‘My Merit and My Blackness Are Fused to Each Other’

Piero Ribelli

When a woman told Dan-el Padilla Peralta at a classics conference this month that he had gotten his job at Princeton University only because he’s black — a claim he’s heard before — he felt rage.

He felt rage when he realized that the woman’s attack would divert attention from the paper he had just delivered — research on how journal publication in classics is a “whites-only neighborhood” — wrote Padilla, an assistant professor, in a Medium post on Monday. It was a moment of “white fragility disrupting the practice of grounded and data-backed critical scholarship,” he wrote. “What a surprise.”

Mary F. Williams, the independent scholar who confronted Padilla, said in an email that if her comment had been “misunderstood,” it was because “it was difficult for me to speak clearly in a noisy room as I was leaving.”

On Friday, the day before Williams’s comment, two scholars of color who were also attending the conference, a joint meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies, said they had been racially profiled by hotel security guards. The annual meeting was “quite the showcase for the enforcement actions of white supremacy,” Padilla wrote.

He spoke with The Chronicle about whisper campaigns and why the discipline might need to be completely overhauled.

Q. You wrote in your piece that in the aftermath of the incident, no one in the room rallied to the defense “of blackness as a cornerstone of my merit.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

A. What I found myself returning to in the hours and days after the incident was the strong belief that has informed so much of my own work and teaching: My merit and my blackness are fused to each other. It is impossible to think of my scholarship, my achievements, without thinking about my blackness.

Undeniably there have been people, and there will continue to be people, who think the ideal should be this depersonalized objective scholarship. But I don’t believe in the possibility of this type of scholarship, or in its desirability. That’s not to say one has to center the voice of the ego on every single page in every single sentence. But that voice is there, whether we like it or not. The histories behind that voice are there, whether we like it or not. So why not make the effort to attend to that voice as diligently as possible?

Q. What kind of conversations have unfolded about diversity in the classics discipline?

A. There’s been a conversation about what kinds of responsibilities fall on the shoulders of allies in this work. Some of the topics involve professional advancement, the job market, publication. What has been most exciting for me has been to see department chairs and the leadership of the Society for Classical Studies begin the flow of necessary work.

There’s also a renewed attention to what folks who are very prominently centered as the faces of the discipline should do. I want to see more consideration from a meta-scholarly level of how we interact with other folks in the field, including folks who come from historically underrepresented groups. If there is a traumatic incident, or a series of traumatic incidents at a conference, what is the responsibility of those prominent people to address them directly? Does one just continue with what one has planned? Does one take a moment to zero in on the ethics of a discipline in which incidents like these have happened, and will doubtless continue to happen?

A good friend circulated this McSweeney’s Internet Tendency piece, titled “How Can I Help to Promote Diversity Without Relinquishing Any of My Power?” It is going to be really, really difficult to convince folks that have been the beneficiaries of power and status in the field of classics, and other disciplines, to surrender that power. But that’s a necessity.

Q. You mention “whisper campaigns” that happen behind closed doors and on an anonymous blog about the classics job market. What are those campaigns, exactly?

A. I have overheard, and I’ve seen posted on this anonymous blog, Famae Volent, comments about scholars of color in the field and the job market. These comments orbit and strike quite explicitly at the supposition that scholars of colors are better situated because they’re scholars of color. They completely overlook the fact that scholars of color have had to overcome extraordinary structural barriers to even field a competitive application.

So many colleges have professed a commitment to diversifying the professoriate. It’s true for Princeton. But one of the aspects that has been fuel for these whisper campaigns is the necessary lack of transparency with which some of these searches are conducted. I’m talking here about what some institutions call “target of opportunity hires.”

You see this fretting and gnashing of teeth from candidates who feel these searches will come at their cost. What’s particularly vexing is it’s very difficult to confront this kind of attitude head-on when it is not voiced explicitly. There was a kind of clarifying virtue to the brazenness with which Mary Frances Williams targeted me, because it aired out something that’s whispered.

One of the things I was discussing at the panel was the relationship between racial representation and the major academic journals in classics. The journals are gatekeepers. They have a tremendously significant role in advancing the careers of those who are submitting articles to them, but we don’t have an open conversation about the relationship between the disparity in racial and ethnic representation in their publication records, and professional attainment in classics.

That, in turn, makes it possible for scholars who have seen their work published to propagate a discourse of merit that distances their own identities as white scholars from the circumstances behind the production of scholarship. In that way, the discourse feeds on itself, and amplifies itself.

Q. You wrote about Professor Mary Beard’s plenary lecture at the conference and said “it bored me to new heights of rage.” What did you mean by that?

A. What had really gotten to me is that Professor Beard went into some detail in explaining how at this early juncture in the history of classics, there had been figures who had discerned the complicity of classics and various projects of what we might now term as structural violence, imperialism, racism, and so on. One of the slides that Professor Beard presented was of several African-American classicists from the late 19th century who had been the subjects of, among other things, an exhibition at the Center for Hellenic Studies, in Washington, D.C.

What I find frustrating about this, and what I found frustrating even about Professor Beard’s encomium about the need to diversify the profession, is that very little thought is given to the material and psychological cost faced by those from historically underrepresented groups who try to attain visibility in the profession.

The business of hope is a fraught business. I wanted to draw more attention to another mode of critical engagement with the discipline. It’s a mode that is much more Afro-pessimistic in scope, and one that entertains quite seriously the possibility that the discipline has not gotten better on this front, and will not get better in accommodating representation from historically marginalized groups. Therefore, we might need not just to focus on bringing new bodies into the discipline, but to overhaul the discipline in its entirety, from nuts to bolts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.