The Rewards Outweigh the Risks— Advocating for Public Scholarship in an Era of White Supremacy

This is the text from my recent talk on the Public Facing Scholarship in Canada panel at the 2018 Classical Association of Canada Annual Meeting. The rest of the panel papers, handouts, and participant information can be found by following the link to our panel page @ this blog. Thanks to Aven McMaster, Katherine Blouin, Jaclyn Neel, and Alison Innes for such an informative and inspiring panel. This version contains external links to events or other mentions.

“The Rewards Outweigh the Risks— Advocating for Public Scholarship in an Era of White Supremacy”


There are a lot of great reasons for someone in a field like Classics to engage in public scholarship--it increases visibility of the field, helps entice donors to archaeological digs, increases the number of students who want to study it and reduces the number of parents who don’t know what classics is. My own experiences and those of a number of my colleagues in Classics and ancient history (and our Medievalist colleagues), however, have shown the risks of such public engagement as well. A portion of the general public that tends to be interested in things classical is not necessarily the general public one hopes to attract. While there are good people who took a class or two in college or even majored in it who want to connect, an unusually large demographic of the public interested in classics are white men who view classics as “western,” “white” and “theirs” alone. Among these men are those who are openly white supremacist and neo-nazi. They appropriate antiquity in a myriad of ways to support their dreams of a “white nation”--whether in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, or elsewhere. This public – explicitly racist or just complicitly racist – forms a part of the public that we of necessity address, and who don’t hesitate to address us. Public engagement for us, as a result, comes with both risks and rewards. 

I’ll start with the risks: The public are not passive recipients of our scholarship.

We need first to admit an uncomfortable fact: a white supremacist is not necessarily crazy to see Classics as an ally. Classics has a long and complicated history with respect to modern race constructs and justifications for colonialism and imperialism. Over the course of the last 40 or so years, however, the field--at least a portion of the field--has been coming to grips with its biases and complicity and has sought to correct the historical record by engaging critically with past scholarship, with new archaeological and material artifacts, by widening the canon of authors and texts we teach and research on, and, more recently, by engaging in more public outreach to make all of this research accessible to a wider public. (e.g. the Everyday Orientalism blog) Many in the public, however, prefer the 19th and early 20th century writings about ancient Greece and Rome--writings that are in the public domain (which might explain part of their reliance) and that their ideologies depend upon. A scholar who wades into public conversations should not be surprised if the general public is unaware of the current communis opinio or recent scholarship.  In fact, such a public facing scholar might find herself facing a charge of being a so-called “Social Justice Warrior Revisionists” bent on indoctrinating the youth in colleges and set on destroying the “foundations of western civilization.”

There have, of course, been a few recent high-profile examples of what can happen when these white supremacists or there “bot” friends decide you are a threat to them. Aggressive threats toward Donna Zuckerburg and Sarah Bond are the most well-known cases. In each case, the scholar in question wrote a public facing work and was repaid with aggressive, threatening comments, articles written about them in right wing magazines and websites and, in Sarah’s case, posters hung on her campus and calls made to administration calling for her firing. In many ways, the excesses of the attacks on them are easier to dismiss as anomalous or unindicative of concerns we as a field need to have. And yet, the virulence and organized nature of the attacks should concern us.

Sarah Bond’s article was in a popular publication (Hyperallergic) and Donna’s was in Eidolon, an unapologetically liberal feminist magazine, but others are being targeted for their scholarship in academic journals and presses. Sarah’s case, though, is illustrative of how the targeting works--first, her article was picked up by an intern at the website Campus Reform, a group that considers itself a policer of liberal academics. [[Update: There is apparently a Canadian equivalent site now called “Woke Watch”]]. They look for scholarship on climate change, studies on “whiteness,” gender and sexuality studies, diversity in the classical world, etc. They write an article about it, typically one that misrepresents what the scholar actually writes. This then mobilizes an electronic army of trolls to attack the author in the comments sections to their article, in emails or, more frequently, on Twitter.  Sometimes, the scholar might receive a call from the schedulers on the Tucker Carlson Show. They sometimes contact university administrators, making threats or demanding the person be fired. If you are lucky, you both published in a forum that helps moderate the threats and work at a university that mobilizes behind you and provides you risk management and legal support, if needed. Sarah was fortunate on both counts, but others, like Donna, are not so lucky.

This pattern has been repeated dozens of times in the last 18 months. It has even targeted students writing for student newspapers (as happened to a student at my campus). The attacks are extreme, but are not consistent. Concerning and more persistent, however, are attacks on our public scholarship by fellow non-classics academics, such as Nassim Taleb’s barrage against Mary Beard, which started with her Roman Britain tweets but which continues at seemingly random intervals still. Whether one agrees with her or not on this or any issue, Taleb (and I classify Taleb as such because he is insistent that he is “white” and descended directly from ancient Greeks and he uses lots of inaccurate and troubling genetics to demonstrate it), with is tens of thousands of Twitter followers and blog on Medium has used his public platform to wage a continual assault on her. So relentless is it that legitimate criticisms of her posts are often lost and classified as “trolling.” One of the myriad dangers that the white supremacist barrages can lead to is that it can  obscure actual usefully critical conversations.

For myself, the risks have been different. I joined Twitter--one of the primary mechanisms white supremacists use to attack--only this last October, the result of a concussion that clearly clouded my mind. But I did so while simultaneously signing onto a shared block list with other academics (it’s a program called “Block Together” and I highly recommend it), something that has protected me from numerous unpleasantries. But my first foray into public scholarship was quite unpleasant.

I first considered venturing into public scholarship back in 2009. I wrote a couple of blog posts and had an opportunity to be a “talking head” in 3 episodes of a History Channel international series (sorry, no aliens). Filming was fun, the reactions of my friends and family when they saw me on TV was fun. Not fun were the sexually harassing and disgusting emails I received (and occasionally still receive) from men whose only response to women being experts in anything (and I was the only woman in 2 of the episodes) is to try to make them go away. And that’s what I did. I didn’t want to get those emails. So, I figured I should just lay low. But last year, meeting with Donna Zuckerberg a couple of months after her “How to be a good classicists under a bad emperor” article hit the internet, I changed my mind.

