What would it mean to ‘decolonise’ the Classics?

We classicists peering into the past can sometimes be blindsided by the present. 2020 brings the charge that our discipline promotes racism. Last month, America’s Society for Classical Studies announced ‘the complicity of Classics as a field in constructing and participating in racist and anti-black educational structures and attitudes’. A pre-doctoral fellow at Princeton has enjoined ‘white classicists’ to ‘unlearn white supremacy in themselves’. And, closer to home, Oxford’s Faculty of Classics is being petitioned by many of its students to ‘acknowledge explicitly its own role in the proliferation of racist, colonialist, and white supremacist attitudes’.

Have I really chosen the career of racism-pedlar? Are classicists really promoting ‘white people’ as racially supreme over the rest of humankind? Given that racial discrimination is at once repulsive and illegal, just how guilty is present-day academia? In a fair trial, the onus of proof lies with the prosecution, but their evidence is yet to be presented. Scour as I may 21st-century Classics, I read no racism, I hear no praise of ‘whiteness’, and I find no colleague denouncing non-westerners as uncivilised barbarians. Or, if it’s now only far-right extremists who claim ethnic descent from Greece and Rome, does their fantasy condemn academics too?

‘If we accept the notion of “Western Civilisation” with a straight face,’ a Classics professor in Arizona warns, that puts us ‘certainly on the same spectrum’ as ‘white nationalists’. We are urged to reject the existence of western culture, on the grounds that it is impossible to define with geographical, temporal or cultural precision.

This is a sophistic absurdity. However narrow and complex the tradition, there is no doubt that the intellectual inheritance of the modern West can be traced back, via and alongside Christianity, to the Romans, who always looked over their shoulders to the Greeks. Indeed, for most of humanity’s history, such cultural appropriation was thought a positive phenomenon.