{"id":48526,"date":"2021-02-22T08:58:15","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T08:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=133349"},"modified":"2021-02-22T08:58:15","modified_gmt":"2021-02-22T08:58:15","slug":"saving-the-classics-from-blindness-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/22\/saving-the-classics-from-blindness-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving the Classics from Blindness"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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McCosh 50, the largest lecture hall on Princeton campus. Photograph Source: David Keddie – CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a classics professor at Princeton, was the subject of a recent article in the New York Times Magazine<\/i> entitled \u201cHe Wants to Save the Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?<\/a>\u201d Padilla, according to the article, believes classics, as an academic discipline, \u201chas been instrumental to the invention of \u2018whiteness\u2019 and its continued domination.\u201d I won\u2019t argue with that. I don\u2019t know enough about classics as an academic discipline. I do know something about academic disciplines more generally, though, and I have to say that, in my experience, most are characterized by at least unconscious, if not conscious, racism.<\/p>\n

The racism at the foundation of this country is no longer in dispute. And if the country is based on racist oppression, that attitude is going to characterize its institutions as well, not least of those institutions being colleges and universities. Higher education has traditionally been the privilege of the social and economic elite. It wasn\u2019t simply that most people couldn\u2019t afford to pay tuition. Most people couldn\u2019t afford not to be actively earning money. Most people had to work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The exception, of course, was hereditary aristocrats, the social and economic elite, nearly all of whom, if not actually all, were white. They had the time and money to go to college. So with a very few exceptions, they were the only people who did. Since they were the only people who got advanced degrees, they were the only people who got teaching positions at universities. The system of academic privilege perpetuated itself, generation after generation. Things changed somewhat after WWII, when the GI Bill made it possible for veterans of all social classes to go to college. Even then, though, few of those who benefitted from the GI Bill could afford to continue their education beyond the undergraduate level. So academic privilege continued to be reserved for whites, and primarily white men.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When you think of a college professor, what image comes to your mind? A middle-aged white guy, right? A man in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. That isn\u2019t simply the image that comes to mind for the person on the street when they think of a college professor. It\u2019s the image that most academics have of themselves. It\u2019s the image in the minds of individuals on academic hiring committees, independently of whether they\u2019re conscious of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When you think of a swan, you think of a white swan, right? Because white swans are what you mostly see. You may know that there are black swans, but they are not part of the world of your experience, so when you think of swans, you think of white swans. That\u2019s the way it is with academics. The people they mostly see, the people they mostly work with every day, are white men. So when they think about whom they want to hire to replace a retired colleague, or to fill a new curricular need, they can\u2019t help but imagine a white man. I can\u2019t count the number of times I\u2019ve heard a black scholar characterized as \u201cgood, too.\u201d Hiring committees will go through their pool of applicants with the aim of producing a short list, or look at their short lists with the aim of making a job offer and they will look at a minority candidate and will nod approval. Yes, that person is \u201cgood, too,\u201d meaning that they\u2019re already out of the running.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Once, when I was interviewing for a position, back when the interviews at the American Philosophical Association were conducted at tables in large ballrooms of the conference hotel, I saw a black man sitting at the table where my interview was to take place. Cool, I thought. This department is clearly really cool. Except that it wasn\u2019t. The black man wasn\u2019t a member of the hiring committee, i.e., a member of the department. He was another job candidate.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know whether he got the job, but I kind of doubt it. Academics are conservative. I don\u2019t mean politically conservative. I mean socially conservative in that they are slow to change. Things are changing in higher education, but they are changing slowly. There has been genuine progress is racial diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, but acknowledging that progress amounts to damning with faint praise. Things were so bad that even with the little progress that has been made, they are still pretty bad.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So I\u2019m ready to believe that classics, as an academic discipline is pretty racist. There\u2019s no question that many racists have appropriated classical culture, or their imagined version of classical culture, to support their own racist agenda. The question is the extent to which this imagined version of classical culture corresponds to reality.<\/p>\n

