I understand many people’s misgivings about Latin & Greek language requirements, and the frustration of people with more interdisciplinary skills who have been undervalued.

But the current fashion of white scholars calling language tests ‘violent’ is turning my stomach. 1/

Latin/Greek tests are excessive & outdated.

They are not violent. That is a pernicious lie to intimidate minority students, an insult to those who faced colonial violence.

My family lived through Partition. They all speak 3+ languages. They aren’t scared of poxy Latin. 2/

I’m the first in my family to go to university. I’d never written an essay. Languages were the only thing I could do better than white peers.

I’m sick of certain white activists in the field trying to take that from me in the name of ‘diversity’. 3/

Do classicists need to be able to parse a rare Greek verb without a reference book? No.

Could any other discipline get away with peddling this gatekeeping? Also no.

Imagine the arrogance of saying that French courses must stop requiring that the literature be read in French. 4/

Lat/Gk tests are often based on a dubious idea of knowing grammar by rote being somehow moral.

The field’s focus on ‘objectivity’ is scuppering a lot of good work. It shuts out alternative perspectives. Only those who can empathise w imperialist ancients are deemed objective. 5/

This refuses to recognise the limiting social & historical context of many of our seminal works of scholarship. It refuses to apply to modern writing the critical lens we shine on ancient texts.

We must teach minority students to recognise & not be derailed by this hypocrisy. 6/

But instead, certain white people are out here demanding to ditch Latin & Greek. Which ethnic minorities often excel at.

All you will achieve by that is that minorities have to work off translations by white people, and our work will suffer for it.

There’s a word for that. 7/

Latin & Greek are the languages of two empires. Are only descendants of imperialist countries allowed to read them? Is that it?

Because that’s what will happen.

Only someone who never experienced real violence could equate a stuck-up grammar test with genocide. The audacity. 8/

It’s absolutely sickening that, when ethnic minorities are just getting a foothold, trying to get our alternative analyses of the texts heard -

white scholars move the goalposts and say, ‘Oh, no, that’s not what counts as excellence now, cos we’re no longer best at it.’ 9/

Because I learned Latin & Greek, I’ve studied the way elites appropriated & twisted the languages of poorer groups, down to the vocabulary, to derail minority representation & make it all about *their* interests.

So I ain’t fooled when you do it now. 10/10

Addendum: a clarification https://twitter.com/livyaugusta/status/1335348328087826433?s=19