More Than a Common Tongue

This article is part of our “Burn it All Down?” Column

Race is not universal. And neither is Classics. To assume that race is the same everywhere is to fall into one of the most basic traps that scuppers radical anti-racist work: that the hierarchies of racism are self-evident and hold epistemological and ontological weight in and of themselves. To historicize race, to make it a phenomenon construed in particular forms to particular cultures, is to take the first step in unpicking its cruel and dehumanizing logic.

Language is a good way of seeing how race is constructed differently according to cultural and national contexts. The previous piece I wrote for Eidolon analyzed various defensive behaviors that white classicists produce when they perceive that their place in the racial hierarchies that structure Classics are under attack. In that piece I used the short hand “black and brown” as a slightly less denigrating way of indicating “not white” when talking about classicists from racial minority backgrounds. “Black and brown” also got me some way to decentering whiteness. It was my way of getting around the fact that BAME, the awkward acronym standing for “Black and Minority Ethnic” that is used in the UK, would be pretty meaningless in an online journal whose readership is primarily based in North America (arguably, as Afua Hirsch points out (p. 120), it’s already so broad in trying to cover all non-white groups that it’s pretty meaningless from the off).

Similarly, where “person of color” is a useful umbrella adjective for North Americans, my British ear still quails because of its proximity to “coloreds” as a racially pejorative term (which though outdated, can still be heard as a slip of the Conservative politician’s tongue). “Asian — Other,” the box I choose to check when I identify on any given administrative form, presents an interesting instance of the Gordian knot of race because of its shifting referent between US and UK contexts; ditto “Indian.” (In the US, Asian refers to East Asia primarily, whereas in the UK, it refers to South Asia. Confusingly, “Indian” in the US is a clunky term that hides foundational genocidal violence, where in UK “Indian” is primarily understood as South Asian nation, though might be used as a catch-all for “vaguely brown”).

One of the most challenging conversations I had around my choice of wording was with those who felt like “black and brown” did not represent their racial status. I had to think about how terminologies of race organize hierarchies, and do not simply operate as ordering categories. In trying to get under the skin of whiteness, I was tripping over language and could not adequately decenter whiteness. It’s one of the design strengths of racecraft that the language that we use to describe it slips out of our grasp, and therefore eludes the very analysis that could start to undermine it.

Race is not a straightforwardly portable tool of analysis, even as we recognize that the traffic of enslaved black and brown bodies back and forth across the Atlantic is the original trauma of imperialism that binds North America and the United Kingdom together. The Atlantic, and not the Mediterranean, might be better thought of as mare nostrum, a shared geography of empire. There are of course crucial overlapping moments of these histories in the contemporary world — for example, the sharp uptick in Islamophobia, in political discourse as well as in physical violence, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was a key juncture in the history of race relations on both sides of the Atlantic. And yet these national histories of race are manifestly different — European racial hierarchies are structured by claims to autochthony, where the settler colonial fantasy of white America gets masked by the Thanksgiving turkey and the totalizing assimiliationist demand of the melting pot.

The tendency toward American exceptionalism also extends to the fallacy that the American categories of race are universal. Ask any person of color who comes to the US and discovers they are “black,” as the protagonist of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah describes in the experience of coming from Nigeria and being interpolated into a whole (and to her, wholly foreign) regime of racecraft. Alternatively, there is a mode of British self-delusion that looks across the pond and observes that American racism is exceptional because it is generated by exceptional cultural stupidity. (This patronizing British attitude is of course a strategy of total denial about racism in the UK.) White British classicists partake of this attitude too: it was not uncommon to hear in the wake of the racist incidents at the SCS that race is a particularly American problem, and therefore the incidents, while regrettable, were unimaginable in a British academic context. In addition, this queasy calculus (“class is a British problem, race is an American one”) throws working-class people of color under the bus on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the ways that we can deconstruct the universal purchase of race is by pointing out its historical specificity. The traditional authority of Classics rests on a paradox: the exceptional value of Euro-American culture is in tension with a desire to create universally applicable sets of value (what it means to be human, for example, taken as the exclusive predicate of Greek tragedy as epistemically formatted by white men). When we start to consider the history of the Classics in culturally specific ways, for example, by doing comparative and cross-cultural work, we undermine the authority of a universal claim. If we take race as our lens for examining the structuring paradoxes of Classics, we might shatter two universal claims at their most ideologically suspect point — the point at which they reinforce one another.

And so, in this piece I want to think about how race matters differently on both sides of the Atlantic. Although I’m wary of the dangers of doubling down on the Anglophone dominance over global knowledge production, I’m focusing on the United Kingdom and the United States because those are the national contexts for the academic work that I’m the most familiar with. Having studied Classics at Oxford for my undergraduate degree, I did a masters at University College London in Reception of the ancient world followed by a PhD at Princeton in Classics. My training, then, is split almost equally between Britain and America.

