Racializing Antiquity, Post-Diversity

Abstract

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• Racializing Antiquity, Post-Diversity
• Patrice Rankine

at cambridge university in 1965, James Baldwin debated William F. Buckley Jr. whether "The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro."¹ These men could not have been further apart on the matter and took positions already weatherworn by the mid-twentieth century.² Whereas Baldwin had become a well-known and outspoken advocate for the civil rights movement in the United States, Buckley opposed what he saw as federal imposition on Southern states in such legislation as the forced integration of public schools (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education [1954]). Baldwin, who was raised in poverty in Harlem and educated only as far as high school, understood his unlikely status as a sought-after public intellectual. Buckley (although also born in New York) came from a wealthy and established Southern family and held a Yale University degree. The aspiration of the Cambridge Debates had been to highlight just such divergent perspectives, with the aim of getting at the truth or at least opening minds to viewpoints they might not have considered before. Realizing his native disadvantage, Baldwin fashioned his argument for the majority culture, the European descendants who primarily filled his audience at Cambridge and would listen across the airwaves, especially in the United States. He takes an ethical position in his appeal, stating that "it is a terrible thing for an entire population to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them."³ Grounding his argument [End Page 1] in lineage, he offers that his ancestors, although the minority, were also (like the Founding Fathers) "trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other" (Baldwin and Buckley 1965). Baldwin, it might be said, was a "race man," a person whose words and actions would advance the cause of Black Americans.⁴ He understood his own truth as tied to the question that the debate posed. Buckley saw himself as an individual speaking on his own behalf.

The subject of race (and racism) permeates this special issue, which is unusual for a journal dedicated to the philological study of Greek and Roman antiquity. As such, the Baldwinian heuristic is a useful countermove to the status quo, a tool that can serve readers seeking truth and understanding as opposed to simply reenforcing disciplinary commonplaces, in at least three ways: it can help surface our positionality, center race as a spectacular secret, and consider the evidence of this proposition in good faith.

Regarding the first countermove, Baldwin offers that positionality contributes to shaping worldviews. By contrast, Buckley hardly mentions his own background or upbringing when advancing his ideas (Buccola 2019). Positionality, although not itself the end of the story, informs the questions researchers ask and even the answers proposed. Whether in contemporary settings or as it pertains to antiquity, positionality informs how researchers approach the question of race. Taking up this Baldwinian countermove of foregrounding positionality, my introduction to these essays deploys a personal voice, the use of I and crystal clarity on my own relationship to these concerns. I, moreover, assume collectives: on the one hand, an assortment of individuals who might share similar experiences, perspectives, or worldviews as my own (in some cases, as racial minorities); and on the other, the broader readership of TAPA, who have been trained in the professional disciplines of Classical Studies and do not center race in their work. These collectives infrequently overlap, and when they do, our perspectives are often not the same, owing to our different vantage points. With regard to the broader collective of classicists, I make explicit what the data tells us, as Arum Park's essay in this volume dissects: namely, that although we share a profession, the overwhelming majority of classicists do not identify—and would not be identified on sight—as racial minorities (see the TAPA volume online to view Park's informative charts in color).

Although our training tells us that racial designations have nothing to do with Classical Studies, the essays in this volume methodically and meticulously [End Page 2] reveal a "spectacular secret," a term that Jaqueline Goldsby used to describe one of the darkest facts...