> Skip to content
FEATURED:
  • The Evolution of Race in Admissions
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
ADVERTISEMENT
News
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Show more sharing options
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Copy Link URLCopied!
  • Print

After Racist Incidents Mire a Conference, Classicists Point to Bigger Problems

By  Emma Pettit
January 7, 2019

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.

We’re sorry. Something went wrong.

We are unable to fully display the content of this page.

The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net.

Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, or subscribe.

If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.)

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.”

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

A version of this article appeared in the January 18, 2019, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
InternationalScholarship & Research
Emma Pettit
Emma Pettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers all things faculty. She writes mostly about professors and the strange, funny, sometimes harmful and sometimes hopeful ways they work and live. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

Related Content

  • For One Scholar, an Online Stoning Tests the Limits of Public Scholarship
  • Medieval Scholars Call for Transparency and Anti-Racism at Conference
  • A Debate About White Supremacy and Medieval Studies Exposes Deep Rifts in the Field
  • Medievalists, Recoiling From White Supremacy, Try to Diversify the Field
  • Russian Studies’ Alt-Right Problem
  • Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
    Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
  • The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
    The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
    Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
    Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2023 The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin