Racism, Responses, Responsibilities
E(i)ditorial — January 2019
On the last day of 2018, Editor-at-Large Yung In Chae published an article on our Patreon account with the title “Eidolon’s Significant Statistics in 2018.” Included among those statistics: last year, we estimate that two-thirds of Eidolon’s writers were women. That’s a significant increase for us — men outnumbered women in 2015 and 2016, and in 2017 we had gender parity. Since our relaunch, we’re trending in the right direction.
A few days later, I received an email from editorial board member Dan-el Padilla Peralta asking if we’d run any numbers on the racial demographics of our contributors. The truth was that we hadn’t, because we haven’t been collecting demographic information from authors and we didn’t have a secure methodology for figuring out the race of any given writer.
Nevertheless, an estimate revealed that between 12 and 15% of our writers are people of color. It was a disappointing (if not entirely shocking) discovery that prompted our editorial team to resolve to do better—publishing more people of color was at the top of our list of resolutions for 2019.
The insufficiency of our response was forcibly impressed upon me at this year’s AIA/SCS meeting, where the lingering impact of Classics’ enmeshment with white supremacy was on full display. It is obvious (but bears repeating) that the racial profiling and subsequent online trolling of the founders of the Sportula, Djesika Bèl Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn, is the result of the overwhelming whiteness of our discipline. And it was sickening that so many chose to view Mary Frances Williams’ racist outburst at the Future of the Classics panel as an isolated incident. I witnessed the frenetic energy colleagues expended to frame her accusation that Dan-el Padilla Peralta only got his job because he is black as the ravings of a sadly unbalanced individual who had failed to find employment at a university.
You should read his response to the events, but I want to especially highlight the fact that his paper at that session was about the near-monopoly white classicists hold over publishing in some of Classics’ most prestigious peer-reviewed publications. Although Eidolon isn’t a peer-reviewed publication, I consider us to be part of the same wider ecosystem. In this climate, it simply isn’t enough to talk amongst ourselves and vow to “do better.” We need open discussions about race and publishing in Classics, with a focus on transparency and accountability.
Some journal editors (both present and former) are already making strides to change the shape of the conversation, including Josephine Quinn. Others have been sharing author demographics on Facebook recently (although those posts are not publicly visible). This is a fantastic development, and making those statistics widely available to our colleagues is a necessary first step to moving the conversation forward.
But naming and recognizing our past deficiencies is only a start. We also need to be looking to the future and making concrete steps to improve racial diversity in the landscape Classics publishing. To that end, we’re making a few changes and an open commitment to improving our representation in 2019. Specifically, we are aiming this year to have at least 70% of our contributors be women and 20% of our writers be POC.
These numbers mean that women and POC will be overrepresented in Eidolon in proportion to the discipline as a whole. That’s the entire point: when a group has historically been drastically underrepresented, it’s not enough to aim for proportionality.
In the past, one of the barriers to knowing the demographics of our writers has been a lack of self-reported information. So we’re making some changes to our pitch process. Starting this month, instead of having writers send pitches to an email address, we’re using a Google Form. That form gives writers the option to provide us with some information about themselves so we can better understand the makeup of our submission and author pool, and be able to report much more accurately on our submissions and publishing demographics.
Will that demographic information impact how we view pitches? You bet it will. I have no interest in providing bland and false reassurances that we only care about good ideas and good writing and not who our authors are. From day one, this journal has been devoted to showcasing personal perspectives on classical antiquity—the identity of our authors are has always mattered. Since its rebranding, Eidolon’s mission has been to provide a platform for exciting, fresh, well-written essays about the ancient Mediterranean, especially those that promote the cause of social justice. But we’ll never succeed if publishing continues to be, as Padilla Peralta deemed it, a “whites-only neighborhood.”
I know our trolls pretty well by now, and I know that they will have Thoughts about these (really quite modest) commitments to making our writer pool more inclusive. So I’m going to take this opportunity to preemptively answer some questions that I expect will arise.
Aren’t you discriminating against white men?
No.
But…
No, and I don’t think you understand what “discrimination” means. And no, that is absolutely not an invitation for you to give me a lesson on Latin roots.
But what about merit?
Leaving aside how often appeals to merit have become white supremacist dog-whistles at this point, let me just assure you that Eidolon will continue to have a very rigorous pitching and editing process. The majority of our articles go through several stages of revision and, rest assured, if we are publishing your article, it’s because we’re proud to do so. We reject over half of the pitches we receive; and it’s not unheard of for us to decide a draft (or second draft) of an article isn’t right for us. Our commitment to increasing the diversity of our writers doesn’t mean POC get to skip these stages, but it does mean we won’t go out of our way to advance white men or women (let’s call this the “reverse model-minority method” of publishing). If you’re white and we publish you, you will know, for maybe the first time in your career, that it was because of the merit of your idea and not because you’re white.
Should white men still pitch to Eidolon?
This is a trick question. Past experience (both mine and others’) tells that there is no force strong enough to dissuade white men from sending pitches (or poems). But I promise: if a white man sends us an amazing pitch, our editorial team isn’t going to sigh and lament to each other “Alas! If only we hadn’t already met our quota of white men for the month!”
Are you afraid at all that people will lie about their race/gender on the submission form to get their articles published?
There’s some precedent for this: in 2015, a guy named Michael from Indiana had a poem accepted into that year’s Best American Poetry volume under the name Yi-Fen Chou. I know the point white men think they’re making when they do this, and I don’t think they realize what a complete and utter self-own it really is.
More virtue-signaling from the SJWs at Mark Zuckerberg’s sister’s “woke” Classics publication!
This isn’t a question, but I’ll respond anyway: if you’re one of the people who lost your mind because I gently suggested you think about how you use the phrase “Western Civilization”, let’s just say it’s a big internet out there. I’m sure you can find something else to read — there’s already hundreds of years’ worth of conservative adoration of the classics for you to enjoy, and occasionally someone even publishes a new mediocre recapitulation of one of these old defenses.
Won’t this make Eidolon worse?
No, this will make Eidolon better. (Unless you already think Eidolon is bad, in which case, yes, it will get worse.)
I hope that this editorial will inspire others to make similar commitments to improving the diversity of their writers, and to continue to be transparent about their past history of exclusion.
Making the field more diverse — which will in turn make it better and more interesting — isn’t going to happen as a matter of course. That kind of change requires intention, conviction, and effort. And if we can’t summon up the will to make the changes we need, then we at least need to stop lying to ourselves that racism is in our field is, as they say, ancient history.
Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton, and her writing has appeared in the TLS, the Washington Post, and Jezebel. Her book Not All Dead White Men (Harvard University Press), a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is available now.
