Claims of racism at a classics conference — which are being investigated by the two hosting academic societies — have prompted scholars to criticize the field on Twitter for what they say is a broader indifference toward race-related issues.
Two incidents happened at a joint meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies, held this past weekend in San Diego.
On Saturday, at a panel called “The Future of Classics,” four scholars, including Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an assistant professor at Princeton University, fielded questions from the audience.
That’s when an independent scholar took the microphone, said she’s not a “socialist” who doesn’t believe in merit, and told Padilla he’d gotten his job “because he’s black,” according to multiple accounts. (Video published in February 2019 shows the scholar pointing at Padilla and saying, “You may have got your job because you’re black, but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”) The speaker, Mary F. Williams, was identified by Sarah E. Bond, an associate professor at the University of Iowa who is chair of the classics society’s communications committee.
Williams did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Reached by email, she told Inside Higher Ed that it’s important to unapologetically “stand up for classics as a discipline,” and that she didn’t think her comments were racist.)
On Monday, Padilla described the verbal attack in a Medium post. “What will be stored in the vaults of my memory,” he wrote, “are not just the accusatory words themselves, but the expression on the face of their white-supremacist purveyor as she relieved herself of them,” along with “the looks on the faces of students of color in the room.”
“Most of all,” Padilla wrote, “I will remember the rage: not the impotent rage of Mary Frances Williams, but my rage on realizing that her personal assault would divert attention from the paper I had just delivered on the whites-only neighborhood of journal publication in classics.”
Williams was subsequently asked to leave the conference because she had violated the event’s harassment policy, tweeted Bond.
A More Persistent Truth
On Friday, two scholars of color, who were being honored at the conference for improving equality and diversity in the field, said they had been stopped by security guards at the Marriott hotel where the conference was being held. (The hotel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The scholars, Djesika Bel Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn, founded The Sportula, an organization that helps undergraduate classicists pay for tuition, textbooks, and other expenses. Bel Watson and Echeverría-Fenn had received a professional-equity award for their work, presented by the Women’s Classical Caucus.
The security staff members asked to see the two scholars’ badges, The Sportula tweeted, while many white and “non-working-class-dressed” scholars without badges were standing around them. “Still confused as to why your security felt fit to question us alone out of all of the guests that were on the balcony today without name badges,” Bel Watson tweeted at the Marriott account. “I’ll wait for an answer.”
Both academic societies said they were investigating the incidents, although details were sparse. “All our welcome at our meeting,” the groups said on Twitter. “We expect all our attendees to follow our guidelines on respectful behavior … It is our practice to investigate reports of incidents that affect our attendees, including those that involve our contractors and vendors.”
“We’re talking with the hotel right now about this incident, and will provide updates when we have them,” the Society for Classical Studies tweeted on Friday. The Board of Directors “condemns the racist acts and speech that occurred,” the organization also tweeted.
Some classics scholars said the incidents should not be viewed in isolation. The episodes are not anomalies, they said, but evidence of a more persistent truth — that the predominantly white discipline often falls short on issues of race. (Medieval studies has faced similar critiques. A cohort of scholars spoke out during its annual conference last year.)
Classics has a diversity problem, said Young R. Kim, a historian who now works at a nonprofit organization and was in the audience at Saturday’s panel. When Williams reached the climax of her tirade, Kim said, he and others moved toward her to take the mic away.
Kim said that he was angered by Williams’s comments, but also that he wants a broader conversation about racism in the discipline. “If the field is to survive and thrive into the next 150 years,” he said, “what will it have to look like?”
‘Rampant With Discrimination’
Padilla said this wasn’t the first time he’d heard the accusation that he had achieved something because he’s black. Many scholars of color, he said, had told him they’d heard the same claim. (He also argued in the Medium piece that his “Afro-Latinity” is, in fact, a valid reason to hire him.)
Padilla hoped, he wrote, that what had happened to him would spark an “honest conversation” about the classics colleagues who hold beliefs similar to Williams’s. In recent years, he said, racist views have been posted on Famae Volent, an anonymous blog devoted to the classics and archaeology job markets. The blog — known across the profession for its tendency to devolve into vitriol — shut down in April. What had once been the occasional “problematic post” had crossed the border into “more serious territory,” the blog’s anonymous architect wrote.
Most who hold the same views as the racist won’t say them in public.
As loud as the pushback against Williams was in the moment, tweeted Scott Lepisto, a visiting assistant professor at the College of Wooster, most classicists aren’t on Twitter. “Most who hold the same views as the racist won’t say them in public,” he said, “and way more people hold those views than most either realize or want to admit.”
Though the racist events at the conference were “appalling,” tweeted Christopher Polt, an assistant professor at Boston College, nobody should be acting surprised. “The field is rampant with discrimination,” he said. “Ask any minority or working-class classicist, and they can give you countless stories.”
Sharmila Sen, executive editor at large for Harvard University Press, who immigrated to the United States from India, identified with Padilla’s experience. “Too tired to feel outrage at racist incidents at #AIASCS,” she tweeted. The expectation to be “poised & eloquent” and to “supply solutions” is something that people in the United States who aren’t white have to carry.
“Our additional baggage fees,” she said, “are astronomical.”
Updated (2/28/2019, 10:01 a.m.) with a link to video of the interaction at the conference.
Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.
