fun or for understanding Greek and Roman culture. So, they expand the canon to include more--maybe some Plautus and Juvenal and Martial, too. Maybe some myth, often via Ovid and Homer. Some of us lean more towards history and so we assume Classics includes not just the languages and culture of Greece and Rome, but also social, political, and economic history. Some of us can’t depend on literary texts in ancient Greek or Latin to understand history or culture and look instead to material evidence-vases, sculptures, architecture, inscriptions, even bones. One of the things that becomes super clear as you learn more about the ancient Greeks and Romans is that “Classics” is a lot more than the languages and a few select texts. 

This thing we call Classics, in fact, is made up of rich and complex intertwined worlds that criss-cross the Mediterranean and interact with peoples well beyond that sea. Those people we call Greeks and Romans lived on three continents. They came in wide ranges of skin colors from the palest “white” to brown to the darkest “black”. We know this because they tell us and show us. And because speaking Greek and writing Greek and, at some stage even calling oneself Greek ceased to be about whether your ancestors  came originally from the cities of Athens or Sparta or Corinth, but about your cultural investments. Lucian, the great satirist was Syrian, even though he was also Greek. Herodotus came from a town settled by both Greeks and a local Asian people called the Carians. Greek philosophy was developed by Greeks living in the Persian empire, they borrowed many forms of mathematics and science from those in Babylon and Egypt. Many of our most important Greek documents come from Egypt and, though in Greek, were written by and record the lives of people who thought of themselves as Greek and Egyptian and Roman--all at the same time. Because they were--we often forget that!  

To be Roman was even less about being from a specific location in Europe (Italy) than being ‘Greek’ in antiquity was. Roman, by the middle of the 1st century BCE was a name given to a political group with citizenship, whether they came from Italy, from Greece, from north Africa, or Gaul. The freedperson also become a citizen no matter where they came from--and we know that the enslaved men and women who became Roman citizens this way came to Rome from as far away as modern Ukraine, Sudan, Ghana, India and more. 

Our 2019 Summer Class at Aegina, Greece. 

Who Can Study it? So, “Classics” for many of us, if it means the study of ancient Greeks and Romans and their languages, literature, history, art and archaeology, means the study of this whole vast world. In the past, however, and, in some ways even still, who can study it is limited--either by economic inequalities or, in the united states, by racial and ethnic boundaries that often (but not always) fall along economic lines. I mentioned that we didn’t have Latin in my high school. I went to school in San Diego. The schools there that were mostly White and wealthier had Latin. My school was over 50% Asian-Pacific Islander and had a lot of military families. We could take Spanish or French.

Because I didn’t have access to Latin in high school, it is likely that, if I applied to graduate school in Classics today, I would not get in. If I had tried even just to go to college before World War 2, I likely would have been rejected from most places because I didn’t have access to Latin. If it had been the 19th century, even if my school had Latin, I wouldn’t have gotten into college because I didn’t have ancient Greek. Being a woman, of course, would have made all this even harder. Being Black in America would have made it near impossible (though, in both cases, of course, there were exceptions--exceptions don’t erase the rule). 

These historical exclusions were intentional and meant to keep the study of Classics and access to college restricted to elite White men. The impacts of those exclusions are still with us in who we see studying and then teaching and researching Classics--it is still not unusual to enter a “Classics” conference, classroom, or other space and see only a handful of non-White students or teachers or even none. In some cases, who studies Classics is linked to what we consider Classics. if Classics is just the Latin and Greek languages and a small canon of texts, it limits who might find it interesting and who might be able to enter into Classics or feel welcome in our classes.  

Tomb of the metic ('immigrant') woman
Phanostrate. 4th c BCE Athens.

Why Study Classics: But it goes somewhat deeper than this: it also is a matter of why we study Classics. And here, I want to introduce you all to the notion of "Critical ‘Classics” or, as some of my friends and colleagues call it “Critical Ancient World Studies.”

In the past in the United States (and in the UK and elsewhere), ancient Greece and Rome were presented to us in idealized form: the Roman Republic was the model for our constitution and the Founding Fathers promoted it as, and we still often assume that is was, an inherent good. Ancient Athens was the “first Democracy” and we call ourselves a democracy and are good and so Athens’ democracy must have been good. Both the Roman Republic and the Athenian democracy are often presented to us in textbooks and TV and films as the homes of values like “freedom” and “justice” and “equality”. We were told to study them because they are ideal models for our modern world and because our society is founded upon those ancient ones. 

