Some of our most powerful pieces tackle the intersections of race and Classics. Here, you can find reflections on the Silent Sam controversy, experiences as a teacher or student of color, and the complicity of the discipline in upholding white supremacy.
White People Explain Classics to Us
Epistemic Injustice in the Everyday Experiences of Racial Minorities
by Yung In Chae
“In plain language, we need to talk about white classicists thinking that they know more than classicists of color because they “look the part” and we don’t.”
Turning the Tables on Dominance and Diversity in Classics
By Nandini Pandey
“Many of us have (or will have) to deal with hierarchical violence at some point in our careers. But social and technological shifts are making it easier than ever before to find solidarity in shared experience.”
More Than a Common Tongue
Dividing Race and Classics Across the Atlantic
By Mathura Umachandran
“British politeness of course is also a feature of moral cowardice. For me, the comparative lack of discussion about race and Classics in the UK, until relatively recently, is indicative of this wider moral cowardice.”
A Historian Annotates the Horrific Speech Given at the Dedication of “Silent Sam”
Every Conceivable Content Warning Applies
By Andrew Tobolowsky
“[4] “… No nobler young men ever lived …”
Keep an eye on this: up until this point in the speech, Carr has said quite a lot about how glorious the cause was, but not one thing about what it is.”
“After Careful Consideration …”
Trying to Get Hired as a Black Latin Teacher
By John Bracey
“The questions all had an air of skepticism, like an interrogation. I got the distinct impression that they were searching for a justification not to hire me. I looked often to the one non-white face in the room for reassurance, but his expression felt like a silent apology. I left the interview feeling utterly defeated.”
Like Dionysus
BTS, Classics in K-Pop, and the Narcissism of the West
By Yung In Chae
“… it’s impossible to honestly discuss the story of BTS’s success without placing it within this larger context of imperialism, especially because the story itself reenacts the dynamic of America setting a standard that South Korea then tries to meet.”
“The Board Is Well-Reminded”
What It’s Like to Be the Only Classicist of Color in a Faculty Meeting
By “Sankarshana”
“For that one moment, I felt as if I had been reduced to nothing but the brown person in the room. And I had never, ever been made to feel like that, even though, in actuality, it’s very often the case for me.”
The Life of the Oriental Mind
Introducing the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus
By Stephanie Wong
“Historically, it has been much easier for Asian classicists to assimilate into the white academy than to address identity. Add the centuries of western colonialism and imperialism in Asia, and it’s no surprise that Classics continues to be a desirable but ultimately unattainable class marker of the global West.”
We Condone It by Our Silence
Confronting Classics’ Complicity in White Supremacy
By Rebecca Futo Kennedy
“As long as Classics justifies itself by claiming to be the foundation of Western Civilization (feel free to do a random check of university department web pages), it will continue to find itself uncomfortably at the contested center of the continuing culture wars.”
On Guilty Pleasures
Makeup, Latin, and Diaspora
By Lucia Tang
“I didn’t know that for other people, scholars of color in the discipline’s trenches, Greco-Roman antiquity was already something embattled.”
Classics Makes Me Happy. Is That Enough?
An Undergraduate Student of Color Examines Feelings of Guilt
By Helen Wong
“I am an undergraduate student of color who chose to major in Classics, liked it enough to want to keep going, and now have to figure out whether my personal guilt about being a person of color studying Classics is going to be enough to stop me from moving forward.”
What Would James Baldwin Do?
Classics and the Dream of White Europe
By Denise Eileen McCoskey
“ My specific concern here, however, is as a historian — and I want to appeal to classicists to attend closely to the use and abuse of European history in today’s white nationalism, its use of an alleged European past to violently conjure the possibility of a state without black people.”
Tarfia Faizullah with Stephanie Wong
Scattered Across: Conversations with Asian and Asian American Writers from the Diaspora
“Because I was trained as a Western poet, even if I want to disengage from those forms, those forms are there in me. Maybe that’s one of the things that’s an issue, in part because it’s awareness of yourself as intersections of diaspora and empire, and having to reckon with those structures even if you don’t want to.”
The First African to Have Attended a European University
First Generation Classics Special
By Yung In Chae
“ I don’t know, but — as a classicist you’ll love this — Amo only quotes, outside of his works, Epictetus. It’s wild to me because Epictetus was also a slave, so Amo is feeling some sort of affinity.”
The First African to Have Attended a European University
First Generation Classics Special
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Western Imperialism in the Classics Classroom
First Generation Classics Special
By Ashley Lance & Kiran Mansukhani
“Engaging with my classmates makes me feel isolated, but engaging with the classical past does not. I fell in love with the ancient world because of all the beauty I could imagine.”
Bad to the Bone
The Racist Application of DNA Science to Classical Antiquity
By Denise Eileen McCoskey
“The desire to see race as rooted in science rather than human invention is aided, of course, by widespread belief in ‘science’s greatest myth,’ namely ‘that it doesn’t encode bias and is always self-correcting,’ when ‘(i)n fact, science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias.’”
The Whitening Thief
Latent White Supremacy in Percy Jackson
By Maxwell T. Paule
“But let me suggest that rather than being a coincidence, that setting — as well as Olympus’ new home atop the Empire State Building — purposefully emphasizes Riordan’s recurrent theme of American exceptionalism.”
Latin Unmoored
White Supremacy and Trauma in NASA’s Use of Classics
By E.L. Meszaros
“Why does NASA continue to make these mistakes?”
Classical Slavery and Jeffersonian Racism
Charlottesville, One Year Later
By Sarah Teets
“For Jefferson, Greek and Roman antiquity provided a set of symbols for consolidating the identity of elite white males.”
The Racism in Science’s DNA
The Bad Logic of Aristotle and James Watson
By Velvet Yates
“Comparing Watson to Aristotle helps us consider the question of whether or not a scientist’s racist views can be separated from the scientist — and, more importantly, from his science.”
Black Athena, 30 Years On
Why Bernal Still Matters to Classics
By Megan Daniels
“Whatever could one of Classics’ most notorious iconoclasts, Martin Bernal, have to offer American education in terms of addressing these combative social divisions?”
Black Athena, White Power
Are We Paying the Price for Classics’ Response to Bernal?
By Denise Eileen McCoskey
“My goal in reflecting back on Classics’ encounter with Black Athena (beginning some thirty years ago now) is not to open old wounds — or at least not open them casually — but to insist that we cannot effectively combat today’s use of Greece and Rome by white nationalists until we admit our own role in bringing such ideology about, until we grapple honestly with the fact that in no small way Classics’ response to Black Athena is coming home to roost.”
