White People Explain Classics to Us
Epistemic Injustice in the Everyday Experiences of Racial Minorities
We need to talk about epistemic injustice in Classics.
I borrow the term epistemic injustice from the philosopher Miranda Fricker, who defines it as “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower,” and I rely in particular on her concept of testimonial injustice: “when prejudice causes the hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word.” For example, the better-known “mansplaining,” inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Men Explain Things to Me” — to which this article obviously owes its title — is a gendered form of testimonial injustice. I focus on race (“whitesplaining”) rather than gender here, but as always, when you bring up the first the second is already lurking in the corner with a few accomplices.
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.
This phenomenon is admittedly difficult to capture, let alone discuss, because it seems to exist between words. Most of all, it is shot through with plausible deniability. People call you paranoid, hysterical. They demand proof, even though epistemic injustice by its very nature resists “proof,” and your inability to supply facts and figures reinforces their belief that you aren’t credible.
It is an intellectual problem and, simultaneously, much more than an intellectual problem. For no amount of pedagogical reform or evidence that the ancient world was diverse — at least, none of that alone — is enough to counteract an injustice so insidious that it is embedded in our daily interactions with each other. Everyday experience is both the scene of the crime and the entry point into a larger system of racial oppression.
For this article, I reached out to classicists of color and asked them whether they had ever been made to feel as though they knew less about their area of expertise than white classicists, although their answers turned out to be far more complex than my question. Some agreed to talk about their experiences on the record. Others (understandably) expressed reservations — for various reasons, including professional ones. The very real fear of consequences is a common difficulty in bringing any sensitive issue, such as sexual harassment, to the surface, and one of the things such difficulty speaks volumes about here is how the hierarchical structure of the academy stifles the stories that need to be heard most. On a related note, I should admit that I focus on people from elite institutions, which is both a weakness of this article and a function of some privilege being necessary in order to talk about sensitive issues in public.
The conversations that I had softened some of my views and sharpened others, but overall I was left with the unsettling impression that this is a problem with no clear beginning or end. Right now we classicists talk about racism as if it were a tangle of string. But it more closely resembles a Gordian knot: immense, impenetrable, impossible. You can hardly loosen one small knot without tightening another somewhere. Yet we still picture a tangle of string, and are shocked when, for all our good intentions and misdirected solutions, the knot does not yield.
My intention is not to find solutions but to better understand the problem.
I first became aware of a racial epistemic injustice in Classics through an interaction with a (white) graduate student, who saw me enter a classroom and, once I was in earshot, announced that she was going to play “devil’s advocate,” then launched into a curious explanation about how my particular research interest, critical theory, was making Classics inaccessible. “But I guess that’s just because making Classics accessible is really important to me,” she said, knowing full well the work I do at this publication.
This happened to be the day after my inbox had flooded with anti-Semitic emails intended for our Editor-in-Chief, Donna Zuckerberg, the backlash to work done in the name of making Classics accessible. Having glimpsed the devil, I was in no mood to deal with his lawyer.
When I later told the Eidolon editorial team — Donna, Sarah Scullin, and Tori Lee — about this incident, Sarah asked the question: “Would she have said that to you if you were white?”
As with gendered epistemic injustice, the answer is a hesitant “I don’t know, maybe,” a decidedly unsatisfactory one that raises even more questions.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Assistant Professor at Princeton University (and, full disclosure, member of Eidolon’s board), has long been a prominent and vital voice in the conversation about race and Classics. So I asked Dan-el about these aggressions that are, in his words, “so micro as to leave a sour taste in your mouth but no clear memory as to how the interaction unfolded.”
“When I was doing my master’s degree,” he said, “a supervisor made it quite clear to me that he did not think I could hack it. I spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out, ‘Why does he think that I’m a second-rate mediocrity?’ ‘Why does he convey to me, with every gesture, that I’m not worth developing intellectually?’ Eventually I came to the conclusion that this had a fair bit to do with race. Now, I don’t think that race was the only variable at play here — there was an intersectional component to this, with, for example, my migrant identity. But at the core I had no doubt that much of this was a function of my not conforming to the type of student that he had in mind. And my failure to conform was in part due to my Afro-Latino background.”