But this is a rosy colored picture that does a disservice both to the realities of antiquity and to the realities of our relationship to them. Critical Classics is about not promoting antiquity as idealized models to underpin modern American exceptionalism, but instead, encourages us to look to the broader realities of that past (warts and all) and to the various ways that past has been used and has influenced our present--not because we are the “natural” heirs of ancient Greece and Rome, but because we chose to build some of our political and social (and scientific) assumptions and practices upon parts of antiquity we liked. 

Unfortunately, some of the most acclaimed and widely read ancient texts, like Aristotle’s Politics or Plato’s Republic or the writings of Hippocratic doctors, or Caesar’s Gallic Wars or, in some interpretations, Virgil’s Aeneid, were used to promote and justify enslavement, scientific racism, sexism, genocide, eugenics, economic class disparities, white supremacism. It is important for those of us who study and teach Classics to reckon with our past and the ends to which we have used the Greeks and Romans. Critical Classics--the stuff you see being represented in the popular press these days as “Cancelling Cicero”--actually  helps with that reckoning. 

But Critical classics isn’t just a negative thing that seeks to dismantle our past complicities and, in fact, isn’t about “Cancelling Cicero” at all. We just want to expand what “Classics” means to encompass more people and to be more than learning how to translate the Catilinarian speeches. In fact, Critical Classics is what helps us learn about all that rich and complex variety of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. It opens up new avenues of inquiry, new materials to enjoy and evidence upon which to help us understand the past. My research and teaching has for many years now focused on immigrant groups in ancient Athens and the broader Greek world. I track them using tombstones and then try to reconstruct their lives based on courtroom speeches and inscriptions. Their lives were often difficult and their treatment harsh, but they were real people and to get to know them even in the small ways our evidence allows feels like an honor to me.

I also teach and study how the ancient Greeks and Romans understood race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality by looking at how they talk about these things in texts spanning over 800 years and in images on vases, or in sculptural form, and other material arts. Because we take critical approaches to the past, the ancient world has become for me an endless pool of possibilities to learn about and understand the people we group together as Greeks and Romans. I don’t think of them as people to emulate or their ways of life a model for my own. But they are endlessly fascinating to me and reflecting on how they ordered their worlds help me be more cognizant and reflective on how we order our own. 

And so, I’d like to end today by provoking you to reflect upon what it means to really study the ancient world, why we do it, who can do it and what limitations we put on who, how, what, and why. Our world keeps changing. Classics should too. And I hope that you all will be that better future of Classics.

Thank you.

Changing "Classics": What Do We Want? Not What Some People Keep Saying We Want

By Rebecca Kennedy and Maximus Planudes

At the end of my last blog post, I (RFK) pleaded for an immediate halt to uninformative, poorly written, inaccurate responses to the recent New York Times Magazine article, which focused on our colleague Dan-el Padilla Peralta and current debates in the discipline known as "Classics". Why this heartfelt plea? Isn't open debate good?! Only if those involved in the debate understand the ideas and commit to representing them accurately. In many cases, the inundation of op-eds show either little understanding or disinterest in accurate representation. Some are plain bad faith. 

In this post, we lay out a preliminary list of some of the criticisms and changes called for by scholars like Padilla Peralta, but by many, many others as well. We want, eternal optimists that we are, to ground the “discourse” in what people are in fact saying. Classifying these views as “attacks,” as some are apparently compelled to, requires a certain blinkered chutzpah when the majority of actual attacks on “Classics” come from outside the discipline by people hell bent on defunding the humanities and ancient world studies everywhere or insisting on a particular nationalist approach.

We start with what is being advocated for and then address some of the false narratives about attacks on the discipline. We should probably make it clear that when we say “Classics” we are explicitly talking about the professional study of the ancient world in educational/academic contexts. We are not talking about what some call “the classics”, which tends to refer to objects of study or enjoyment. In other words, we aren’t talking about Homer and Virgil, but about the discipline. 

*Note: we have tried to link to relevant already existing writing, podcasts, videos, etc. if/where statements and arguments for the positions listed have been made. But, honestly, after about 20 of them, we got tired and just needed a break because SO MANY PEOPLE ARE WORKING TOWARDS AND SUPPORT INNOVATION-EVOLUTION-REFORM-WHATEVERYOUWANTTOCALLIT we can't keep up. We will continue to add links, though. Many are already listed on the blog here in the anti-racism and teaching resources pages. Please also see the Community link for organizations within the field working for change.

***

1. Changing the Name: The disciplinary designation “Classics” is, of course, not used everywhere, but mostly in the US/UK where its obvious elitist connotations are somewhat balanced by the popular ignorance of its specific meaning in the academic jargon. “Oh, you teach Jane Austen and Mozart?” indeed. Recognizing this elite connotation and the historical usage that mark out literature from ancient Greece (basically Homer to Aristotle for many people) and Rome (with emphasis on works from the late Republic and Augustus) as superior to other world literatures, some would like to change the name to be less elitist. 

Others wish to change the name because of the history of the discipline’s complicity in colonialist and white supremacist actions (see more below); others, because some students, unaware of the jargon meaning of Classics, think we teach the Scarlet Letter and Tribe Called Quest; still others, because the disciplinary jargon historically referred primarily to the language and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, thus not reflecting the broader realities of how we study and teach today. Name changes frighten some people, but Classics is a relatively recent jargon term and we support a change.

This change, of course, will happen, if it does, locally. We are changing our department name to help our students more accurately and easily recognize what we do. It is also more respectful to certain colleagues who teach other “classical” topics, but do not get the name. We will become Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. It says where our focus is and, because we are limited to 3 full time and 2 part time faculty, covers what we can reasonably admit to teaching: We teach languages, literatures, histories, cultures, and receptions of ancient Greece and Rome. 

A name change isn’t going to solve the problems outlined by advocates for structural and institutional changes to the discipline. It will not, it should not need saying, end racism. Instead, the change of name can function as a signal of willingness to change, of understanding (some of) the history of the discipline’s problems, and as a show of respect to our colleagues in other disciplines by not pretending that our field is inherently better than theirs (except for evo-psych; we are definitely better than them). 

***

2. Structural Changes: A name change, however, may be bundled with suggestions for structural changes to programs and departments. Different suggestions imply different recommendations for structural change. e.g., Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Global Antiquity, [Critical] Ancient World Studies, [Ancient] Greek and Roman Studies, or [Ancient] Greek and Latin Studies. It should go without saying (alas) that changing the name Classics only addresses programs that are currently called such (many are not!) and is a local, not universalist project. Not all programs can or will do the same thing, nor should they. We do not expect changes to be free of controversy; we also do not believe it is helpful to frame them as attacks, except, I suppose, for certain reactionary purposes.

Padilla Peralta (in the NYTimes article) and Josephine Quinn have suggested Ancient Mediterranean Studies, a suitable name for some programs which can, in fact, do what this name entails. Programs taking up that name should (ideally) do so because they are broadening their programs beyond ancient Greeks and Romans to include west and central Asia, the Levant, and north Africa. They explicitly want to extend their departments to be more inclusive of non-langauge/literature based approaches, giving equitable emphasis to material culture, specifically by expanding the number of archaeologists and material-based historians.  

We have also seen advocates for Global Antiquity or “[Critical] Ancient World Studies”, encompassing even more places like China, India, Nubia, Axum, Arabia, the Black Sea, the Americas, etc. Anywhere where there is accessible ancient material for study. 

Suggestions such as these are ideas, subject to debates. One might imagine a program focused narrowly on Latin, but covering its full history of use. In fact, it is not even clear that it is advisable for every program to look the same. At the same time, broader discussions help shape local ones, since the dynamics facing programs have many similarities. It is also important to acknowledge that structural changes of any sort have obvious staffing consequences. Some changes de-center Greek and Latin languages and/or add other languages like Sanskrit, Hieroglyphs, Akkadian, Hebrew, etc. These are hard issues.

We imagine that the staffing consequences entailed by proposed reconfigurations may encourage the (unmerited) charges that people want to “cancel languages” or “cancel Plato”. Departments or programs that opt to embrace a broader view of “Classics” under the auspices of AMS or GA or [C]AWS may reduce the centrality of these texts, but won’t abolish or abandon them. And, of course, any changes that would occur would occur at the local level of individual departments and in specific institutional contexts--Harvard may not be interested in such changes, but UCLA might and it would provide more avenues for people to enter graduate study and then, jobs willing, the broader profession. It would be nice also, of course, if, instead of the continuing use of “trickle down” approaches to defining the discipline’s parameters, where graduate programs decide their requirements and undergraduate programs feel compelled to shape themselves around them, they looked to see what sorts of changes these smaller and often more nimble programs are doing and adapt to us for a change.

