Yale News

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change,” Audre Lorde remarked in a 1979 panel.

In a 2021 New York Times article, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics at Princeton University, recounted a heated exchange he had had with independent scholar Mary Frances Williams at a 2019 conference run by the Society of Classical Studies. In the course of their back and forth, Williams contended that classicists should work harder to defend the discipline, arguing that “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West,” and  proceeding to address the following directly to Peralta: “You may have got your job because you’re Black, but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.” 

Peralta responded simply and straightforwardly to Williams: “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.”

Peralta’s response generated as much, if not more, controversy as Williams’ claim that Peralta may have been hired on the basis of race. After all, it is not a usual claim for a scholar to call for the death of their own field. What, really, did Peralta mean when he expressed the hope that Williams’ iteration of classics would die, and what factors most informed his perspective on the matter?

If, in terms of Lorde’s metaphor, the master’s house is representative of white supremacist structures in the classics, then the master’s tools are the readings of the field which facilitate those structures, both those which do so by explicitly endorsing them and those which do so implicitly by failing to deconstruct them.

Applied broadly, this idea contends that the master’s house is not classics itself, but rather any reading of it which is not intentionally inclusive. Applied to Peralta’s perspective, Lorde’s idea of the master’s house requires further analysis and some definitions. Classicism has been broadly characterized by Yale’s department as the study of the “histories, languages, and literary and material cultures, of ancient Greece, Rome and the ancient Mediterranean.”

In view of this definition, it should be noted that there is no pure form of classics; scholars in the field spend as much time studying interpretations of the world of the ancient Mediterranean as they do primary resources. The classical world is one which has been constructed and reconstructed on the basis of research, ideology and conjecture, among several other means. Thus, the iteration of classics which Peralta attributed to Williams is merely an interpretation of the field, not the field in and of itself. 

This point becomes all the more clear when one considers that the concept of “the West,” much less the modern idea of race, that Williams referred to was one that existed in full force in the ancient world. Consequently, any iteration of classics that purports to uphold unequal race structures is a construction rooted more in racialized scholarly interpretation than in the culture of the ancient Mediterranean. 

If white-supremacist readings of classicism are revisions made on an earlier tradition, which was itself not possessed of the modern concept of race, then other iterations of classics that seek to remove white supremacy from the field are simply other interpretations of the field, not pernicious efforts to destroy it altogether.

To better understand the nature of anti-racist readings of classicism, one must first possess an understanding of classics as it is known today as a tradition steeped in inequality as well as a historical, cultural and linguistic study. 

It is important to remember that studying classics has been and is now a status symbol. Classics was designed precisely as a way of signaling status. The Latin word for which the field is named, classicus — a term for members of the highest class in Roman society — is itself an indicator of elevated social status. At their core, class-based intellectual traditions, especially those that posit that success in the field is rooted solely in merit rather than privilege, go a step beyond exclusivity.

As is often true of exclusionary practices, the cliquishness of classics is not as simple as prohibiting others from engaging altogether in the tradition, since it is impossible to have an upper class without also having an underclass. Therefore, it is not only important for the power holders in exclusive traditions to deny others the opportunity to engage in the tradition; it is also essential to keep the under class ever present in the background of it. W.E.B. Du Bois famously commented on this phenomenon:

“In the folds of this European Civilization I was born and I shall die, imprisoned, conditioned, depressed, exalted and inspired. Integrally a part of it and yet, much more significant, one of its rejected parts.”

The feeling which Du Bois articulates above is quite similar to Lorde’s idea of the master’s house. There is no recourse within the world occupied by Du Bois by which even the most talented members of the under class could have achieved a status truly equal to that of those in the upper class. Such is the limitation imposed on everyone but the master by the tools of the master. 