“The trick is,” he said, “if you were to ask me what the exact interval of orchestrated interpersonal interaction that made clear the presence of racial animus was, I could not tell you.” Where racial animus is keenly felt, he added — to borrow (unwillingly) a phrase from Michael Gerson, George W. Bush’s speechwriter — is in “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It is ironic, then, that the resistance to meaningful diversity often takes the form of an appeal to maintaining standards; Dan-el brought up “the exhortation to keep language training as the cornerstone of the discipline.” At one level that’s perfectly fine, he said wryly, at another it’s “a capitulation to the socioeconomic forces that conspire to deny folks access to the opportunities to attain proficiency in Latin and Greek by the time they’re applying to graduate programs.”
These conspiratorial socioeconomic forces get to work early. “At my undergraduate institution,” he told me, “there was, and still is, a rivalry between the Classics and Classical Studies concentrators. I arrived with gaseous ideas about what my language training had equipped me to do, because I had been the beneficiary of a private school education. From early on, I — hitherto on the receiving end of structural injustice — found myself lapsing into these curious little rituals that accentuated my sense, and the sense of my fellow Classics concentrators, that we were better than the Classical Studies concentrators because they didn’t have the languages and we did, although obviously they did have the languages. They weren’t taking upper-level classes and graduate seminars.”
This came to a head, he said, during a case race (a drinking game where you race to finish a case of beer) pitting Classics against Classical Studies his junior year. Classics won, and sent an email announcing the results to the department listserv. One professor wrote back to congratulate the victors and said, “Yes, those Classical Studies folks, they take water with their whiskey.”
“It took some brutal introspection,” Dan-el said, “to realize that this Classics-Classical Studies divide replicated many of the socioeconomic and racial divisions that, in other contexts, deeply troubled me. We were groomed to police each other this way.”
So what are the implications, on the macro, of microaggressions? Dan-el brought up a talk that he gave last year in which he “put forward a vision of Classics that embraced the possibility that the field would have to die for the realization of a higher goal” (a vision that he put forward again last month in Boston). “At a moment when we are confronted with white supremacists strip-mining the classics,” he said, “one answer is to say, ‘We need to take back our field.’ I’m obviously in support of this. But I adopt a more ambivalent posture toward the discipline because, in my embodied experience as a raced individual, it has never been far from my mind that one of the things that drew me to Classics was a form of epistemic injustice.”
He was brought to Classics by epistemic injustice? “It was the erasure or occlusion of many other historical and cultural trajectories that had been folded into my immigrant experience but did not receive repeated validation,” he elaborated. “It was when I turned to Classics that people started saying, ‘Ah! You do Classics? That’s so hard. That’s so amazing, that you’re interested in the Greeks and Romans.’ Of course there was all this condescension in the attempts to encourage me. A version of ‘look at how articulate he is.’ But because there was such an overwhelming urge to be validated, I turned in the direction of those compliments and smiled. And I basked in their glow because I felt that it was this form of affirmation that heralded a deliverance from life circumstances that I found reprehensible.”
At this point in my conversation with Dan-el, a realization bubbled up. I’m often asked how I ended up studying Classics, and I always reply, I randomly started taking Latin, I enjoyed it and one thing led to another and oh, ultimately it’s complicated. But the real, honest, secret, shameful reason that I majored in Classics is simple and clear: I wanted to tell people that I was a Classics major. I wanted to tell people that I was studying something esoteric and important, which required knowledge of two difficult dead languages. Especially white people, for in my imagination they were always white, except when I was talking to people of color to say, I’m not like you, I’m different.
So why do white people, after selling Classics as a ticket into the honorable club of “Western civilization,” after refusing to accept anything less than impeccable pedigrees and performances from us, pull a bait-and-switch? Why do they keep insisting that we know less about the classics?
“What’s devastating is that I did know less about the classics,” Mathura Umachandran responded when I asked her this, rhetorically, over an Italian lunch near the British Library.
Mathura went to the University of Oxford and is finishing up her Ph.D. at Princeton, so I was a bit taken aback. But I also felt a tingle of recognition, as if she were about to articulate an idea that lay dormant in my brain.
“My parents were immigrants,” she continued, “and come from a culture where becoming a doctor or engineer is a social aspiration. And that was also the social aspiration for me and my sister, and we were both like, ‘No, we’re going to go to Oxford and do Philosophy and Classics.’” She said that she often compares herself to white peers who have academic parents and thus don’t have to struggle to carve out what it would be like for them to have the same career. “There is [a struggle] for me, every day, because there are almost no women of color in Classics. Imagine having someone like that in your family.”
