Classics Makes Me Happy. Is That Enough?
An Undergraduate Student of Color Examines Feelings of Guilt
Admitted Students Day at Brandeis this year was on a cold, rainy Sunday. The depressing weather probably deterred at least some people from going, but plenty of the new class of potential freshmen and their parents still showed up. The part of the day that I participated in was the Majors Fair, where student representatives and professors gather at tables for their departments and meet the flood of admitted students. I spent a packed two hours speed-talking about Classics, passing out flyers about the department as fast as possible, and generally having a good time meeting all the new people.
But as time passed, I began to notice that all the new students I’d talked to so far had been white. I started looking around, trying to make eye contact with other students of color who were passing our table. Most spared me an uninterested or confused glance, then continued on their way.
I empathized with them. If I had gone to Admitted Students Day when I was a prospective freshman (and I hadn’t), I would have passed over the Classics table too. I would have considered it a niche, elitist offshoot of the History department, or something that was unimportant and which my parents, first-generation immigrants with high hopes for their kids, wouldn’t have approved of anyway. By the time the Fair was over and we had to pack up, I had met two non-white prospective freshmen who were interested in Classics out of a group of about thirty students.
The experience felt surprisingly jarring. I had gotten used to being part of a small but generally progressive and supportive department. In fact, I had forgotten that I had been reluctant to join the program not so long ago. It had taken me forever to turn in my major declaration; I waited until the last hour to do it despite having had it ready for weeks. I was hesitant to study Classics because I didn’t think I would ever really have a place studying something I thought was made by white people for white people. But in the end I decided that that was fine as long as I got to study archaeology, which at Brandeis isn’t an independent major and is best taught from the Classics department.
A few years later, I’ve found that I actually really enjoy the material. I’m happy to study Classics as a whole, not just its archaeology. But the uneasiness that underlies my relationship with Classics has never gone away; it’s like background noise, loud enough for me to register but quiet enough to ignore with some effort. I’ve dealt with it by not dealing with it. Upon taking a closer look at the issue, I’ve discovered that the discomfort is mostly guilt. I feel guilty about studying Classics, and a big part of it has to do with being aware of my race and the politics attached to it. Now, as I seriously consider pursuing a graduate degree and maybe even a future career in Classics, I know I have to examine my discomfort. I’m afraid of moving forward, of becoming a classicist like I think I want to be — and then finding out too late that I’ve let this these feelings fester into something unmanageable.
This piece is intended to be to some extent a testimony of experience. 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.
In the summer of my sophomore year, right after I declared my major, I had a conversation with a friend, also Asian-American, whom I hadn’t seen for a while. We met for lunch, caught up on our lives, and talked briefly about our majors. I told him I was studying Classics. He paused as if confused, then leaned forward and asked me, concerned, if I was into white supremacy. I was taken aback. I told him no, that’s not what Classics is about. He replied, without malice, “Okay, then what is it about?”
I think I defensively stammered out something about ancient Greece and Rome and how they were actually very diverse. He looked confused, but I quickly moved the conversation to something else. At the end of the lunch, I left with a sinking feeling. That brief exchange of sentences had seemingly validated a particular personal anxiety about studying Classics: looking like I was helping to prop up the glorification of “white” culture. It had been an unexpected exchange, yes, but not a fundamentally surprising one. He had simply voiced what I had been worrying about from the beginning.
I think of the faces of Classics as white. As for the ancient world, I’ve had to actively teach myself to understand that it wasn’t a collection of white ethnostates and didn’t exist in a vacuum. Eidolon and other publications that produce similar content have been instrumental to my learning this — for example, the first article I read on this site was Yung In Chae’s “White People Explain Classics to Us.” It was extremely validating to know that there were many other people of color who had at one point or another also felt uncomfortable about being in Classics. It wasn’t just me.