There is, simply put, more than one way to do “Classics” and many are advocating for changes that reflect that simple reality. The fact that material culturalists and historians in our discipline have been advocating for these changes for DECADES shows this isn’t some fiendish, cultural Marxist, post-modern, far-lefty wokeness attack, but the perennial request for equal valuation.  

***

3. Racism and Whiteness. The structural changes discussed above are a long-standing issue in the field and they may leave untouched a core issue for many: racism and a history of disciplinary complicity with white supremacism, colonialism, and imperialism. This issue is likewise not new, but has taken new urgency in many places, with different underlying dynamics. Colonialism and imperialism, for example, are more prominent terms in debates in the UK and other European and European colonized countries. In the US, we generally speak of White supremacism. 

The diversity of situations should not lead, as it too often does, to outright dismissal. It is far too easy to ignore the discussions of racism. They are uncomfortable and ignorance is easy. We all, us included, could do more listening, a lot more listening, to those who generously share their experiences and ideas.

There have been many many excellent discussion of these issues by our colleagues. For framing of the issue in the UK and how it and the US differ, we suggest these excellent essays by Mathura Umachandran. We also highly recommend attending events held by The Christian Cole Society for Oxford Classicists of Color. There is also the manifesto of the Critical Ancient World Studies group. We will also happily add links for other contexts if anyone can provide them. Our own knowledge and experience is of the state of the question in the US, so this is where we will provide the most info. 

Most in the US advocate for changes to the discipline to address historical complicities with white supremacism. There is a lot of work to do. What is being sought:

• acknowledge how the academic discipline and scholarship has facilitated and encouraged racism, especially anti-Blackness, by serving as a vehicle for slavery apologism, educational gatekeeping, forms of scientific racism, elitism, “Western” and American exceptionalism, Islamophobia, and other forms of white supremacism. 

• recognize that white supremacism exceeds far right extremism, that it exists in institutional practices, even in our landscapes. The far right appropriations are insidious and harmful to the public image of the field, and public facing scholars are doing good work in combating them. They are, in some senses, an easy distraction because we can write about how they are wrong, mock them, document them. None of this addresses white supremacism in our institutions or discipline. We acknowledge, however, that our students sometimes come to us influenced by these views and we must be prepared to confront them.

• discuss and advocate for changes to how we work within the discipline to promote our programs and discuss the ancient past so that we do not provide facile narratives that can and have been used to support racist policies and institutional forms of white supremacism, i.e. the practices and policies within academic institutions and professional “Classics” that work to exclude Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) students and professionals. Some examples:

