An interesting exchange between Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classics, Princeton) and Solveig Gold, who was an undergraduate in classics at Princeton and now a graduate student at Cambridge University (she is also now the spouse of Joshua Katz). Gold writes:
Classics is not about white people and Classics does not belong to white people. The first is a question of how we read, the second, of who does the reading.
Classics is not about white people because the authors in our canon do not purport to be writing about white people. They and most of their characters may be white, but their stated goal is never to offer an account of the “white race,” an identity that would have meant nothing to them: it is to raise questions and tell stories that, they hope, grasp at truths transcending one place, period, or people.
Classics does not, in turn, belong to white people because those Classical authors succeeded in crafting texts with universal appeal: their questions and stories have moved and engaged readers of different colors well beyond Ancient Greece and Rome. To speak of universal appeal is to take note of those different colors—that is, not to be “colorblind”—and it is specifically in this context that I invoked Padilla’s name: he, a black, Dominican immigrant, evidently recognizes the appeal of the Classics as much as anyone....
One must literally know nothing about racial classifications, and how they work (they are an ideology of "ascriptive differnce" to quote Professor Reed, that vary by place and time and the needs of the ruling classes), to think, e.g., that "Plato is a dead white male": he is dead and he was male, but there is no sense at all in which he was "white," except an utterly anachronistic one.
Sometimes I think the hostility of the mindless "woke" to classics has much to do with the fact that one learns far too much about human nature and motives from them, in a way that is deeply uncomfortable for those whose lives revolve around their moralized self-deception.
Recent Comments