I know that our modern conception of race and its particular fixation on colorism is a uniquely modern construction; there’s little sense in trying to force it on the ancient world. But even though our modern framework of race is irrelevant, or at least the wrong one with which to understand relations between different groups of ancient peoples, the fact is that, today, Classics as a field has baggage. It comes from hundreds of years of Europeans glorifying classical culture, claiming it as their own, and using it as a cultural cudgel in their global expansion of empire. Engaging with Classics means engaging with its baggage, one effect of which was that lunchtime conversation, another of which is its complicated interaction with my own ethnic and cultural inheritance.
Today, some consider the classics to be foundational to modern Western civilization even while, as Rebecca Futo Kennedy put it, Classics as a field is battling for relevance today inside and outside of academia. Kennedy brought up university Classics department webpages as common examples of that kind of messaging; upon checking, the program I’m a part of at Brandeis is not an exception: “The Department of Classical Studies offers courses in the languages, literatures, history and archaeology of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. These two cultures are the intellectual, social, political, legal, scientific and artistic origin of Western civilization.”
I bought into that idea and didn’t realize how deeply I did until very recently. I thought, of course Classics is foundational to Western civilization. I never thought to really question it or to be critical of this paradigm that I’ve learned, internalized, and retained. The idea that I can now legitimately question this, with a view to the bigger picture, is both surprising and compelling because a large part of my discomfort with Classics has to do with its whiteness — not just in terms of who populates the academic field, but also in the sense that I thought it stood for white Western “culture,” the very existence of which might be genuinely questionable. If my understanding of the relationship between Classics and whiteness is at the root of my discomfort, and if that understanding is flawed, then my discomfort is built upon shaky ground.
My parents immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong in the late 1980s. Their experiences are typical of immigrant parents in my neighborhood: they came from desperately poor backgrounds, fought tooth and nail for stability, and tried to give their kids a better set of choices than they had. Thanks to my parents, I now have the luxury of studying something that makes me happy.
I’m immensely grateful to have these choices. I am always aware that they were not won easily. Like so many other first-generation Asian-American kids, I would like to show my parents that their sacrifices for me were worth it. I think at this point they accept my current life plan, but I know they would probably be more comfortable with their child becoming a doctor, engineer, or lawyer. What they have instead is a kid who chose to study Classics. A few times, they’ve told me that they couldn’t bring themselves to tell our neighbors and friends what I was studying.
Part of that was where we lived, in an academics and STEM-focused neighborhood in Silicon Valley where the humanities are considered by the average student to serve no more purpose or value than as garnish for college apps. Most of my peers ended up studying computer science, being pre-med, going to an Ivy, or all of the above. I was — am — zero out of three on that. The failure stung, and still does a little. But there’s nothing I can do about the past except move forward and try to be better, prove that I can excel outside of those standards I failed to meet. My parents can respect that. We’ve worked out a truce to the point where neither of us is truly satisfied, but neither of us is truly upset either. It feels like peace.
The other important component of my guilt about Classics is cultural. I am deeply afraid of becoming culturally bleached to whiteness when holding on to my ethnic heritage is already difficult. I was born and raised in America, where the default culture is “white”; I don’t necessarily need to retain elements of my heritage to live here or be successful. But even if I chose to stop speaking Chinese, caring about my heritage, or even thinking of myself as Asian, it would make no difference in how people see me.
Still, I’d like to avoid the bits of cultural bleaching that can be dodged, by choosing to speak Chinese at home or making the effort to take Asian history classes. Over time, it’s felt like a matter of conscience to make those choices. Choosing to study Classics and then going forward with the next step of becoming a classicist is intuitively counterproductive to that goal — I think it would actually be hard to pick another area of study “whiter” than this.