Beyond the exclusivity of the field, the dark shadow of its historical practice further contributes to white supremacist readings of the tradition. Many famous intellectuals, including Yale’s own John C. Calhoun, insisted that an education in classics was a marker of worth and simultaneously denied entire communities the right to study it. Alexander Crummell humorously pointed out the incoherence of this line of thought in his 1897 address, “The Attitude of the American Mind Toward the Negro Intellect:”

“One of the utterances of Mr. Calhoun was to this effect ‘That if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man.’ Just think of the crude asininity of even a great man! Mr. Calhoun went to ‘Yale’ to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His son went to Yale to study the Greek syntax, and graduated there. His grandson, in recent years, went to Yale, to learn the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. School and Colleges were necessary for the Calhouns, and all other white men to learn the Greek syntax. And yet this great man knew that there was not a school, nor a college in which a black boy could learn his A, B, C’s. He knew that the law in all the Southern States forbade Negro instruction under the severest penalties. How then was the Negro to learn the Greek Syntax? How then was he to evidence to Mr. Calhoun his human nature? Why, it is manifest that Mr. Calhoun expected the Greek syntax to grow in Negro brains, by spontaneous generation!”

Crummel’s analysis of Calhoun’s thought process betrays a bizarre inconsistency in the logic of white supremacy; those who subscribed to Calhoun’s ideas possessed some understanding that Black achievement in America was limited by oppression and inaccess, rather than innate ability. As Crummel contended, “there was no denial that the Negro had intellect. That denial was an afterthought.”

Calhoun was far from being alone in his beliefs regarding race and the classics. The founder of the American Journal of Philology Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve was a white supremacist and Confederate soldier in the American Civil War, which he likened to the Pelopponesian War. 

As Patrice Rankine argues in his 2019 essay “Classics, Race, and Community-Engaged Scholarship,” those who blend the classics into their white supremacist beliefs are similarly likely to blend their white supremacist beliefs into their work in the classics. Rankine contends that “Once it is clear that motives — those causes that instigate individual action — are impure, the uneasy connection between race and the Classics is exposed as iron-clad, rather than incidental.” 

Given this, it is important to consider that the field of classics is not one unimpacted by the prejudices of the scholars who work within it, both currently and historically. Rather than a purely observational field, classics may be considered a tradition made up of two elements: the demonstrably true and the constructed. 

There are the known facts of the ancient world, consisting of artifacts, documented and deciphered languages, geography and the like. Beyond these facts, however, there is a remaining element of classics, the unfilled gaps of knowledge, which classicists seek to fill both by looking for new evidence and by using conjecture to construct a version of the classical world which is comprehensible to them. 

Consisting of translation, reception, interpretation, adaptation, theorization and the like, it is in this second element that bias of several forms makes its way into classics. For example, Samuel Butler, an English classicist and author, developed the theory that the “Odyssey” was composed by a woman based as much on his understanding of women as the evidence in the epic itself. 

The bias in Butler’s theory reveals itself more clearly at some moments than others. One particularly absurd turn in his argument sees Butler insisting that, if written by a woman, the “Odyssey” is excellent and, in fact, better than the “Iliad.” On the other hand, he contends, if the “Odyssey” was written by a man, it “would be ridiculous.” Therefore, because the “Odyssey” is excellent, and not ridiculous, it was likely composed by a woman. This logic is rooted almost entirely in Butler’s own understanding of gender roles in 19th century England, a point he himself confirms by comparing the “Odyssey” to the works of Jane Austen.

Butler is just one of many examples of the combination of evidence-based inference and biased conjecture characteristic of what is now known as the classical tradition. Composed of these two elements, classics reveals itself to be an invented field, which can be and has been constructed and reconstructed, appropriated and reappropriated, to various ends, with varying success, and among various peoples.

How, then, might Peralta and Williams’ exchange be better understood, and what would an antiracist iteration of classics look like? On the one hand, it may be the unfortunate reality that the field of classics has not completed its work in deconstructing racism in the field. On the other hand, it is well worth celebrating that classics is an intellectual tradition which can be observed and reinvented in many rich, antiracist forms. 

One excellent example of this is “The Island,” an Apartheid-era play by Athol Fugard, Winston Ntshona and John Kani telling the story of a perfomance of “Antigone” in Robben Island, the famous location where political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, were held.

In the academic perspective, the work of Peralta and Emily Greenwood both provide valuable insights into how anti-racist classics can be executed in academia.

In classics, as in all academic disciplines, it is the responsibility of the field’s practitioners to deconstruct the legacy of white supremacy in their area of study. In view of this, it may well be time for white supremacist interpretations of classics to die so that newer, more inclusive readings of the tradition may take form.