• An appeal to the “foundations of Western Civilization” narrative. This critique is often misunderstood as a rejection of the works often included in the narrative or of the idea of influence itself. It is, rather, a critique of the narrative, a relatively recent (19C) myth of a continuing trajectory of cultural inheritance from the time of Homer to now in certain modern European, but mostly Anglophone, nations (including the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). It is a particularly toxic origin myth, a just-so story designed to explain a relationship to the past that justifies modern power hierarchies and socio-political exclusions. 
• An appeal to a color-blind “Meritocracy,” another just-so myth frequently used to avoid talking about racism in admissions, hiring practices, publication access, and more.
• Citational practices and peer review problems within our scholarship that privilege a closed circle of white, mostly male authors and approaches, that reproduce elite hierarchies of scholars, and that reject certain types of analysis and critical methodology, approaches that are often central to disciplines focused on critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, or ethnic studies. Things like the forthcoming TAPA special issue edited by Patrice Rankine and Sasha Mae Eccleston are moves to combat this. It is also a place where Padilla Peralta has done important work (he presents the data starting at min. 32). Curiously (?), this work is rarely discussed. 
• Writing and talking about the ancient Greeks and Romans as if they were White. The Whitewashing of the ancient Mediterranean by Classical scholarship has a long history. The assumption that modern racial categories were perennial and would have been used and understood in antiquity is based, in part, of mid-19th century slavery apologism works like Nott and Gliddon’s Races of Mankind. and promoted to the general public through museums, world's expos, and other institutions. When we avoid engaging in serious study of ancient identity formation processes, we perpetuate the myth of ancient Whiteness and the idea that “Classics” is the inheritance or history of White people only. We also impose the idea of Europeanness onto the Greeks and Romans, many millions of whom (including many famous ancient authors) would neither have identified as such (and never as White), but as from places in Asia and Africa. This ties back also into the “Western Civ” narrative and use for promoting our programs or as frameworks for our scholarship.
• In this same vein, expanding what count as “mainstream” topics by working to normalize teaching and  studies that focus on race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, slave systems, immigration and mobility, economics from below, the experiences of people and not just the processes, etc. Instead of avoiding these topics that often require us to set aside triumphalist and nationalist narratives of the past, advocates argue that they should be embraced in order for us to have more accurate understandings of the past. 
• Using more diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks--much of “Classics” still thinks reading Discipline and Punish is cutting edge and trendy. They actively ignore and even discourage engaging with Critical Race Theory, in particular. This is a major talking point for the political right generally, not just in op-eds on “Classics.” See the “1776 Report”.
• Reading and discussing, holding workshops and conferences on, and creating resources around teaching and writing about “difficult subjects” that appear in our sources like rape, genocide, enslavement, xenophobia with more nuance and care for how our students may interact with the texts. This is often dismissed as “coddling” or creating “safe spaces” when it is, in fact, just being a conscientious teacher and scholar.
• Acknowledging and working to change language textbooks rooted in slavery apologism—lazy and happy slave narratives are a particular problem in the Latin textbooks, but show up in Greek ones as well. This is a problem that spans the US and UK language textbook industries. 
• Encouraging more respect for the study of and engagement with both reception studies and disciplinary history and not treating them as ancillary to the primary discipline and a hobby for people who already have tenure and have proved themselves “Serious Scholars” with more traditional publications. In this sense, we debate how “Classics” has historically been used as a gatekeeper to elite education, how needing extensive pre-graduate training in both Greek and Latin can inhibit access to the field by those who come from economically distressed backgrounds, which frequently falls along racial lines because of the US history of red lining and other anti-Black policies that date back to Emancipation and the end of Reconstruction. The overwhelming Whiteness, middle-upper classness of the field is well-documented. The numbers hardly budge decade after decade regardless of outreach efforts because the disciplinary structures themselves (some mentioned above) can make participating in “Classics” departments or programs toxic for BIPOC. Here is the data from the most recent survey of the US (there is also data from the UK).  
• As part of disciplinary history, focus in on those histories that have been occluded and erased, like Black Classicisms, the place of Afrocentricity, and “Classics” as it has been done in contexts outside of Europe and the US and Canada, for example, by Egyptians in Egypt or in post-colonial Ghana (EO Talks)
• Acknowledging the experiences of racism that our BIPOC/BAME, but in particular Black-identifying, colleagues encounter within academic classrooms, conferences, publication, departments, social media, etc. Claims that these experiences aren’t “really racism” (yes, these statement have been made) because they are subjective are dismissive and reproduce racism in the discipline. Attempts to sideline or interfere with anti-racism initiatives by organizations and departments because they “overly focus” on the problems our Black colleagues and students face (yes, this also happens) ignore disciplinary history and the history of the US generally.
• And, on the languages front, recognizing that in this broader “Classics”, not everyone will need to have training in ancient Greek and Latin. Maybe they need both, maybe one, maybe (gasp!) neither. Or, understanding the role the languages play in gatekeeping by race and economic status and adjusting how much experience students are expected to have in them before they start a graduate program. Or changing how languages are taught based on local conditions and reconsidering what it means to have language mastery. Again, this one isn’t about ending study of the languages, just being more thoughtful of how and when we require them and recognizing how access to language training falls along racial and economic lines and so leads to unequal access to professional training in graduate programs.

These are some examples of what is being advocated for in the debates around “Classics” and its historical ties to and complicity in White supremacism. These are complex problems that need serious engagement. We recognize that even just this list is large and it would be impossible for any op-ed to address them all. It is telling, however, that they address none of them. 

