Thread by @sentantiq

#ClassicsTwitter anyone else struggling to find the lines of where white supremacy ends and the study of the classics begins?

Not saying they are perfectly coterminous but as the years go by it is harder and harder for me to deny our discipline's historical complicity

The "Classics" we teach and we trained on is heir to elitist and racist constructions of the past as @kataplexis shows, so attempts to decolonialize are doomed to fail

(Which makes for easy appropriation as @pharosclassics documents)

But the source texts so rarely give any voice to the oppressed and marginalized, and we have to toil to find these voices again

I have scoured texts for the past few days, looking for rare kind words for rebellion, uprising, and revolution. But the 'classics' that have been preserved for us are not about those people or for them

There are likely exceptions, but the record is so bleak and even the literature we prize so deeply so often takes deep and radical intervention to stand as something more than the discourse of power

Yes. It is our job when we see this to do the hard work, to recuperate the lost voices, to lay bare the peoples occluded by time. But oh how I despair of ever being able to do so enough to make a difference

Most of us in classics are the beneficiaries of the very intellectual, racial, and class histories that make #BlackLivesMatter necessary and true and fighting an uphill battlei

And I ask myself: did any part of my empathy for BLM and my desire for a better world come from my classical training? And if it did, how much was it shaped by the theory, politics, and subjective .life experience many in our disciplines traditionally deny?

I really don't know how much our field can contribute to the good beyond elucidating its nature, correcting past mistakes, and combating it's more insidious uses

To those on the front lines, to those hurt and hurting, and to those who will never have the choice to back down, my love and respect.

Stay safe. Be true.