A number of points are relevant to this debate. First, ancient peoples didn\u2019t really have a concept of race. They did, of course, have a concept of outsiders, and a disturbing track record of treating them badly. They also had slaves. The ancient Greeks had slaves. So did the ancient Romans, and while some were treated relatively well, the overwhelming majority were treated pretty horrifically. The article on whether we can save the classics from \u201cwhiteness\u201d details some of that treatment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have so many testimonies of how profoundly degrading enslavement was,\u201d Padilla told Rachel Poser, the author of the article.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Enslaved people in ancient Rome could be tortured and crucified; forced into marriage; chained together in work gangs; made to fight gladiators or wild animals; and displayed naked in marketplaces with signs around their necks advertising their age, character and health to prospective buyers. Owners could tattoo their foreheads so they could be recognized and captured if they tried to flee.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing is, most of those slaves were white. The Greeks actually enslaved one another. One didn\u2019t need to look different, or be considered intellectually or morally inferior, to suffer the kinds of horrific treatment detailed above. One, or more correctly one\u2019s city, simply had to lose a war with another Greek city. The victors got to take the vanquished as slaves. Some Greeks objected to enslaving other Greeks, but most didn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s what\u2019s really<\/i> disturbing about the history of slavery in the classical world. The ancients didn\u2019t need to view their slaves as somehow inherently inferior to themselves in order to justify their situation as slaves. The system of slavery was based purely and simply on power, not on race.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And the thing is, slavery in the ancient world wasn\u2019t restricted to Greece and Rome. It was ubiquitous. The ancient Egyptians had slaves, and so did the ancient Hebrews. \u201cSlavery,\u201d writes Paul Lovejoy, in Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa<\/i> (Cambridge, 2012),\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

has been an important phenomenon throughout history. It has been found in many places, from classical antiquity to very recent times. Africa has been intimately connected with this history, both as a major source of slaves for ancient civilizations, the Islamic world, India, and the Americas, and as one of the principal areas where slavery was common. (p. 1.)<\/p>\n

Black Africans were themselves involved in the slave trade (see, for example, \u201cWhen the Slave Traders Were African<\/a>,\u201d Wall Street Journal, <\/i>Sept. 20, 2019, and \u201cMy Nigerian great-grandfather sold slaves<\/a>,\u201d BBC News, 18 July, 2020). It was a way of making money, a way of providing for oneself, a way of surviving in an age when life was cheap, when there was no concept of human rights.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Few ancient societies bear close scrutiny. Few would fare well by contemporary standards. We admire their literature or artistic achievements and forget the inhumanity, the suffering and misery, that gave rise to the wealth that made such achievements possible.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the pervasive inhumanity that characterized classical Greece and Rome, I doubt they were any less humane than most ancient societies. Inhumanity, and, in particular, the institution of slavery, seems to have characterized all \u201cgreat\u201d (meaning large) ancient civilizations. It is important not to forget that. It\u2019s also important, however, not to misrepresent it. Ancient societies weren\u2019t racist because, again, the concept of race that we employ today was unknown in the ancient world. What they were, was brutal and often, as the quotation above from the article on the debate about the classics started by Padilla makes clear, sometimes horrifically so.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The brutality of ancient societies is a sad fact of human political history. There is a bright side to acknowledging it, though. However much our own society continues to be characterized by brutality and, in particular, by brutal racism, humanity as a whole has made progress. Martin Luther King Jr. appears to have been right when he observed that while the arc of the moral universe is long, \u201cit bends toward justice.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Classics, as an academic discipline very likely does need serious reform, as do so many other academic disciplines. But studying the classics, looking back, hard, at the civilizations that gave birth to our own, is a crucial part of our own progress toward the justice of which King spoke.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The post Saving the Classics from Blindness<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a classics professor at Princeton, was the subject of a recent article in the New York Times Magazine entitled \u201cHe Wants to Save the Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?\u201d Padilla, according to the article, believes classics, as an academic discipline, \u201chas been instrumental to the invention of \u2018whiteness\u2019 and its More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Saving the Classics from Blindness<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48526"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48526"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48920,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48526\/revisions\/48920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}