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.