Having an older sister who went to Oxford, she said, made her think that it was a possibility, not just something you read about. “I thought, I like Latin and literature, I could go to Oxford and do Classics — having no idea what it meant, how competitive it was. And I showed up there and went, ‘Oh shit, this means a lot to white people.’ So this polemical position fell into my lap, I had no idea what I was walking into.” Before Oxford, she didn’t have Greek, so she went to the Bryanston Summer School (“Enid Blyton with lots of booze”), where she was taught by a man who ignored the nine women in his ten-student group and focused on the tall blond boy. “He reserved most of his disdain for the one obviously out lesbian and me. Something between complete non-engagement and outright meanness. He really made me feel like I shouldn’t be learning Greek at all. Which is not true, now I work on people who read Homer and tragedy. That was a damaging experience.”
“After Oxford and before Princeton, did you feel good about your abilities in Classics?” I asked.
“I felt terrible,” she replied. “The reason I wanted to do more was that in my final year there was a reception paper that had just been introduced. I had just seen the pilot of The L Word, and in it one woman seduces another by asking, ‘Have you read Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho?’ I was like, no, you’re kidding, someone talking about Sappho is on a TV show that I want to watch.” So she went away to read Carson and produce an essay, through which she realized that she did enjoy research and writing. That led to a Master’s in Reception, not Classics, at University College London with Miriam Leonard (“She made me feel like I could do anything”), which was the “turning point.”
I also started Greek (and Latin) in college, so I knew what she meant when she said that this sense of disparity isn’t always our insecurities getting the better of us; there are structural reasons for epistemic justice. Simply put, if you’re not white, you’re less likely to have access to the classical languages — first of all, ever, but also early enough so that you don’t feel like you’re massively behind your peers by the time you get to university. Or as Mathura put it, “At Oxford I found myself up against public school boys who had known Latin and Greek for as long as they had known English. How was I supposed to read the Iliad like they could when I had only learned the word ‘to kill’ the previous week?” The worst part is that people know about this disparity, or at least assume it, which “colors” your interactions too.
So has she ever had a moment when someone made assumptions about her knowledge and she wondered whether it was about race? (Earlier, we had discussed the particularly tender intersection of race and gender, and how you never quite know which one was the trigger.) Mathura — whose dissertation is on Theodor Adorno and Erich Auerbach — said that she would answer my question by way of critical theory, which is dominated by white men.
Once, she said, she told a professor what she was working on and he responded, “Adorno! Rather you than me” — a comment she didn’t know what to make of: “Is he saying that his German isn’t good enough? No, I don’t think self-deprecation is in his repertoire. Is it because Adorno is fiendishly difficult? Because yeah, he is, but so is Apollonius of Rhodes, and if I had been working on him he wouldn’t have said that. And then it occurred to me, it’s a comment about who I am. Critical theory’s been the thing that makes people do a double take. Like, you don’t look like you should be thinking about antiquity, or critical theory. Why do you know German to the level that you think you can work on this? I doubt you even know English.”
I have to confess that while I am aware, on an intellectual level, of diversity in the ancient world and in Classics the discipline (however limited), whenever I picture anyone from either, they’re white. I’m not proud of that, but I bet I’m not alone. And if that weren’t the case, if we could somehow not internalize that classicists of color don’t belong, that might change how we interact with each other. So this gap that Mathura described between who we think studies the classics and who actually does — that’s another piece of the Gordian knot.
Fun fact: once, at an introductory get-together at the pub, a Classics professor asked me what my undergraduate major had been. He asked only me this. Everybody else at the table he assumed had studied Classics. Yes, they were all white. Yes, the professor was white too.
We also need to talk about how the loudest voices in conversations condemning the whiteness of the field belong to white people.
I will be the first to say that Eidolon is guilty of foregrounding white voices in discussions of race — Donna, for example — as is the Classics and Social Justice group. Last fall, Sarah Bond compiled a bibliography for fighting white supremacy that includes exactly one classicist of color (Mathura) and conspicuously excludes Dan-el, whose deep body of work on the subject leaves us spoiled for choice; not to mention Shelley Haley, who was working on race and Classics before any of us and deserves recognition as such.
I don’t deny that these writers are good people, necessary allies even, doing the best they can, and I’m not interested in shows of purity. I realize that Classics is so white that the choices are, in the first place, limited. And I’m certainly not saying that white classicists should never talk about race — on the contrary, they shouldn’t make classicists of color do all of the work.