Some of the problems will take decades to solve, even with the will to change. Advocates are asking that we have these discussions, listen to the experiences of BIPOC who are in (or have left) the professional discipline (as students or faculty), and problem solve ways to unbind ourselves from this past and move forward in (re)building an academic field that is more equitable, self-critical, inclusive of the variety that is the ancient world, and better for more people. Ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist hasn’t worked for decades. No reason to think it will start working now. 

So, we can have serious discussions or, we don’t know, complain about cancelling Homer. 

***

We struggle to see within the ideas discussed above the strawmen planted to scare people while sowing division and crowding out meaningful discussion. Where, we wonder, are the “attacks”? We know of no one within the discipline advocating a halt to teaching the languages or our favorite ancient texts. No one is suggesting “yielding” Juvenal and Aristotle to the far right. We know of no administrators or funding organizations who are cutting Classics because it is attempting to reckon with its racist past—administrators at colleges don’t need this as an excuse to shutter programs, when they have for decades used under-enrollment in language courses, dropping numbers of majors, and strategic plans that focus on STEM and job placement initiatives. We don’t know everyone, though, so perhaps these mythical beasts exist. 

The people we know are suggesting that we might continue to broaden the canon, accept a more broadly defined classics, embrace a diversity of methods, recognize the importance of reception and history of the field, and -- importantly -- support those in our field from underrepresented groups who feel the alienation that comes from being made to feel they do not belong. They also suggest that these changes might help our field weather the series of financial crises that have enabled dismantling of the humanities writ large in academic institutions while also making Classics programs in particular more equitable.

It is possible that many of these op-eds are addressing things that have happened outside of the discipline proper, such as removing the Odyssey from a middle school general language arts curriculum (not linking because all articles are attacks and are not fully honest) or protests by undergraduate students groups (like at Reed, Columbia, and Brown). There are solid reasons why middle schools may want to change/update their curricula. Also, student groups have legitimate reasons for feeling like “Classics” is yoked to White supremacism. Or, in the case of Columbia, that Ovid’s poems can read like incel handbooks when taught badly. We should not dismiss these concerns out of hand because, after all, they are coming from students and we teach them and want them in our classes (see Sarah Ahmed's Against Students). They don’t think these things because advocates for change within the discipline are telling them the field is racist. Advocates for change often have their own experiences of racism in the field and are still in it despite the racism. They want to make it so other BIPOC students don’t have to have those same experiences of alienation and, instead, can see the ancient world more accurately and find it interesting and worth study. 

In fact, the only person within the discipline we have seen who has explicitly said “let’s dismantle Classics departments” in a longer twitter convo, in which they advocated for Classics department members to ask to be reassigned to other disciplinary departments (history, languages, art history, philosophy, religion, etc), which I (MP) discussed here. [UPDATE: Walter Scheidel has also advocated this and may be the originator of the idea.] We don’t think this is intended to be taken literally (or is a serious recommendation in any sense), but is best understood as another discussion about the nature of the field—what would a “Classics” look like without departments. This is the reality for many programs at smaller and non-elite state colleges already. Best to discuss it on its merits. That is how fields stay relevant. 

Sure, the “burn it down rhetoric” is incendiary, and White Classicists tend to be a bit fragile and think we own the discipline, but it’s better to be the person who reads the whole article before commenting and not just the headline. Because, it is, in fact, nearly impossible to find people within the discipline who want to “destroy Classics.” Instead, we see increasing numbers within the discipline (every link here represents at least 2 more also advocating similar change), ranging from undergraduates to full tenured professors at a wide range of universities and secondary programs, working to make “Classics” more accessible, more equitable, more self-reflective, and open to innovation and new ideas. 

Burning, after all, is part of the agricultural cycle. Sometimes you have to clear out the brush in order to prepare the ground for new crops. When our colleague Dan-el Padilla Peralta says that maybe Classics should die, he explicitly says “Classics in its current form”. That isn’t “attacking” Classics, that is begging Classics to (once again) change itself or risk irrelevancy and continuing down the path of white supremacism. In this, we are with him as are many many others within the discipline. 