My ultimate goal here is not to discourage the progressive and radical agenda for classicists across the Atlantic by insisting that our historical differences of race and nationhood are insuperable. Rather, I’m convinced that Classics can only really start to think of itself as a global project once it has reckoned with how it has been invested all over the world in histories and ongoing realities of colonialism and racialized extractive capitalism of many kinds. To do this, we have to march straight up to the values around which Classics has been constituted and look it in the eye. Only then can we start to struggle free together from the straitjackets of race and class that hold us trapped.

American universities and colleges are structured by, and bear the wounds of, racism. A clear sign of this is in the existence of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Officially recognized by the 1965 Higher Education Act, these institutions are particular to America’s educational landscape. They emerged as a response not only to the immediate demands of the Civil Rights movement, but were also part of the longer history of social exclusion from the civil war period, when freed slaves sought education but were not admitted to universities or colleges. As Frederick Douglass pointed out in 1845, deprivation of basic literacy (among many other privations and forms of violence) is one way of keeping an enslaved group of people from a means of self-realization and liberation.

The need for the existence of a mechanism like HBCUs to correct for systematic exclusion, however, has not been obviated in the fifty years since the legislative repeal of segregation. HBCUs have been chronically underfunded compared to institutions that do not have an explicit aim of educating Black Americans, and the overall number has been steadily dropping: currently there are 102 listed. HBCUs tender the possibility that the university can be the site of radical critiques of injustice within higher education and in wider American society.

The other side of the coin from HBCUs is the admission of minorities into elite schools. Affirmative action also forms part of the history of higher education as an elite and whites only institution. While still controversial, affirmative action attempts to remedy exclusion by “race, creed, color and national origin” by insisting on inclusion on those same grounds. And yet, it seems like affirmative action as a reparative mechanism can only do so much when elite schools still admit by legacy, i.e. when having an alum in the family is to the advantage of a prospective student. Legacy admissions therefore reentrench the racial injustice that explicitly and disproportionately excluded black and POC students. The recent admissions scandal (that only hit the national headlines because it involved formerly relevant celebrities) was not news to any racially discriminated minority group that lives with the historical legacy and ongoing exclusion from educational institutions. Affirmative action is one (not unproblematic) part of the calculus that race and wealth together have historically been used to determine who receives higher education in America.

The alternative model to the private institution used to be the idea(l) of publicly funded education. Public universities and colleges in most states now draw their funding more from tuition than from tax dollars — almost without the wider American public realizing it. Who knew that you could put a price on “the pursuit of happiness”, and that that price might be cripplingly prohibitive? In the context of the wider shift towards demographic diversity (the weaponized fact that white Americans will constitute a minority for the first time ever by 2050), what does the collapse of public higher education mean? And more specifically, what does it mean for the place of Classics in this ecology of racialized market forces?

In short, these material histories of racial exclusion and economic injustice orient the place of Classics in the American academy. One way of mapping its place is to turn to discourse analysis; see for example the resurgence of interest in describing how the Founding Fathers turned to antiquity to create the ideological project of America. This approach reveals how the economic privilege of learning Greek and Latin and the cultural status of Classics as the commodity of the elite reinforce one another. Another way of grasping the racial and economic politics of Classics is to do a little comparative disciplinary history. The first black studies program in the United States (at San Francisco College) has this year marked its fiftieth anniversary — it was born amid the heyday of student activism and the demand for transformation of higher education (alongside the demand for LatinX/ChicanX studies as an officially recognised discipline). The value of studying Classics in America has historically been tied to wealth and whiteness at the literal and figurative expense of considering other cultural objects worthy of academic investigation.

I have often wondered if Black Athena could have been written by a scholar operating in a British university context. Martin Bernal was white and British, and worked at Cornell University, an Ivy League institution in upstate New York. The book, and the ensuing scholarly controversy, illuminated the cultural and racial commitments of its various actors in mounting a challenge to the whiteness of Greco-Roman antiquity. And yet, the Black Athena debate is also an object lesson in how the work of scholars of color are erased in disciplinar memory. The mere fact that the book was published, and the controversy rumbles on, is revealing of an essential cultural difference between the US and the UK that informs how race is handled in respective academic contexts. It seems to me that race is an area in American life in which little is held back — historical ugliness, contemporary ugliness, and all. By contrast, race in the UK is almost a taboo topic — a friend memorably compared trying to talk about race to farting in a room full of people, and have everyone turn away from you. She was not far off; a mixture of British shame about bodies and a drive to avoid confrontation (constructive or not) at any cost lurk under the guise of politeness. Whilst acknowledging this difference in cultural temperament, the Black Athena debate is construed more as a locking of horns between white scholars than as erasing the interventions of black American scholars such as Frank Snowden Jr. These disciplinary silences and national taboos collide in Black Athena — they are telling of a bad conscience around race.