But it is worth considering that the whiteness of the conversation about whiteness — however inevitable it may be — isn’t just terrible from an optics standpoint. It results in a myopic rendering of the problem.
For example, I sometimes run into this claim that we need to shout from the rooftops the fact that the ancient world was diverse not only because it’s accurate, not only because the anger it provokes in white supremacists exposes what this scuffle is really about, but also so that people of color “see themselves” in the classics. This is a case of seeing color but not shades — never mind that, as an East Asian woman, I will never “see myself” in the classics, whatever that even means, or that on the flip side is the troubling idea that white people shouldn’t look beyond Europe.
It makes sense that white classicists have trouble talking about race in Classics because they are describing an injustice that they may have witnessed but have never experienced, an injustice that has no depth without experience. It’s like describing a color that you’ve read about but never seen.
Then there’s the condescension. White classicists love to say, “It’s up to us to make students of color want to study the classics.” As if the study of the classics were some great privilege that whites deign to let non-whites have.
Which, given who the gatekeepers are, given who’s leading even the conversations about race — isn’t entirely false.
So get more classicists of color to participate! But when we loosen that knot, another one tightens: because Classics is, as I mentioned, a very white field, getting more classicists of color to participate would entail demanding even more (uncompensated) labor from the few classicists of color that exist. Furthermore, when classicists of color study or discuss race, we’re deemed “predictable” and punished accordingly.
So diversify the field! This beloved rallying cry of white classicists is almost never accompanied by a serious reflection on what they’re bringing people into. The trouble is that when you cite diversity as an antidote to Classics’ “race problem,” you are using people of color as battering rams to knock down barriers that we didn’t erect, at an emotional cost that you don’t have to pay. Sure, this has been necessary throughout history, but we need to be honest about what we’re doing, not wrap it in white benevolence.
Luckily, some people of color come and stick around because of that formless thing, joy. I just don’t know whether joy alone will save Classics from itself.
The Gordian knot doesn’t budge.
Another fun fact: a couple of years ago I had the pleasure of attending a seminar on textual criticism where the professor, in explaining how a stemma works, said, “It’s like that theory that we’re all descended from one or two people in Africa. Although I’d hate to think that I’m related to some of you.” Then he looked at me and the one black student in the room.
Qasim Alli and I exchanged incredulous, amused glances. Did that just happen?
A year later I called Qasim, who is now the Outreach Officer at the Oxford Faculty of Classics, working daily to make the discipline more inclusive. When we first met in the fall of 2016 he was planning to write a thesis on Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who adapted Euripides’ Bacchae and eventually became the first African laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Qasim has since written and submitted this thesis, but he remembered that when he was working on it, nobody acted surprised that he was tackling what is an unusual subject in Classics despite the fact that he has no direct connection to Africa (he and his parents are British, and his ancestors are from the Caribbean and India).
I wondered aloud: if Qasim were white, would people have acted surprised that he was writing about Soyinka? He hesitated, then said yes, he thinks that if he were white people would have assumed that he was writing about Soyinka for an intellectual rather than an identity-based reason. At the same time, he acknowledged that his identity as a classicist of color was an influence, that it made him want “a more diverse experience of what Classics might look like.” And that, in turn, made him realize: “If we think of the white, Christian context as bland, and this African, Yoruba context as exotic and gimmicky, then we should reexamine that and alienate both of those [assumptions], and through that process learn more about Greek religion.”
It should be clear by now that epistemic injustice manifests in not only skepticism of one’s grasp of “traditional” Classics but also the very idea of a traditional-untraditional distinction. In other words, the banishment of certain interests to the margins creates intellectual hierarchies that map onto racial hierarchies, the result being that we cannot talk about who studies the classics without also questioning what we study in Classics. Qasim said that, on this topic, Johanna Hanink’s article “It’s Time to Embrace Critical Classical Reception” has stayed with him the most, as the idea that the fear of reception is a fear that criticizing Classics takes something away from it, and what he wants is for the academy to tell people that Classics is complicated, that it has problems as a field and deserves to be interrogated as a subject.