Some Things are too Embarrassing to Talk about or Ignore

I tried not to read this last one. They have all been so bad and I am aware that anything about "Classics" published in the National Review regardless of who writes it will be at the least subliminally racist and stuck in the worst Dreams of Whiteness. This most recent one by well-known translator Sarah Ruden is no exception. It is also long, which means I simply cannot do justice to all of it in a response, so, I won't even try. Instead, I want to point out some of the most egregious moments. Some of it is undoubtedly unconscious--living lives insulated from people who are different, who have to navigate the world as not White can put blinders on people and make them miss lots of things. But other parts? I can't believe anyone is that naive and uncritical and poor at basic analysis. So, anyway, here we go:

***

I appreciate that from the beginning, we are informed of which elite halls the author has been traveling down. I hate it when they wait to flex the Ivy credential until the 3rd or 4th paragraph. When it is in the first sentence, I know how the narrator is positioning themselves and how I should feel about my own state school PhD: "Clearly, the [author] wanted me — a [working]-class, [midwestern/west coaster], very young woman — to contemplate what a glorious opportunity I had [not] been given, my [lack of even a] small share in so much wealth, power, and prestige." [changed from the original].

"And in fact nothing ever moved me to denigrate or pity classics as a discipline, though I had already seen, and would keep seeing, hardship of all kinds, phaseouts, and accusations of irrelevance and iniquity inflicted on institutional classics." 

It's called Stockholm Syndrome. Joking (not really), but no. "Classics" is not a person to be pitied. And critical assessment is not "denigrating". Its...critical analysis and engagement. And the things you describe are neither actions of pity nor denigration. They are institutional actions around an academic discipline within the structures of the modern university. Can you pity an institutional structure? That is just odd.

Nice that we can skip all that stuff about origins of Harvard and stuff and Puritans and Classics. I've read a lot of better and more accurate histories. You can, too.  (Maximus Planudes suggests, however, that Panine's Sanskrit grammar would have better accomplished the goals that she ascribes to early Harvard education, but they chose Greek and Latin for some reason. Probably the Christianity thing or something, right?). 

"But this is not the fault of the classics, which are just a set of sturdy and adaptable tools." 

Not very adaptable if moves within the field to change it are treated as hell freezing over. But, perhaps more accurately, it is just wrong. "Classics" is not a set of tools. "Classics" (see above) is an academic discipline moored within academic institutions. Maybe this is where we can see the beginning of the source of our problems--conflating "Classics" the discipline that people want to change--change the educational goals and institutional structures of and extend the content we include within it--with objects of study like languages. Also, as one colleague said on Twitter, "Pretty sure there is something about this tool stuff in Plato's Gorgias." But no one ever reads the Gorgias. 

A century later, the Founding Fathers came to their clear thinking about governance by way of the classics.

Wow. Clear? Have you studied our government? Or read the Federalist papers? Or been engaged at all in the the last few decades of American politics? CSPAN is always on for you.  

                                                                                ***

This next paragraph is a doozy:

The prevailing accusation in cancel-culture America is that the classics are inherently authoritarian, and never even a potential tool of liberation. But a look back at the beginning of the modern Western tradition, where classics merged with Christianity, suggests the opposite [side note: I thought Kagan taught at Yale]: Classics is tantamount to the prize itself, so that you might as well righteously resolve to keep money away from the poor. 

Sentence one is pretty much just all filled with wrongness. Cancel culture? PLEASE STOP WATCHING FOX NEWS. If there are people saying "the classics"--which I think is meant to be different from "Classics", no?--are inherently authoritarian, they are wrong. But, just no. Almost no one says this. The only thing most of us say is inherently authoritarian is the political machinery seeking to silence criticism of entrenched power (you know, White supremacism?). If by "the classics" you mean books like the Iliad or Aeneid or Herodotus' Researches, then this is a willful misrepresentation of any serious person in our discipline's assertions when we speak of the complicity between the academic discipline of Classics and White supremacism. It's the most useful straw man y'all can trot out though, because then you can get headlines like "Wokeness Brigade Hates Homer". It's a lie, but it riles up the base. 

I don't even know what that last sentence means. If Classics does mean giving money to poor people, I am all for that. 

***

The (rather long) point of the Augustine passage is hard to see. As a translator of Apuleius, I would have hoped that '"the docile mule" of "Classics" would have hidden something more interesting. Skipping it.  

***

All of this was on my mind as I read about a present-day clash in the field of classical studies.

Not surprised she totally misunderstands Dan-el's position, if all that muddle is in the way. 

If you can master the hard, linguistic part of classics — the inner structure, as necessary as anatomy is to medicine — you are by rights the master, the magister or “teacher,” in the M.A. abbreviation; it would be tough for any racist politics to deprive you of that distinction...

