The most harmful story we’ve told ourselves

My friend and debate partner sent a link to a story in the New York Times Magazine about Dan-el Padilla Peralta. They story was written by Rachel Poser. The reason Padilla was worth a full article is that he is a black man and teaches Classics at Princeton. His primary work is dealing with a contradiction: The Greek and Roman cultures are described as the foundation of Western Civilization and the birthplace of democracy. The same cultures are at the core of white supremacy. Can we untangle the two? Are we misinterpreting the Ancients? Can we rebuild our understanding? As an example of the white supremacy side:

Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state; online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms; the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “Every month is white history month.”

Poser described Padilla’s view of the field:

Padilla’s vision of classics’ complicity in systemic injustice is uncompromising, even by the standards of some of his allies. He has condemned the field as “equal parts vampire and cannibal” — a dangerous force that has been used to murder, enslave and subjugate. “He’s on record as saying that he’s not sure the discipline deserves a future,” Denis Feeney, a Latinist at Princeton, told me. Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”

In response to another classicist defending the field and traditional understanding Padilla said:

Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined. I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.

Padilla was born in the Dominican Republic and his early childhood was in the capital Santo Domingo, which was called the “Athens of the New World” for its culture and learning. Even with that lofty title there were racial tensions. He and his family went to New York because his mother had pregnancy complications. Brother Yando was born there. After a bit the father went back to the Dominican Republic and mother and boys went through a series of apartments and finally to a shelter. Yando was a citizen, Dan-el was undocumented. In the shelter’s library Padilla found books on Ancient Greece and Rome and at age 9 was seen reading a history of Napoleon. Padilla acquired a mentor. In college Padilla’s friends asked him why was he studying this white people stuff? How is that going to help people of color? He began to ask himself how could an education and Latin and Greek be Liberatory? By the time Padilla got his doctorate scholars were looking beyond the elite men to those who didn’t appear in the written record: women, lower classes, slaves, and immigrants. The ideas were popular with students, but leaders in the field wanted to go back to what they were doing. Classics were at the core of a liberal arts education, meaning the were liberal. Weren’t they? Most of the time that assumption was not questioned. Though slaves were not in the center of the written record, they were mentioned, and in ways that showed how cruel slavery was. There were also archaeology records, such as slave collars. Since there were no firsthand accounts of Roman slaves, Padilla turned to studying the trans-Atlantic slave trade. That wasn’t enough. He had to begin dismantling the white supremacy framework that displaced the classics and parts of his own identity. Then came the nasty guy and his supporters who claimed symbols of the Ancients.

Padilla argues that exposing untruths about antiquity, while important, is not enough: Explaining that an almighty, lily-white Roman Empire never existed will not stop white nationalists from pining for its return. The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.” Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today. To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether. Classics was happy to embrace him when he was changing the face of the discipline, but how would the field react when he asked it to change its very being? The way it breathed and moved? “Some students and some colleagues have told me this is either too depressing or it’s sort of menacing in a way,” he said. “My only rejoinder is that I’m not interested in demolition for demolition’s sake. I want to build something.”

Padilla is starting that rebuilding through his teaching. In his introductory Roman history class he had the students role play various people of Roman society to help imagine being subjects in an imperial system. After around of the students trying to forge alliances as various Roman people Padilla returned to the lectern.

“What I want to be thinking about in the next few weeks,” he told them, “is how we can be telling the story of the early Roman Empire not just through a variety of sources but through a variety of persons.” He asked the students to consider the lives behind the identities he had assigned them, and the way those lives had been shaped by the machinery of empire, which, through military conquest, enslavement and trade, creates the conditions for the large-scale movement of human beings.

This exercise excluded slaves, even though it was a major feature of the Roman imperial system. However, leaving them out was an act of care. He wasn’t ready to tell a student, you’re a slave. Though the classics have been used by supremacists, they have also inspired marginalized groups. Modern civil rights movements are inspired by ancient texts. Haitians revolutionaries viewed their leader, Toussaint L’Overture as a Black Spartacus. Medea is a symbol for patriarchal resistance. The poetry of Sappho and the Platonic dialogues give hope to lesbians and gays. Mary Beard, a colleague of Padilla says the classics, like the Bible have no politics. They are a language of authority that can be used for emancipators or oppressors. The study of the classics began in the Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries. European universities emancipated themselves from the church and the classics gave Europe a new, secular origin story. The old writings competed with the Bible in moral authority. Orators proclaimed the way to be great is to imitate the Greeks. And that propagated a hierarchy. Greek and Roman (and white) was at the top. Everything else was lesser. This was in the colonial period and that hierarchy was taken around the world, including to America’s Founding Fathers. It was the Roman republic, including fear of the tyranny of the majority, that was the model for American democracy. The classics served as a model for our culture. Western Civilization considered itself to inherit the greatness of Athens and Rome. And that, Padilla says, is the most harmful story we’ve told ourselves.

Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together.

They want to get to the point when people think of classics they think of people of color. If not, the classics should not exist as an academic field. Making classics departments not exist could be done by reassigning classics faculty to history, archaeology, and language. Or integrate with Ancient Mediterranean studies, including Egypt, Anatolia, Levant, and North Africa. That would return to a Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity. Others think the classics should be taught because American history is based on the study of the classics. That would, of course, perpetuate the supremacist aspects of the classics. As Padilla watched the January 6th insurrection he saw many symbols inspired by the classics – a Greek helmet, the Roman eagle, the phrase Molon labe adopted by gun advocates which means “Come and take them.” Classicist scholars say that’s not us. But the institutions that incubate the classics also see systemic racism to be foundational. These scholars need to see the many ways racism is a part of what they do. Padilla has begun to have an effect. Others are beginning to see teaching the classics requires exposing its racist history. Otherwise it is just propaganda. When my friend was telling me about this article he commented how Greek and Roman statues were considered quite highly. The marble statues were praised for beauty – and whiteness. Poser’s article linked to another by Sarah Bond on Hyperallergic that discussed that many of those statues had been painted in bright colors when they were made. No, they were not a celebration of whiteness. About 18 months ago (in the Before Time) I traveled in France, Germany, and England with Brother and Niece (see my post entries for August 2019). Several of our discussions, aided by articles on some aspect of history that Niece pulled up on her phone, were about how this or that historical figure (Napoleon comes to mind) who specifically cultivated the image of being a successor to the glories of Rome. It seemed that everyone wanted to make that claim. Now I understand a bit more as to why.