He said that you also see this fear in outreach, where many classicists are willing to use the lie that the classics are the root of all Western civilization — a lie that many of them don’t actually believe, but feel is necessary to draw people in. I asked him, someone who now works in outreach, what the goal of getting more people of color in the discipline is. Who does he do outreach for? “Yeah, I ask myself that,” he replied. He continued that he is vehemently opposed to the stance that Classics is necessary for an enlightened education. Rather, he said, people of color should study Classics first of all because it’s fascinating, and also because if they don’t, Classics will die as a discipline, or survive while perpetuating white supremacist narratives. “Classicists of color will interrogate Classics in unprecedented ways and deconstruct the colonial narratives that hinder our understanding of the ancient world,” he said.
But as to why Classics is good for people of color? Is there an answer that doesn’t smack of the white man’s burden? “I’m not sure it benefits individual people of color, other than that studying other civilizations widens your mind,” he said. “It’s important for people of color in a big way because Classics is still used as a tool of white supremacy, and having more people of color study Classics will enable us to deconstruct narratives of oppression.”
“I must in some ways believe that white classicists think that people of color don’t really think about the classics,” Qasim told me toward the end of our conversation, “because I take great pleasure in existing every day to prove them wrong. Just by being there, being at events, being a presence, it means they can’t pretend that Classics is for white people, and they have to face the problem that I am the only person of color in the room.”
To illustrate, he mentioned a literature seminar where a professor gave a talk on Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, which is about an Ethiopian royal couple that has a white baby because the mother looks at a painting of Andromeda during conception. “I remember at that moment being supremely aware that I was the only classicist of color in the room,” he said. Then a mixed-race graduate student piped up from the corner. “I was grateful to her for highlighting that this wasn’t an academic discussion of all black people, that we were also in the room. I felt that it was making the white classicists uncomfortable, and I wanted them to be uncomfortable because I was uncomfortable.” (The Gordian knot rears its ugly head: even if everyone is uncomfortable, white classicists can always retreat into reading “just the texts,” while for classicists of color racism remains a reality to confront, accept, or be in denial about.)
“I think that’s the danger of having racially homogenous groups of people debating things like race, even in a removed way,” he added. “You need diversity in the room to make you think about the words you’re using.”
Another trap to avoid is assuming that white fragility necessarily means white conservative fragility. It is too easy to read Mathura’s argument that “Nice White Classicists are also implicated in racial injustice by insisting on the exceptional value of Greece and Rome” and think, “That’s not me. I argue against the foundational narrative,” thus joining the chorus of voices calling for the end of white fragility without actually contending with it. But the racial injustice that exists in and beyond the intellectual realm, that saturates everyday experience, that hurts colored bodies simply by monopolizing their oxygen supply? That could be you, too. That could be anybody.
In the course of writing this article, I was especially struck by something Jackie Murray, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky, said while telling me about the many, many encounters she’s had with racial epistemic injustice in her career: “Rather than ‘What got you into Classics?’ the question should really be ‘What was trying to push you out, and what made you stay?’” That, she said, was more reflective of her own experience, the times she had to tell herself “Well, I really want to do this because…” after people took her accomplishments for granted, questioned her ability and authority in the classroom, or doubted whether she was the professor at all. One thing white classicists could do, she told me, is ask themselves, “What am I doing that is driving people away from Classics?” instead of just thinking about how to attract more students.
Epistemic injustice is an everyday experience and a problem, and it’s important to mention specific instances so that people see that we’re not making stuff up. But the point of sharing is not to call out, name names, humiliate, punish. While everybody I talked to agreed that whitesplaining in Classics was a thing, they focused far more on the insights that such experiences give us into the systemic underpinnings. Epistemic injustice cannot be boiled down to rudeness or even one-dimensional racism; we must consider it in conjunction with other inequalities. And while I wrote about Classics here, because that’s what I know, the problems are not exclusive to this discipline. They run deeper and wider than that, and the betterment of Classics is therefore inextricable from the betterment of society at large.
With that we’ve reached the part where, had I set out to do such a thing, I would make a list of concrete solutions to the problems that I picked out. But after concluding my interviews, I’ve realized that the problems are bigger and thornier than I had ever imagined. I don’t know where the Gordian knot begins or ends. I certainly don’t know how to untie it.
What I do know is this: whatever those solutions are, they’re going to be not progressive but radical. They’re going to fundamentally change what the field is and whom it’s for.
Because the way to solve a Gordian knot is not by untying it but by severing it completely.
Yung In Chae is the Editor-at-Large of Eidolon. She received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University and an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