Well... for many of us, the languages are the easy part. For some people, the hard part is synthetic analysis across genres, chronologies, and materials. I never found the languages difficult (neither did the author, apparently, but says it way later in the essay because the structure of this thing is awkward). I found them fun. The hard work for me was always ideas and figuring out how to make the initial idea into something more substantive and meaningful. Reading most of the responses to the NYT article, I can see this is a struggle for many others as well.  

More importantly, yes, people do dismiss the credentials of BIPOC scholars ALL THE TIME. There are DOZENS OF STUDIES ON THIS. We are watching it happen in real time. It happened in the NR essay.  I don't know why people think it is totally ok to makes such insipid statements that are easily countered by evidence.   

Without the language standard for advancement, classics becomes — has to some degree already become — a mere soup of feelings about the past and its influence on the present, a soup heated or cooled by whoever commands the institutional stove. In his classroom, Poser observes as Padilla directs a mash-up enactment of Roman power struggles, with a student in a football shirt eventually winning the empire by seven votes.

HOLY NON-SEQUITUR, BATMAN! But, seriously, the ignorance and absolute dismissal of demonstrably good pedagogy is depressing. Like, do people not spend any time actually doing the research on how students learn? And does the author really think that reading Caesar's propaganda is the best way to understand Roman history? If so, no wonder so many people who have done a Classics degree think authoritarianism is good. (OOPSY. I used the word authoritarianism, but I think it is ok, because Caesar actually did overthrow the Roman Republic with his legions and set himself up as Dictator for life). 

Not gonna talk about the soup.

***

I am going to say something that may make the author of the op ed livid with me, but I get her. I really do. I too live(d) in the midwest (in Ohio even!) until I was 13 (and again later) and understand how utterly depressing it can be as a place. I am sorry the midwest hurt you. But, your inability to write a check properly or heat up pizza at the age of 21 is not even remotely connected to or similar to experiences of racism. You felt ignored? Its nice to be White in the midwest that way. You can just blend right in. Try doing it while not White. I'll wait for the detailed description of that experience. 

I should stop with the running commentary. I am being needlessly cruel here. Instead, I will just list the remaining moments in the essay I found where the Whiteness of the author reared its head and the (unconscious?) racism pops through. Because, honestly, a lot of this just reads like sour grapes (luscious overseas grad student mistress? trading desirability for publishing translations? WTF? Did you not have someone edit this for you?) because someone who thought they were superior to others turns out to be just like the rest of us in most ways--non-celebrities plodding along. Some of us are, however, interesting-- I just want to point that out. 

1. "I’m sorry, but I do understand what it was like for the young Padilla to have someone (in his case a photographer who was semi-homeless himself) make sacrifices for the sake of his talent: I can’t count the number of hours of off-the-clock, one-on-one tuition and classroom auditing teachers gave me over the years. These people stocked my brain and pushed me forward. As I was finishing my B.A., Berkeley offered me the country’s leading fellowship for graduate study, but I matriculated at Harvard instead, as its placement record for new Ph.D.s was better."   Unnecessary flex (as my Gen-Zer would say). Also, please stop pretending your experience was anything like Dan-el's. It's almost worse than the multiple invocations of MLK. I mean, if only Dan-el had written a book about his experiences that could help us truly understand him better. 

2. (Racism could be daintily avoided; none of us had ever heard of “minorities” except on TV.) WOW. This is a deeply damning critique of your education that might suggest that BIPOC in our discipline, like Dan-el (who, ya ya you totally get), actively experience racism in the field. Why do you not frame it that way instead of just tossing it out as an aside and quickly moving on?

3. The entire section on South Africa and Zimbabwe. I think a commentator on Twitter summed it up best with something like "I needed European literature to remind me what beauty was after being subjected to Black violence in Africa." Like, this is just so so bad. But, of course, if plays right to the base audience of the NR, who are invested in the notion of "western" chauvinism and in a European-only "Classics". Interesting coming from a person who is well-known for translating African authors from antiquity.  

***

I admit that I have not been particularly gentle in my comments. Do such badly written, bad faith misrepresentations of our colleague and his hard work trying to turn the discipline towards a more productive, equitable, innovative, "sturdy and adaptable” future deserve such? It's angry-making. It's frustrating. It's fundamentally dishonest. Please make it stop.