My conversation with her on public scholarship started with me asking Donna what the Women’s Classical Caucus, an organization I currently co-chair, could do to support her. She said “write”. I was, as you might imagine, a little apprehensive. I’m a specialist in ancient immigrants and race and ethnicity in antiquity and the reception of these ideas in modern race science. These are things that could get me attacked on the interwebs. But, the best thing I could do to support her and others who were already starting to engage the tough questions was to write about it for the public using my expertise. So, I have.

The audience for my public scholarship is both my colleagues in classics and anyone in the public at large who has interests in the ancient Mediterranean world. Frequently, my posts target or derive from the writings of others (almost always non-classicists, but not always) about classics in popular or contemporary culture. Whether it’s an anonymous person who hates Black Achilles or David Brooks and Mark Bauerlien lamenting that “western civ is dying” or some random lawyer on FB who doesn’t know the difference between rape law and adultery law in antiquity, I choose my topics based on whether or not I think I can persuade someone--usually someone in the field or an interested but not white supremacist non-classicist--that the ancient world is not a white monolithic space that belongs to elite white men alone. The difficult topics are the ones where it is our fellow academics (in classics and in other fields) who have an investment in a white male and “western” classics.

Public engagement isn’t just for a general public outside of academia nor is that the only place white supremacists or neo-nazis hide. Often it includes colleagues in other fields (and within our own) who are interested in antiquity for personal reasons. These colleagues may often be overtly or implicitly white supremacist or defenders and promoters of “western civilization” or, more frequently these days, are interested in genetics and see genetics as correcting decades of attempts by ancient historians and archaeologists to undermine biological determinations in human variation--i.e. the construct of race.[1] Numerous of the defenders of the “west” who look to maintain a status quo view of classics and classical antiquity as “white” and “western” sometimes run so called “race realism” journals like "American Renaissance” or “The Occidental Quarterly” or "The Dorchester Review" or go by names like Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, David Reich, and Charles Murray--there is a strong investment in maintaining the “Greek Miracle” if you are a white male neuroscientist, psychologist, or geneticist who believes that race and gender are biological realities that determines intelligence and behavior.

Many seem to be invested in the idea of a fully “white” antiquity, which suggests they may not want to hear what I and my colleagues have to say.  So, part of my public engagement goal is to try to sway those who can be swayed to love the classical world for reasons other than a false fantasy of it being a white wonderland and to get them to embrace a more accurate picture of the past--Classics is valuable for its complexities, not its perfections. I also try to demonstrate how modern misconceptions came into being--though it is challenging to get people to understand that pointing out past racism in classical scholarship isn’t an accusation of racism in all current admirers of antiquity. I’ve been accused of betraying my race, of trying to induce white guilt (and this by a religion colleague at another university just for using the word race in relation to antiquity), and even of hating classics. The toughest part of public engagement for me really is not replying to everyone who is wrong on the internet or at the bar.

These are the risks, clearly--harassment, dismissal, even threats. But, I don’t allow comments on the blog proper and my healthy 99,000+ person strong block list on Twitter has helped a LOT. And the rewards increase as those of us doing this work gain in strength and numbers--the more of us doing this work, the less impact the more extreme elements on the internet have and the more impact we can have on the more moderate forms of classical exceptionalism that pave the way for white supremacism.

So, what are the rewards?  The public are not passive recipients of our scholarship.

In terms of the profession--Prof Bond’s article and the response to it have engendered real conversations concerning the display and teaching of classical art--museums are changing, even if only slowly. Donna’s journal Eidolon, has a regular readership of around 10,000 now and celebrated its 2nd anniversary with an unabashedly feminist rebranding; it has been inspiring a more diverse classics and giving voice to many in our field who haven’t felt like they could speak before. A recent conference I participated in, Racing the Classics, included many scholars (young and older) who participate in reception studies and some in public scholarship and they are committed to trying to find ways to ethically promote a study of classics that includes race and racism--in antiquity, in the field, and in the use of classics to promote racism outside of the field. We actually held a panel at CAMWS this year on Classics and White Supremacy--lots of people came (standing, sitting, jammed into the room) and have continued to express appreciation for it happening.

There are also professional rewards.  Since that conversation with Donna in January of 2017, I have written 2 articles for Eidolon. My blog Classics at the Intersections has gained an audience. It’s focused mostly on the intersection of ancient views of race and modern one, of racist appropriations of the classical past, and sometimes, women and gender. I also house there an online bibliography and resource database for teaching race and ethnicity in antiquity where my own and colleagues’ syllabi are available to anyone who wants to adapt them. My blog has had around 79000 views since August 2017 as of last week, which is way more people than will likely ever read my scholarship in academic publications. Posts I’ve made are being assigned in classes around the world. My name recognition in the field has increased measurably, especially for someone who works at a small teaching college in the American midwest.

Creating public scholarship has also impacted my regular scholarship--a big question that is always asked about public scholarship is “but does it count?” It may not count in itself for tenure and promotion at this time, but it has led to opportunities that do: I’ve been invited to participate in a number of conference panels, podcasts, or workshops on classics and white supremacy. I’ve been invited to meet with departments to help them build inclusive syllabi and curricula, and to participate in an international workshop in Leiden on creating integrated approaches to studying histories of race and migration that includes historians, archaeologists, and geneticist. I was asked by Johns Hopkins to write a book for them on the topics I address in my public scholarship--in the voice I use in my public scholarship. More people are actually reading my academic publications as a result of my public facing work. These are material gains, scholarly gains that resulted from my willingness to venture into a hostile public sphere, where the work I do wouldn’t “count” for anything professionally like tenure or promotion. And, yet, these are real professional gains.