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. But blaming a wider cultural bashfulness does not exculpate us: we simply have had not had our “Black Athena” moment because we have not wanted to confront the shitstorm of empire, race, and epistemic injustice that has framed the study of Classics in the UK. Whatever else the Black Athena controversy unleashed, it shaped the agenda for the study of race and classics within the US and then beyond. From my perspective as a brown British classicist with skin in the game, UK Classics has not been called to face its racial truths. In fact, instead of borrowing American terms, we need more culturally and historically specific ways of doing critical self reflection around race, class, and empire.

The issue for anti-racist classicists is a local variation on a problem that affects British anti-racism work at large. As Reni Eddo-Lodge has pointed out, the American formulation of race cannot provide the coordinates of grappling with racial oppression in the UK. Black Lives Matter has had an extraordinary effect on the political conversations in America in the last decade; Black Lives Matter UK has been less successful. Taking the American template of race to describe and deconstruct British racism simply won’t work.

We can see this in the phenomenon where British anti-racist activists are surprised to find themselves, relatively late in their development as activists, learning that Britain too has a complex history of race and race resistance. The example that Eddo-Lodge uses in “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race” is the Bristol bus boycott in 1965, a protest that she learned about only whilst working for the Runnymede Trust, a British race equality thinktank (and having taken elective courses at university in black British history). She writes (pp. 54–55):

While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration — eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain never had a problem with race.

Race is not explicitly part of the cultural atmosphere in the UK in the way it is in the US. This is reflected in legislation: while affirmative action is a key strategy for leveling the economic playing field in the US, UK law only allows for positive action, a distinctly less robust way to encourage employers to hire from historically underrepresented racial groups. In fact, the UK equivalent of affirmative action is “positive discrimination” and is illegal — there is a kind of color blindness enshrined in how the UK approaches race in the workplace.

But where race (in conjunction with class) is explicitly expressed in the UK is in the formation of the political elites. The leverage that Classics can still provide politicians on the right would be unthinkable in the US (give or take a few misquotations of Thucydides by a White House official). The idea that a politician could creditably claim that “classicist” is a good qualification for public service wouldn’t occur to most Americans but one that still finds ground in the UK, especially in the figure of Boris Johnson. Johnson, formerly mayor of London and now frontrunner in the race for Conservative party leader and Prime Minister, studied Classics at Oxford University. He likes to present a public persona in the mould of Victorian statesman — with the imperialist politics to boot — which includes publishing lukewarm imperialist wet dreams in the form of popular books on the “Dream of Rome,” comparing himself to the (incidentally pleb-hating patrician) Cincinnatus when asked if he’d like to be Prime Minister, and acting as patron for a major Classics charity. There’s even an online petition to ostracize him, fifth-century Athens-style.

His self-positioning at the crossroads of class, elitism, and whiteness has several consequences. One consequence is to turn off anyone who recoils from this so-called “erudition” as a sign of class hatred. Moreover, his public self-image creates an explicit link between Classics, xenophobia, and racial injustice As one-time Foreign Secretary, Johnson held the most official power in creating and maintaining relationships with the rest of the world — and yet has a long and toxic history of racist public speech. The coupling of his racism with political power has real-life consequences: after his incendiary remarks about women wearing the burqa, there was a direct increase of attacks on Muslims as a consequence.

Thus Johnson’s racism taps into toxic narratives about the “clash of civilizations” that depend on the fantasy of antiquity as exclusively white and Western. As Phiroze Vasunia has shown, the study of Greek and Latin at Oxford and Cambridge were instrumental in the formation of the administrators who ran the British Empire. (You have to reach back to the eighteenth century in America to observe how Classics was centrally important for the formation of the political class). Classics occupies pride of place at British elite schools and universities as sites of social reproduction: Johnson, as a conspicuous product of this system, promotes the exclusionary values of white Britain.

The progressive response to this history within Classics has mostly been to get more historically excluded groups (working-class, as well as racially excluded) to study this discipline. The trickle-up doctrine is of limited value if the discipline itself refuses to re-examine its structure of making and reproducing social values of gender, race, and class. In the UK academy within Classics and beyond, the outsized dominance of Oxford and Cambridge as the two major institutions that train the next generation of scholars have a lot to answer for in terms of the production of these values.

