Fight or Die
How to Move from Statements to Actions
I’m black, and I’m mad as all hell about current events, and I’m locked at home so I can’t vent to anyone about it, so I thought, “What if I wrote an article about it?” So here goes:
As much as I support expanding the Classical canon for the sake of never reading another paper about Virgil ever again, plain ol’ expansion will never be enough to save Classics. The amount of stuff we have to study has never been the actual issue with this field. No, it’s the quality of the field that drives students away. And right now the quality is on full display. Too often Classicists are allowed to believe that silence is justice, that it isn’t their bone to pick. What could a Classical education contribute to the dismantling of a four hundred year old system of oppression anyway?
But here’s the thing: I’m not asking you to use your education and fact check every time a white supremacist misquotes Plato. I am demanding that you use the fact that white supremacists respect Plato — and, by extension, those [white] scholars who study him — and spit in that white supremacist’s face.
When in a rich man’s house, ya know?
Classics’ ties to white supremacy are deeper than most care to dwell on. The two grew up in America side-by-side. With Classics, early America rebranded itself. No longer a ragtag scrabble of European castoffs, but rightful inheritors of the original democracy, the backbone of Western Civilization, the sacred torch-bearers that kept the flame of democracy a-burning far away from the dampening overreach of those wretched monarchists.
This long history means that Whiteness now comfortably sits at the foot of Classics, thinking that this is a safe place, almost sacrosanct. Race politics can be easily avoided here and so they flock.
The first step towards making a qualifiable difference in Classics then would be to yank the chair out from underneath Whiteness. Start teaching an anti-white supremacist, anti-racist Classics curriculum! Today! And tomorrow! And next week. And forever.
The passive resistance of just citing scholars of color or just electing chairs of color will never be enough to uproot Whiteness. White Classicists MUST resist and do the work. Every. Single. Day. To unlearn white supremacy in themselves, to unwrite the white supremacist narratives they discover, and to unteach the white supremacist ideologies they will invariably discover in students who approach Classics as a white history, who have never been asked to challenge the lifetime of skewed representation they’ve consumed.
And unteaching white supremacist ideologies in students is the most important work of a Classisict today. Of course, the work should be done intensively in upper level coursework, but it must also be done (and, I believe, more pressingly so) at the introductory level. Sixth-grade Latin, ninth-grade English (when reaching their obligatory Odyssey/Iliad unit), 105 Introduction to Greek Tragedy. It is these students who go out into the world and spread Classics culture. Their half-forgotten memories of lessons from that one Classics course they took back in college which they bring up over drinks with friends, or during a brainstorm session at work, or while watching the latest historical drama on Netflix will quite frankly do far more to change the Classics’ culture than a paywall blocked, 25-page JSTOR article on the reanalysis of Ethiopian motifs in Herodotus.
Sure, some research will go viral, but the chances are slim — just look at the opening line of the 2017 Vice News article about Sarah Bond’s work on polychromy: “Bond is a classicist, a profession that doesn’t really attract conflict, especially about race.”
We must commit to making a new self-perpetuating system. Scholars unteach white supremacy, students unlearn white supremacy (or they can decide this field “isn’t for them” and leave — hardly a loss), those who choose it become scholars themselves who can unteach white supremacy too but even better now since they were started earlier, and those who choose something else, continue on to informally unteach white supremacy to their friends and family, maybe even steering students who would not otherwise have been reached onto the Classical path.
So don’t waste a single class session! Be anti-racist everyday in every class! White supremacy is already in your classroom, so adopt a zero tolerance policy and teach it right out the door.
Saying this, I know that white scholars are not afforded the kind of hands-on education in racism that people of color receive. While Classicists of color likely have had to explain many times, to a thousand different white friends, white acquaintances, and the occasional white stranger how they aren’t “acting white” by studying Classical history, white classicists may not have any experience in picking apart the oppressive power behind their exclusive, clout-lending degrees. I say this not to be pejorative of their lack of knowledge (…in most cases) but as a plain statement of fact, because every single one of us has grown up under a system of racial inequality.
Our educational institutions are so thoroughly infected by white supremacy that a white person could go their whole lives without seeing the writing on the wall. It’s just not acknowledged. And when it is, a white person (an academic in particular) can find themselves subjected to the overwhelming feelings of embarrassment at not knowing how to talk about race and power and oppression and elitism, much less how to go about unteaching it in others. But you can’t just leave an infection like this be. You can’t just wait and hope it will pass or the field will somehow naturally grow out of it. The Classics community must get up, go out, and get some fucking antibiotics.
But where do we go?
Well lucky for Classics, in higher education, pharmaceuticals abound. For a personal dose, I can offer these first steps: ask yourself right now, “How am I addressing race in my classroom?” If the answer is not at all, re-evaluate that choice. Ask yourself: “How was/is the topic I study used by white supremacy?” If you’re teaching a summer course, ask this question of your class. Trust me, asking them about race won’t be anymore intrusive on their summer learning progress than living through this period of history. For that matter, if you haven’t already reached out to your students of color enrolled in a summer course, do so. Open the channel of communication with the sole intent to listen. And finally, sit down and really ask yourself why it is that you study Classics and how you can study it even better, and then make use of the rapidly expanding list of digital resources and give yourself an answer.
As for a departmental dose, I must first disclaim to all that I do not know. It would be impossible for anyone to know the correct answer to the most pressing issue of race for every Classics department in America, as varied as they are. What I can offer though is broad stroke advice based off of my own limited experience with large scale training and it is as follows:
Organize for training! Today! Send that first email in the chain right now! Seek out creative (and mandatory) collaborative discussions with sociology and/or [insert race]-American departments to learn how whiteness works and what you can do to disrupt it. Seek out creative (and mandatory) collaborative training with education departments and training centers about how to teach towards a diverse classroom and how to cultivate a space in which the students of color are not the only ones talking about what race and institutional power have to do with Classics.
Not only require this training of every single faculty member and graduate student and teacher but also, once that training is formally over, maintain it by holding each other accountable to the highest standard. Training is the first step, not the last.
The most valuable lesson on race I can remember being taught was this: when people show you who they are, believe them. A four-hundred-year history of unresolved hate that all too often ends in violence — whether in the belly of a ship, at the end of a rope, or with the squeeze of a trigger — simply means that I don’t have the luxury of issuing second chances. I just don’t got enough lives.
So learn my lesson. If a peer goes out of their way to rave and rail against this kind of equitable approach to teaching ancient history, if they aren’t willing to put in the work needed to undo generations of damage, realize what they are saying and believe them. I will say it myself right here, right now: a teacher who is unwilling to vocally condemn and dismantle white supremacy in the classroom should not be teaching students of color and, since classroom segregation was made illegal in 1954, it follows that teachers who are unwilling to vocally condemn white supremacy shouldn’t be teaching at all.
Pria Jackson is a Black Classicist who is as tired as she is hopeful. A pre-Doctoral Fellow at Princeton University, she thought she was a devout Hellenist but now, after a summer with Aulus Gellius of all people, she is back to questioning the validity of categorization.