But there is also a personal reward that such work can engender. Whenever I feel like I can’t keep up the work because I’m tired and have too much else to do or think it’s not worth it because no one reads it or pays attention, I get an email or someone comes up to me at a conference and thanks me for being willing to discuss issues of racism and classics’ role in it publicly--thanked by graduate students, junior scholars, senior scholars--people I have never met, people I now count as friends, people who genuinely find some value in the work. There is a real need among many of our colleagues to be able to talk about our history of complicity, to talk about the systems of power and hierarchies that still dominate our field. In a field that is over 90% white and still dominated at the tenured ranks by white men, being public and reflective about our own history can make a big difference. We need to own our past and recognize how embedded racism (and sexism) are in our field.

Over the last two years, white supremacists’ love for the classics has manifested in distressing ways and the question of the risks vs. rewards for public scholarship has become all too real. But none of the women I know who are doing this work--and the people doing this work are overwhelmingly younger women in the field (though hat tip to Pharos/Curtis Dozier and Matthew Sears/Twitter Warrior™--are not backing down despite threats to tenure or even getting employed in the first place. And, far from intimidating me into hiding this time around, the attacks on my colleagues and friends, and the open references to things classical by white supremacists in their hateful manifestos and recruitment campaigns, have galvanized me to do more and to work with others to create support for any scholar in our field who chooses to use their expertise to inform public debate. I have tenure. And a platform. If I don’t use it in support of others and of my discipline, then what is the point?

We live, for better or for worse, in interesting times, and now more than ever, I’ve come to believe that those of us who can participate in public engagement should--even though the risks are real and the rewards are not necessarily always immediate or clear. And I hope that as more faculty decide to use their expertise to inform public debates, more institutions and our professional organizations will support them in doing so. And that can start with how we value public scholarship in our teaching and our own research--podcasts, blogs, databases, they are all valuable and worth assigning and citing. Public scholars are fighting on the front lines of public opinion for our field. The least we can do is to support them and acknowledge the hard work and expertise it requires. Thank you.



[1] I discussed this issue with respect to the UNESCO “Statement on Race” at CAMWS and will have a blog post forthcoming on the topic.

Public Facing Scholarship in Classics in Canada


Coming May 8th at 8:30am (Calgary time!) at the Classical Association of Canada Annual Conference (Calgary May 8–10, 2018)

SESSION 1b, SB 142 (Panel Handout)

Live tweeting of this session is encouraged!  #cacscec2018 & #cacscec1b  Threads will be linked after the conference!

Below are public profiles for each speaker, abstracts for the talks, and links to handouts or presentation slides. NB. Full papers are linked where possible.



Public Facing Scholarship in Classics in Canada/ Le public face à l’érudition en études classiques au Canada

Featuring: Alison Innes, Jaclyn Neel, Aven McMaster, and Rebecca Futo Kennedy.

Chair/Président: Katherine Blouin
Email: katherine.blouin@utoronto.ca
Twitter: @isisnaucratis
Blog: Everyday Orientalism
ABSTRACT: This panel will address the topic of public-facing scholarship in Classics in Canada, with the intent of continuing and advancing the ongoing conversations on the subject. What is public-facing scholarship, and why is it important? What are the benefits of public scholarship in Canada today, both to society and to the academics who participate? What are the risks, to individual academics and to universities? What venues, platforms, and modes of public scholarship are available, and what considerations apply when choosing between them? And finally, how can the CAC and individual departments support people who are interested in engaging in public-facing scholarship?




1. "Using Social Media for Public Engagement" Alison Innes, Brock University (slides; Using Academic Twitter handout)
Email: ainnes@brocku.ca
Twitter: @InnesAlison / @BrockHumanities
Blog: alisoninnes.com--(links and additional documents for talk)
Podcast: MythTake  and fb.com/mythtake  

ABSTRACT: The rise of social media presents scholars with a great opportunity to share our research beyond the academy. Tapping into social media gives us access to broad audiences and allows us to go beyond public relations for our discipline and make our scholarship accessible and understandable to the public. By using social media to engage with the public, we can show the relevance and importance of what we do as academics.
     With so much opportunity and activity happening on social media platforms, how does one create community and space for conversation? This paper will explore ways in which academics can leverage the opportunities presented by social media to build networks beyond academia and engage the public.
     Developing an effective social media strategy requires a number of considerations, including time, budget, platform, content, audience, goals, and risk management. A carefully thought-out plan will improve one’s experience using social media for public engagement and therefore increase the dissemination of academic ideas.
     Academics from a variety of disciplines are already using social media for public-facing scholarship and this paper will examine how strategies such as hashtag ‘games’, AMAs (ask me anything), and live tweeting talks, books, and movies can be used to engage and educate the public. Ro-cur (rotating curator) Twitter accounts and Instagram takeovers are additional ways to expand one’s audience and network.
     Yet another increasingly popular social medium is podcasting, and it lends itself well to making academic research accessible to the public. Podcasting can be useful at several stages of the research life cycle and can take a variety of formats. This paper will conclude by discussing the possibilities podcasting presents for public-facing scholarship. Discussion of specific examples of podcasts will provide a reference point for those wishing to explore the use of podcasting for public engagement.



2. "Lifelong Learning in Cyberspace: Blogging as a Form of Instruction" Jaclyn Neel, Temple University (slides)
Email: jneel@temple.edu / libraryofantiquity@gmail.com
Twitter: @LibAntiquity
Facebook: Library of Antiquity
Blog: The Library of Antiquity 
ABSTRACT: "Public scholarship" is an elusive term, but one that is often highlighted as a desideratum for "out-of-touch" academics (recently: Shafak 2017; Greif 2015). In this paper, I discuss one way to introduce the public to the practice of conducting high-level academic research: by breaking down the process in a blog. This method has many similarities to teaching, but has the ability to reach much more broadly than the traditional classroom. My presentation will also address some of the difficulties involved in maintaining an active internet presence, including potential solutions that could be undertaken by the CAC or other interested parties: funding for the production of public scholarship, recognition of such activities in tenure and promotion reviews, and increasing incentives for activities beyond the academy. The potential payoff for such activities is great: increasing knowledge of and interest in classics among the general population can lead to increased student participation in classical activities. However, the most critical work of public scholarship is engagement with contemporary concerns, and such engagement comes at a price for academics in non-traditional contracts.

