Disciplinecraft: Towards an Anti-racist Classics

Disciplinecraft: Towards an Anti-racist Classics* Mathura Umachandran “We cannot begin to address the obscene injustices in this country without grappling with whiteness—not as a simplistic racial categorization, but as a deeply structured relationship to power and group entitlement.” Tweet by Kimberlé Crenshaw, February 22, 2021. “Racist concepts do considerable work in political and economic life; but, if they were merely an appendage of politics and economics, without intimate roots in other phases of life, their persuasiveness would accordingly diminish.” Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life1 what would it take to imagine and to materialize an anti-racist discipline of Classics? To start with, nothing less than a massive rupture with previous arrangements, that is to say, the ways we train our students and produce knowledge, and of how we act on and beyond the university as part of the wider world. And yet in the multiple overlapping and compounding crises of COVID-19, parts of academic life have found ways to adapt and continue in altered form. If a value beloved by neoliberalism is “resilience” (a personal quality that implies fortitude but actually indexes access to material resources), then here we are in 2021, resilient. But what if we were to see this present crisis (with its material effects on living, working, travelling, congregating, moving, breathing, protesting, visiting, mourning, comforting, celebrating, witnessing) as precisely the rupture that is needed to realize fundamental shifts in the so-called discipline of Classics’ [End Page 25] “business as usual,” since it is a moment co-articulated with a consciousness of a crisis in racial justice? And can the so-called discipline of Classics face up to its co-formation with white supremacy, that is, how anti-Blackness constitutes one of its foundational principles and how it is organized around ideas of the “human” and of scientific knowledge-making.2 My fear is that institutional and disciplinary structures might elastically snap back into place after a period of more than eighteen months in which people have taken to the streets, burnt down police stations, and rioted in order to draw attention to the lethal effects of systemic racism. To put that differently, my fear is that power is resilient to these incursions. Going into the third decade of this century, the worst outcome for the so-called discipline of Classics would be to refuse the call of this transformative moment and batten down the hatches. This brief essay meditates on the epistemic and political possibilities of going through the cleansing fires and building anew. What are the jeopardies of “resilience” that remain, and what are the pragmatics of staking such a bold gambit when so little about the future seems reliable? It is possible that exaggerated tendencies of preservation, caution, and austerity might prevail instead. For a field as ideologically committed to forgetting its complicity in projects of empire and epistemic coloniality as the so-called discipline of Classics (a move Marchella Ward and I have elsewhere named “settler moves to innocence” following Janet Mawhinney), giving way to such conservatism would be disastrous.3 Building an anti-racist discipline is an active, if not also an activist, commitment to justice that sees race as intimately and abundantly entangled with other social categories. In the second epigraph to this essay, Barbara and Karen Fields issue a salient reminder that race is never exclusively a question of political economy but rather is part of the making of the world through social categories. As such, I take from the Fields sisters that it is precisely through the craftedness of this world (and discipline as a subset of the world) that we get to intercede with agency. To put it otherwise: another discipline is possible. All too often, such transformation is imagined at the disciplinary peripheries, wherein public-facing activities undergo a little light seasoning with progressive rhetoric in order that core activities and values of knowledge-making remain petrified in their epistemic and political conservatism. This moment provides us with the unimpeachable legitimacy of insisting: race is central to who we are and what we know. [End Page 26] I want to think about how we become acquainted with and integrate critical...