We see the reproduction of social values in the tiny percentage of the UK professoriat that female scholars of color occupy, and how disproportionately underpaid they are. The diversification of university elites is a game of substitution at best, leaving the ideological core around which Classics is constituted as a mechanism of elitism and white supremacy untouched. In other words, then, I’m not arguing for Oxford and Cambridge to hire more (or any) permanent women of color scholars as a shortcut to doing the work of critical self reflection around gender, race, and class.

Last year saw the publication by the Royal Historical Society of an extensive report on the current state of race and ethnicity, based on data collected from surveys. While not perfect (intersectionality is dealt with far too briefly, for example), it provided a snapshot of where our sister disciplines are at in their thinking about race, and in furnishing us with some concrete data. It is an unsurprisingly depressing read, detailing the challenges of being a BAME person today in a history discipline at any level from secondary (middle and high) school to the rank of tenured professor. The Council of University Classics Departments (CUCD), one of the central organizations of UK Classics, is currently organizing a survey that can give us a similar state-of-the-discipline picture.

Meanwhile, British-Iraqi archeologist Zena Kamash (Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London) recently gave a brilliant keynote at the 2019 Theoretical Roman Archeology Conference (TRAC). One part described her findings from a survey she had written and distributed to UK-based Roman archeologists that particularly inquired into race, ethnicity, and diversity in undergraduate curricula. Another part of the lecture looked at research practices, in which she analyzed the reports of the proceedings of the TRAC and Roman Archeological Conferences, to see what kinds of research have historically been undertaken at a major disciplinary conference and by whom. (Collecting and interpreting data, empirical and anecdotal — the survey approach takes the skills that we have professionally honed and applied to the past and turns them back on ourselves.) The link between what we teach and what we research, it seems, is also necessary to hold in mind when we attempt to dismantle systemic racism in the discipline. Once we have a collective and concrete picture, we can start to take collective responsibility.

And still — once we have our data, the epistemic problems about race that underwrite the discipline have to be addressed. Decolonization is a tool with which UK academia is being construed in limited form, for example in the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. Most of the energy of decolonization in Classics, however, is in operation outside of the academy (for example, in museums), or within the academy but focused on curriculum reform. Both of these sites, important as they are, are seen as the lowest hanging fruit. Decolonization is not an epistemic or pragmatic tool that I see currently in widespread use amongst senior American classicists who do anti-racism and social justice work — it is a term that has currency among graduate students in Classics in the US and in the UK and that makes me hopeful indeed about how critical self-reflection is part and parcel of how the discipline might change.

For my own part, I think about my scholarly self-fashioning and research in Classics in terms of decolonization (there are other kinds of ways of framing this work, such as anti-racism or indigenization). There is a great deal of overlap between decolonization and anti-racist work: both projects I think are about trying to critique structures of power and to take reparative action with respect to epistemic injustice. However I frame this work, I’m not particularly interested in “diversity” which, as I said before, leaves in place institutional and disciplinary structures that are (still) exclusionary in their logic. At the moment, decolonization allows me to imagine the study of antiquity as a kind of anti-racist (and inclusively feminist) liberation work.

In practical terms in the Classics classroom, I think this means building syllabi that do not just tack on “race” as an afterthought to be dealt with in one session, but weave critical attention to race throughout — in whatever ways it takes to stop producing the idea of a white antiquity, but to underscore the idea that the ancient world was much larger than Greece and Rome, and that it was rich in difference in terms of race, ethnicity, and languages. It could look like tracking a figure from antiquity through various rubrics of racial stereotyping, such as Cleopatra, and asking why it’s important that it’s easier to construe an African queen as Elizabeth Taylor than black. It could look like collaborating with a colleague to teach a comparative ancient empires module. It might mean changing the institutions where you teach, for example in an incarcerated classroom.

Decolonization, for me, doesn’t mean turning my back on antiquity altogether. Rather I stay within Classics because of the radical potential there is in picking up the master’s tools for dismantling injustice not only in the academy, but beyond it too. Decolonization asks me to observe how Classics is part and parcel of a society structured by overlapping and intersecting injustices. So it is a useful rubric for me as a classicist in particular because it changes the job description of what it means to be a classicist at all. I want to be the kind of decolonizing classicist who studies the past ethically, who fights fiercely wherever I recognize injustice occurring under the sign of Classics as an elite, whites-only, pursuit. Classics may not be universal, but a commitment to justice is.

Mathura Umachandran knows she can be over-dressed, and knows she can be under-dressed, but is never just dressed. She anachronizes at the University of Oxford. With thanks to Katherine Harloe, Ella Haselswerdt, Zena Kamash, Marchella Ward, Jessica Wright.