Shafak, E. (14/07/2017). "It is time we stopped denigrating the public intellectual." The Guardian.

Greif, M. (13/02/2015). "What's Wrong With Public Intellectuals?" The Chronicle of Higher Education.

3. "Scholarship Out Loud: Moving Beyond the Lone Academic" Aven McMaster, Thorneloe University at Laurentian (slides)
Email: amcmaster@laurentian.ca
Twitter: @AvenSarah
Podcast: The Endless Knot Podcast
YouTube: www.youtube.com/Alliterative
ABSTRACT: ‘Public-facing’ scholarship does not only mean making scholarship accessible to non-Classicists – it also means making the process of research and scholarship accessible to other academics, allowing for interaction and development before the publication stage, even before the conference paper stage perhaps. This can be scary, but also immensely helpful and valuable to all parties involved and to the field in general, while at the same time generating interest in the ancient world among the general public. There are many ways to use newer platforms and venues to do public-facing scholarship today. In this paper I will discuss two of these that I have personal experience with: Twitter and podcasting. My experience using Twitter for research is that it is an invaluable tool for making connections, finding resources, being inspired and generating ideas, collaborating, and receiving emotional support and encouragement through the writing process. Podcasting about Classical subjects has similarly allowed me to make connections with other academics, but it has also provided a platform for engaging non-Classicists with the ancient world and expanding my reach far beyond the students in my classes. There is also an ever-growing number of other Classics-related podcasts which present a range of formats for engaging people inside and outside of the field, presenting ongoing research, combatting misinformation and misappropriation of Classical material, and amplifying the voices of marginalized, non-traditional, and innovative researchers and teachers in ancient studies.



4. "The Rewards Outweigh the Risks— Advocating for Public Scholarship in an Era of White Supremacy" Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Denison University
Email:
Twitter: @kataplexis
Blog: Classics at the Intersections 
ABSTRACT: There are lots of great reasons from someone in a field like classics to engage in public outreach--it increases visibility of the field, helps entice donors to digs, increases the number of students who may want to study it and reduces the number of parents who don’t know what classics is. My own experiences and those of a number of my colleagues in Classics and ancient history (and our Medievalist colleagues), however, have shown the risks as well. The general public that tends to be interested in things Classical is not necessarily the general public that one hopes to attract. While there are good people who took a class or two in college or even did their undergrad in Classics who want to continue to feel connected to the field out of interest, a small subset of the general public interested in Classics is made up white people who view Classics as the core of a“Western Civilization” that is explicitly for and of “white” history or who are openly supremacists and neo-nazis. They appropriate antiquity in a myriad of ways to support their dreams of a “white nation” in the US, Canada, the UK, and other parts of Europe. Public engagement for some of us, as a result, comes with both risks and rewards.
     In this paper, I will discuss the implications of this landscape for doing public scholarship--both the good and the bad--and consider reasons why the rewards outweigh the risks and how we can support our fellow public scholars’ work when confronted by “trolls.” I will do so with reference to both my own experiences and those of academic colleagues both within and without Classics.





When is an "Appropriation" Appropriation?

This other day I read a dialogue between Craig Jenkins and Frank Guan on Vulture about accusations of cultural appropriation against Bruno Mars. I won't go into the details as one can read the article themselves, but the focus is on how one talks about appropriation between people of color-- "Can there be cultural exchange between two minority cultures that exists without offense? Does 'appropriation' have any place in this debate?"

I'm not thinking about this because I'm a big Bruno Mars fan (I am actually not all that aware of him because I pretty much just listen to movie scores these days), but because I just spent the weekend at a conference called "Racing the Classics" at which the issue of appropriation came up numerous times, typically, in the context of white supremacism and classics. It also came up as a suggestion that to talk about "race" in antiquity is a type of appropriation--"race" understood as an important and uniquely modern phenomenon premised on blackness and whiteness, driven by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and underscored by science, has no place in the pre-Modern world and to talk of it is to, perhaps, either render "race" a safe or less challenging idea or serves to make Classics (and the predominantly white people who study it) relevant in a way that diminishes the lived experiences of those oppressed by systemic racism. In other words, it appropriates the experience of race and theorizes it away.

It's also something students in my Ancient Identities class struggled with last semester as they looked at Greece and Rome adopting and adapting ideas, cults, art/architecture, etc. from Egypt, the Near East, and each other--cultural appropriation was a term thrown around by them a lot. The idea of hybridity was largely rendered impossible by them.

Anyway, I've been thinking about it a lot and thought I'd write out the thoughts. I want to start with the first kind of appropriation (in support of white supremacy) and then consider the latter. But let's start with the definition of cultural appropriation from the Jenkins/Guan article:
If cultural appropriation is thought of as the theft of a minority culture by an oppressor, usually with malicious intent, how do we loosen the definition when people of color take from each other? 
The language of appropriation when applied to the use of classics since the late 18th century in the service of white supremacism in the US and Europe presupposes that the texts and material remains of the Greeks and Romans were stolen by an oppressor, that the ancients themselves were racialized as "white," and done with intent to cause harm. This notion of appropriation is driving a series of initiatives about "who owns the Classics," has spawned a website that documents appropriations by hate groups in the US, and more general conversations about diversity in the field in the US. What is at state when we talk of ownership and appropriation (and misappropriation) with respect to the Classics?