By that I mean, my friends often joke that I’m studying some “white people shit,” which I think is always going to be hilarious — but it also demonstrates that there’s a real difference between “pop Classics” and academic, “real” Classics. “Pop Classics” is what most non-academics I’ve met think Classics is: 300, Troy, white marble statues, white people in togas day-drinking wine while being fed grapes by a servant or two. And that’s just the people who know that Classics means ancient Greece and Rome; with the rest, sometimes there’s Shakespeare and classical music in the mix. It’s easy to talk to people in the field about critical theory or to say that Classics isn’t white and be understood, but not so much outside of this shelter. This is what happened to me at the Majors Fair: I’d forgotten about the fight outside the bubble, how difficult it is to battle deep-seated popular perceptions of Classics.
Even aside from that, I have other worries: in-depth professional study can so easily become a glorification of the topic, and if I buy into the Western civilization narrative, then I may glorify that narrative by extension, which I would like to swerve as far away from as possible. But I’ve come to realize that I don’t have to buy into anything. I can be critical, wary. Classics isn’t white people’s heritage, whatever that even means. And if the dangerous narrative of “Western civilization” is just that — a narrative — then maybe things are fine, or they could be.
Even if that weren’t the case, the obligation of conscience I’ve constructed is also problematic. I’ve come to think of it as a duty to respect my heritage, but because I’ve bought into the expectations of others, I’ve also misinterpreted that burden to mean that my heritage should dictate my interests.
The logical proper end of my constructed obligation as it stands would be my studying, and possibly making a career out of, East Asian Studies or something similar. I have a whole set of reasons ready for people who ask me why I’m going into Classics when I could still get to do archaeology and engage with ancient history in an East Asian context — I’m terrible at reading Chinese, I don’t want to make a career out of discovering my heritage, it feels too personal. Those reasons are all true, but the truest one is that I just don’t want to. This is also the only reason that never seems to be enough for the people who ask in the first place.
I may have created or opted into a personal obligation to respect and acknowledge my heritage, but that obligation has its limits. Maybe that obligation would be stronger if I had actually grown up in China and had a deeper connection to my ethnic roots. But I am Asian-American and even though being politically and socially active is important to me, trying to meet that obligation to the degree I’ve inflated it to is perhaps just as much an act of pretending to be Chinese as pretending to be white might be. I am a product of mixed cultures; my inheritance is by birthright my own to make.
Knowing this is a relief. It quiets a large portion of the guilt, even if it doesn’t get rid of the entire issue — I still have to deal with how I’m going to parse through my perceived obligations to my family, as well as how I’m going to be treating my consciousness of my heritage in the future. But it is still a lot more manageable than what I had before. The noise in the background has gotten much, much softer.
Now that I know I can move forward, there remains one big question about my future in Classics: is becoming invested in this field worth it? I really like my work in it so far, and I would like to continue doing it in the future, but I know that if I do go into Classics, I have to be active not just in a scholarly sense, but in a socially conscious one as well. The Classics that I want to see myself working in is not the Classics of today.
To get to where I want to be, I think I would have to help make the change I want to see. This change, this hypothetical future Classics, would be a field that is studied by diverse people, benefits from that diversity of views, and would ultimately become something more along the lines of Mediterranean Studies rather than only the study of Greece and Rome in a vacuum. I accept that even if I were to try and help realize this, I might not ever see it happen; and knowing that, is it worth it to stay?
I recently had the chance to speak with Dr. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton. I asked him if he knew how to get over the feeling of guilt that comes from being a person of color who chooses to do Classics instead of literally anything else that’s more socially productive. He was very kind and said that the feeling doesn’t really go away, but it’s a fundamentally personal decision. I went away from that conversation thinking: does Classics make me happy? Do I think I could have a productive, fulfilling relationship with the field despite my misgivings?
I haven’t been working in Classics long enough to come up with a real answer, but I know I can start looking for one. The field can diversify; we can unlearn the internalized idea that the only people who should be studying Classics are white people. For now, I want to still work in Classics because it makes me happy. And maybe that’s all I need to know.
Helen Wong is a senior at Brandeis University. She serves as project manager for the Brandeis Digital Humanities Lab and studies History and Classics with a focus on archaeology and archaeological science.