1. As Emily Greenwood reminded us at the conference, all uses of Classics are technically appropriations--not just the uses made of it by white supremacism (which is arguable any use of it in the US by a white person in any institutional context--so, the field of Classics, for example). Thus the language of mis-appropriation is appealing for those classical scholars discussing the so-called Alt-Right--but doesn't mis-appropriation imply that the ancient texts and images are free from the prejudices their user is putting them to? Or rather, that we are in a position to make value judgments about what is and what isn't a "proper" appropriation? Do we give antiquity a pass by claiming that they didn''t express versions of the ideas that they are being used to support (like Juvenal being used to support misogyny and xenophobia)  The malicious intent of appropriation seems clear in these cases, but the idea that the modern Euro-American is oppressing ancient Greeks and Romans is not as clear. It also pretends that ancient Rome was not a foundation for modern Euro-American education and culture in many ways. When we speak of white nationalist and fascist mis-appropriation, do we mean the appropriation of classics away from its proper "academic" sphere? As if academic classics has never been a party to white supremacy?

2. While classicists (including myself) have been arguing that Classics is not the singular heritage of white, Europeans and Americans (on the grounds that the Classics isn't just about ancient Europeans, they weren't "white", etc.), it is important to acknowledge the continual interactions with certain strands of Classics in Europe throughout late antiquity, the middle ages, and through the modern era  (for example, Roman law, environmental determinism theory, Hippocratic/Galenic medicine, Aristotle's philosophy, Christianity); these strands suggest not "ownership" of classics (which is the language of appropriation), but continuity with. And all of these strands have been used to create race science or argue for slavery.
Craig Jenkins: I feel like the answer to this question sits at the dawn of hip-hop, which was set in motion by a Jamaican immigrant in a community of black and Latin Americans and patronized early on by artsy downtown white folk. It was always a multiracial enterprise by nature of the lay of the land here, and I think that speaking of hip-hop as though it was historically an exclusively black art is not only a misunderstanding of how the culture worked from day one, it’s a disingenuous flattening of several conversations about racial identity and cultural exchange. 
And while this is only one strand of continuity in a very singular way, it suggests that the Greeks and Romans in these particular contexts are not appropriations, but are the undergirding for the entire enterprise of race science and white supremacism--these things are built upon ancient ideas, the ancient ideas weren't stolen from an oppressed people--malicious intent though there was. Further, the classical world itself was a multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial endeavor.

This is where we might see appropriation: the theories of the Dorian invasion and attempts to make Greece and the broader Mediterranean (Egypt, the Near East, North Africa) the product of Germanic invaders. This appropriation was done as part of imperialist and colonialist projects that supported white "Anglo-Saxon" domination of 'others'. We might also call the use of classical architectural forms to promote whiteness and white superiority in the US an appropriation. We see it in the architecture of the World's Fairs and, as Dr. Lyra Monteiro argued at the Racing the Classics conference, in plantation architecture.

Which brings us to the second kind of appropriation: that trying to find "race" in antiquity is to appropriate a modern phenomenon and to do so in a way that renders it safe and white and harmless.
Guan: If such a new vocabulary exists, it wouldn’t exist purely or even primarily within the cultural sphere. Most of the current discourse just assumes that the American situation is the only situation there is, which is to say a white majority with money and connections set against a black minority with artistic brilliance. Whereas most people in the world aren’t black or white, and have musical and other cultural traditions that simply don’t fit into the black-white binary... 
I have suggested (and will argue to support) that race is a transhistorical category that modern US color-based race categories are one manifestation in a long history of attempts to categorize humans in the same way one categorizes plants and animals, that the foundation of modern race science is found in numerous ancient Greeks texts and contexts (particularly in Athens in its citizen/metic system). Anti-semitism is racism. Race and racism can be found in modern Israel, in ancient China, in ancient and modern India. It isn't just about black and white.
Jenkins: ... I do agree that the way the conversation about race unfolds here is 100 percent specific to the terrible history of this country, and that outlook doesn’t always translate well to or speak for people who exist outside of it.
Does it diminish the history of race in the US, does it make it "safe" to acknowledge that there are other ways "race" can be constituted? The term "race" as a scientific, biological category for humans is relatively new (250? years) concept, but it has existed as a term for biological descent in animals since at least the 13th century (it's a French word and was used in terms of dog breeding and then of French nobility--I strongly recommend Charles de Miramon’s "‘Noble Dogs, Noble Blood: The Invention of the Concept of Race in the late Middle Ages" in The Origins of Racism in the West).

Since the 18th century, the idea of race has been almost entirely subsumed into a scientific discourse that attempts to rationalize enslavement, irrational hatred and fear of non-whites by a white majority in the US. Something the popularization of genetics testing has given more life to. In between these two uses of race in the 13th and 18th centuries came the transatlantic slave trade and the identification of slavery with blackness and whiteness with free and superior. The history of race was changed in the US forever. But does that mean that race can and should now only be used in that context?
Jenkins...The closeness of these cultures is present in the rap from that era — stop and think of how many classic rap albums have a dancehall toast in ’em – and to pretend these cultures are not meaningfully intertwined and try to hand out roles to people by circumstance of birth just seems … I don’t know … young? But this is the same social-media sphere that doesn’t understand what an Afro-Latina is and accuses African-Americans of appropriating African culture for wearing dashikis to Black Panther. The conversation about race is flat, when the reality of identity is multidimensional.
Some scholars argue that we should only speak of ethnicity if we are talking about anything that is outside of that experience as a way to not diminish the history and lived experience of people of color in the US. Though then we leave out the rest of the world. And, with it, others peoples who have histories and experiences of colonialism, institutionalized oppression, and enslavement. Can the word "race" be exclusive to the modern US experience or the should scholars seek out the similarities in racist dynamics and institutions in other historical periods? Is it an appropriation by a bunch of mostly white people (classicists) to talk about a bunch of dead white people (presumably the ancient Greeks and Romans)?

What does Classics gain by engaging the language of race? Does it appropriate modern discourses to make itself "relevant"? Does it erase the horrors of the history of race in America and do a disservice to our colleagues of color? It is a mis-appropriation? Or does it force classical scholars to see the ancient ideas at the root of modern racism and our field's history of complicity? I'd like to think it will help us to engage the realities of the ancient world more thoroughly and accurately, and, hopefully, help us understand better how many of our institutions of higher education contribute to white supremacy and why modern race science became what it is and help us be part of the solution to undermining white supremacy in the US today instead of a continuing part of the problem.


On Being a [Foreign] Woman in Classical Athens

It's International Women's Day and so I want to celebrate it by writing not about powerful women in antiquity, but about two not-so-powerful women whose lives were marked not just by the fact of their being women, but, more importantly, by the fact of them being non-citizen or "foreign" women. I say "more importantly" because if it weren't for this foreignness, their non-citizen status, their lives would have been fundamentally different. Because of their foreignness, they were a twice oppressed class. If they were economically poor in addition to being women and foreign, it was a triple oppression. (You can read more about other of these women in a previous post).

Some of you will recognize the women in this post from my book Immigrant Women in Athens. Others, may recognize them from classes you have taken or other scholars' writings on them. They don't make it very far, however, into the popular imagination. We know of them because they were prosecuted in court, a function, I argue, of prejudices due to their foreignness
.

***
Sandys' famous painting of Medea
could just as easily be of a woman 
like Theoris.

THEORIS was from the island of Lemnos. Although Esther Eidinow has suggested she might be a citizen due to Athens' long history of controlling Lemnos, it is unlikely that she would be recounted as "of Lemnos" is she were an Athenian citizen. What we do know, however, is that she was executed along with her offspring for the manufacture and distribution of pharmakia. We learn about her in an aside in a speech by the orator Demosthenes (25.79-80):


He is the full brother of this man on his father and mother’s side and his twin in addition to the rest of his misfortunes.  This man--I will not talk about the rest--but on his account you put to death the repulsive Theoris from Lemnos, the pharmakis, and all her family.  [80] He took these medicines and chants from the handmaid who later informed on this woman from whom this slanderer begot children, the use of charms, and quackery, and (he claims) the ability to heal epileptics, although he himself is culpable of all wickedness.

Here we can vividly witness the precariousness of this foreign woman’s life. We do not know her precise situation, but she was apparently condemned for witchcraft after selling drugs to the brother of Aristogeiton, who then resold them as a cure for epilepsy. She was called a pharmakis, a word often translated as witch, but it probably had a wide range of meanings and is literally something like “druggist” or “pharmacist.” Derek Collins has argued that Theoris was not a witch at all, but something akin to a folk healer (which I agree was most likely the case) whose remedy must have gone wrong and killed an Athenian citizen. Her punishment was extreme. She and her children were executed. 

There is no mention that she had a spouse; she may have been an independent metic ("immigrant") woman with children who earned a living by making and selling remedies and potions of various sorts. The Athenian jury must have determined that her actions were intended to harm or kill, thus the resulting death sentence. We do not know what representation she had in the court. If she was a simple folk healer (akestris) or herbalist (rhizotomos) who sold remedies or even erotic potions to customers, then it is difficult to believe that she intended for anyone to die. In the fourth century BCE, making drugs and selling them was not illegal. It was possible, however, to be taken to court if you sold a drug that went wrong. 

Was Theoris dabbling in magic and seeking to harm citizens with her potions, as her conviction and some stereotypes of foreign women suggest? It is not uncommon to hear slaves or “prostitutes” accused of selling or using love potions in court cases or in comedy. In some ancient cases, we hear of them killing by poison, thinking (Deianira-style) it is a love potion. The associations of harmful magic and drugs with mythical foreigners like Medea and Circe also encourages us to consider that Theoris’ condemnation resulted from prejudice against foreign women. Theoris may also have been a priestess of sorts. Either way, it didn't end well for her or her children.

***

Theano, citizen wife, remembered on her tomb.
NEAIRA is another fairly well-known, but not well-to-do foreign woman in Classical Athens. She is known best from a speech once attributed to Demosthenes ([Dem.] 59) in which she was accused of pretending to be an Athenian citizen when she was supposedly really a sex worker illegally married to an Athenian citizen and passing of her foreign daughter also as a citizen. Most scholars have accepted that she was a sex worker (calling her a hetaira) and many even accept the charges of illegal marriage. I am (not unusually) an outlier on this. 

Neaira, to me, perhaps best exemplifies the way prejudices impact foreign women’s lives in Athens and the violence to which they could be subjected without recourse in law. She also exemplifies for me the way scholars continue to allow those prejudices to do violence to her. Centuries later, we believe her accuser not because he proves his case, but because we buy into his biases and his story.

Apollodoros, the accuser and a political enemy of her guardian Stephanos, attacks her on charges of 1. pretending to be a citizen, 2. living in marriage with an Athenian citizen, and further, 3. attempting to pass off her own children as citizens. The speech, however, is only minimally interested in proving these charges. Instead, Apollodoros devotes the bulk of his time to weaving a sordid tale of Neaira's life from a childhood as a brothel slave to her days as a supposed sex worker in Athens itself, though the events he recounts mostly took place decades, before this case is taken to court. Neaira’s situation and the case presented against her has been much discussed by scholars--no surprise given how salacious the details are and how much of a supposed insight the speech gives us into the lives of sex workers. It is a story intended to make the jury unsympathetic to the accused, but one that demonstrates as well the violence that a foreign woman was subjected to (not to mention the prejudices). 

I think we can believe that Neaira was likely a sex worker when she was a slave--all slaves were technically able to be prostituted without restrictions--but after buying her freedom, she seems to have been uninterested in continuing that trade. As an independent woman, however, she was dependent on the goodwill of men, and particularly citizen men, for her safety particularly since she had no male relatives to properly represent her in court. 

After buying her freedom, she came to Athens with the citizen Phrynion (he had lent her some of the money she needed to buy her freedom). According to the speech, she ran away from Phrynion to Megara soon after, where Stephanos later met her. She left because Phrynion, Apollodoros tells us, treated her like as if she were his private prostitute and, beyond that, permitted her to be raped in his company, possibly even gang rape. Even Apollodoros is unable to hide the fact that Neaira was brutally abused and was horrified at this treatment of her person (he tells us that she had expected that Phrynion loved her, but was instead treated with ‘wanton outrage’).  

After she fled Phrynion, she secured the guardianship of Stephanos. Phrynion, however, attempted to have her enslaved to him by accusing her of being an escaped slave. Stephanos stood with her in front of officials and she was granted the status of a free, independent metic. Maybe they formed a relationship. Maybe, as I have considered previously, he hired Neaira to take care of his two children after their mother had died (not an uncommon occurrence in antiquity). Maybe she actually once was "just the nanny." Whether they had a more intimate relationship later wasn't illegal (unless it was marriage), but it might have angered those who thought foreigners shouldn't mix with citizens. 

And yet, the treatment Neaira was subjected to by Phrynion and his friends seems to have been justifiable in Apollodoros’ estimation in no small part because of Neaira’s former status as a slave and her supposedly sordid life as a sex worker and her status as a foreigner in the city.  He expects his audience to assume the worst of her, to assume she is still a sex worker, to assume that she would steal citizenship. He also hopes that the jury will believe that the children of Stephanos are his by Neaira and so not citizens (we don't know their ages and no wife is mentioned). And the penalty to Neaira if the case succeeded? She would be sold into slavery. 

It isn't a coincidence that Apollodorus ends his speech with an appeal to the jury in the name of protecting their citizen wives and daughters. He wants to divide this foreign woman Neaira from those other, "proper" women in their lives. Neaira isn't a “whore” and corrupt and deserving of enslavement because she is a woman, but because she's foreign. And the prejudices against her run deep. 

Some (most)  scholars believe Apollodorus. I do not. We don't know how this case turned out. But we do know that he was a notorious liar. He was banned from prosecuting others in the courts, including his step-father. In his attacks on his step-father, he also accused his own mother of complicity in murder (of his father!) and implied that his brother was the child not of their father but of his mother in adultery with his step-father. He did this without proof, without any shame. And the Athenians got so tired of his frivolous lawsuits against his step-father, that they banned him from continuing them. 

Given this background, why should we believe him in this one case? Why does he and not Neaira deserve the benefit of the doubt? Why is it that even feminist scholars continue to believe him and not read between the lines and see his biases and question what has long been regarded as truth? Why is it that we can't see that her foreignness here is more important than her being just a woman? Because if she wasn't foreign, she could been Stephanos' wife. And any charges that she was illegally married would be moot. If she was a citizen of some city, she would never have been in a brothel as a slave, having to buy her freedom and make a new life for herself somewhere else on her own. 

***

Both Neaira's and Theoris' lives were defined by their being women in many ways. But their experiences as we know of them were fundamentally impacted (for the worse) because they were foreign. Had they not been foreign women in Athens, they would likely not have even made it into the historical record, because their lives would have been like most other citizen women's--safe from prosecutions, safe from the need for or charges of sex work, safe from violence, safe from sale into slavery, safe from execution. Their children would have also been safer and not marked out for the same violence their mothers experienced.  

I've spent the better part of 5 years living with these women as my research subject and daily I am struck by how relevant they are to our world. Because we aren't all "just women" or even "women first." We are variably white women, women of color, citizen women, immigrant women, wealthy women, not so wealthy women, tenured women, contingently employed women, well supported women, or women with little to no support networks to speak of (to name only a few variations). All this variety can't be hidden under the name "women" alone. The permutations of our existences matter, these other identities shape our experiences as women. Some women live closer to power, have better access to justice. Others do not. To pretend that the lack of access that being a person of color or immigrant or not wealthy doesn't mean as much as being woman alone is a mark of one's access to power--the closer you are, the less those other permutations of womanhood matter. It's a truth of privilege not just now, but in the past, too.




Using Freedpersons as an Argument for an Inclusive Rome?

I'm teaching Roman history again this semester (I do it every year) and I've committed this term to making sure that the course focuses more on social history, the provinces, and the movements of peoples within the Roman empire. I kind of dislike the phrase "decolonizing the syllabus" (I don't know why--maybe I feel like using that phrase is an appropriation of some sort), but I did make a big effort at centering the human experience of non elites and the broader scope of residents of the empire in my syllabus--what does it mean to have to 'toughen up' your raw recruits to stand in an ancient battleline? Why are Rome's political leaps frequently tied to violence against women? What about the sheer numbers of people being forced to move through enslavement? At what cost does "freedom" come for the freedperson? Should we tout the diversity and "liberal" nature of Roman citizenship over time given the horror that was necessary to bring about that diversity? When one of my students used the term "inclusive" to describe Roman character traits embodied in the myth of founding, I shuddered. I mean, sure, okay, but not really.


I guess one of the reasons I've zoomed in on these particular questions is because one of my areas of specialization is Athenian metics (immigrants/resident foreigners/freed slaves) and compared to Athens, Romans are pretty "inclusive" and "liberal" with their citizenship. And, since I'm trying to write multiple articles right now on the issue of how Athenians came to treat metics as they did and what formed their view of who could have certain privileges (land ownership, political access, etc), the comparison with the path from slave to citizen in Rome keeps coming to mind. I've come to the conclusion that 1. neither is "better", they are just different; and 2. that it has to do somehow with different relationship between land and identity. But, of course, I would think this since it's me and this is what I research--the intersection between geography, race, and identity.

Another reason why this is coming up is because of recent pubs that have been saying "let's do as the Romans did and be welcoming of foreigners!" and I've found myself trying to walk that nuanced line between yes, they did do that over time and no, they were kind of assholes about it and let's not overdo it. It's also been an issue in class discussions.

We Americans, especially, have a view of slavery that is very specific and recent studies show that even with that, American students aren't being taught the full extent of the reality of US slavery. There is good work being done of comparative US and ancient slavery, but we've got to be careful in any sort of comparisons that we don't try to "rank" them. We also need to be cautious that we don't assume that similarities in some aspects of slavery in one part of the comparison means other similarities exist for which we don't have direct evidence. I am thinking here, specifically, of freedpersons in the Roman empire and the assumption that there were also similar "freedpersons" in every ancient slave system (as most scholars do with Athens, though I and a few others disagree).

A freed slave in Athens entered the metic class. And, while being freed certainly could work out for banking slaves (e.g. Phormio and Pasion, in Athens), there was no pathway to citizenship for most freed slaves Athens or their descendants. Even in Rome, the freedmen of the Roman imperial household (especially under Claudius, it seems) fared well, but those are the exceptions--the .1% of slaves. What of slave nannies or prostitutes who "aged out" of their usefulness to their owners? What about the young girls whose owners freed them so that they could marry them? Or freed them to  marry a favored slave whom they also freed? These latter were common enough occurrences if we can judge from the fact that Augustus passed a law limiting freeing a slave until age 30 and also from the number of tombs that show these relationships.

The Romans were xenophobic at times. The refusal to extend citizenship to Italians before the Social War suggest it. The satirist Juvenal's persona represents xenophobic views that would not have been unknown to his readers (even if the author was mocking them). It's also true, however, that for every instance of xenophobia in Roman lit, one can counter with stories of access--populations aren't monolithic in their identities or ideologies. But when a student goes so far as to suggest that slavery in antiquity wasn't nearly as bad as modern slavery (or really slavery at all) if someone got paid and could be freed and their kids could be citizens, something has gone wrong.

Not to knock on Mary Beard (again), but I assigned her SPQR as my core textbook and so she is the students' first encounter with the concept of slavery and freedpersons, and her representation of slavery and freedpersons in Rome has them wondering (as many a Latin textbook, like Ecce Romani, does) if ancient slavery was somehow "better" than our modern version was. Does being freed at the end of your owner's life (or when you are no longer useful to them) make up for the forced movements, forced behaviors, physical traumas, loss of children and family, legal vulnerabilities and liabilities in "freedom" that were part of the enslavement? Does being given money for forced sex make it better than just forced sex? Does getting paid for one's labor make it any less painful and debilitating?

Beard mentions various situations for freeing in her book as passing information, including reference to a slave girl freed to marry her owner. In this case, one of the students asked "could a girl refuse to marry once free?" Um, no. She couldn't. In fact, there are a whole slate of rules surrounding the freedperson that make it clear that "free" was a bit of a misnomer. For example, a patron (the position the former master took over a freedperson) could legally commit iniuria (insult, assault, outrage) against their former slave. Even worse, a patron could petition to have a freedperson returned to slavery if they did not pay "proper respect" to the patron. How free was being freed really, if your owner could still beat you, force you to marry them (or another), and potentially re-enslave you?

The one benefit would be that any children you would have would be citizens--but Augustus' restriction on the age of manumission would have reduced the number of children being born to freed slaves. Neither SPQR nor Ecce Romani mentions any of that. Instead, being a slave is only as bad as a single owner's treatment and being "freed" is some golden ticket to opportunity and a path to citizenship for your family. But what family do you have, if you've been stripped of personhood and identity, only allowed to have relationships like marriage or children based on the whims of your owner or after manumission? How do you build a life in freedom?

The numerous freedperson tombs from ancient Rome attest to different configurations of "family"--close friends, freedpersons of the same patron, some marriages, some with children, some showing affectionate bonds--that make clear the way the identity of freedpersons was one of the greatest casualties of their enslavement and being freed didn't bring it back. Their names alone demonstrate this--first names were a version of the patron/former owner's name. So, all the freed slaves from a single owner all had the same name, just masculine or feminine. Even your name was owned and not free. You even had to title yourself as a libertus/liberta--a freedperson--not just a person. You weren't Roman, you may not know if you were Greek or Phrygian, or Egyptian, or Dacian, or Judaean. You were someone's former property and remained their quasi-property.

There were many things about the Roman world that we might call improvements on the Athenian approach to citizenship and slavery--the path to citizenship for freed slaves' descendants was one of them. There also wasn't discrimination of which slaves were freed--Egyptian, Greek, Ethiopian, Gallic, whatever, your children still became citizens (and in 212 CE, all free people in the empire became citizens). This meant an ever diversifying not only population of the empire, but citizenship itself. But too often we gloss over, first, the actual slavery ("but they got freed frequently!") and, then, the actual state of being a freedperson ("some were really rich!" cf Trimalchio). And we diminish the human experience of it all--of the displacement, the wiping of identity, the being sold and (ab)used and treated as a piece of the furniture. Of being expected to show continued deference to the former owner as a condition of freedom, of maybe having to marry them and continue to allow them to abuse you without recourse to divorce as a citizen woman might have. Of the daily reminders that they aren't really free, just kind of, with the hope that, if they had children, they will have the protections and privileges the parents don't.

Historically, ancient texts have been used to justify slavery. I wonder how much the Roman freedperson system influenced the treatment and legal status of freedpersons in the US during Reconstruction? How was it used to justify not allowing freed slaves to vote or own land or using them as continued forced labor despite freedom or preventing access to education? And how many generations living in this country is enough to treat the descendants of slaves as full citizens instead of trying to maintain them as "freedpersons" beholden to and at the mercy of their former owners? Because it seems to me that this country continues to treat African-Americans and indigenous peoples as less than (not to mention pretending the US southwest wasn't part of Mexico before we took it), granting them the status of freedpersons, but never full citizenship. While there was no amount of time living in Athens that could make a foreigner (even a fellow Greek) an Athenian, it only took a couple of generations of swimming in the Tiber to become Roman. We seem to have forgotten that last part, ensuring the half-life of the freedperson continues.