Powerful words from @platanoclassics that give me pause at the same time: I can't help but wonder at the vast lacuna that this article has reproduced, which I find one of the key issues surrounding Blackness in the Classics: ISOLATION and COMMUNITY. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html

Classical studies can be deeply isolating. Despite appeals to the universality (or, as I prefer in the Greenwood tradition, omni-locality), finding different methods of interpretation and communication around Greek and Latin texts isn't easy, and can lead you down...

...wildly divergent paths of inquiry. Its temporality also can make it isolating, alien, different, strange. I think its this quality that draws many of us to it in such diverse manners.

Given the reliance of the Black population of this country on community...

...for survival and the thriving of new traditions and epistemologies, I wonder if one of the greatest disadvantages of the Black classical scholar in America is the lack of community. The lack of network to fall back on. One of the few boons of being mostly digital last year...

...was that I got to connect with more Black ancientists in eight months than I had in my life up until that point.

And that's where my worry concerning the article comes in: by focusing on just an individual, it harkens back to American idealization of individualism.

(An idealization that has deeply impacted our understanding of ancient authors and the concept of "genius" though folks should probably go but @hashtagoras about that, that's all his research)

And while yes, I'm always insisting that tenured professors need to do more (they do), I worry about Peralta's safety with this focus on individualism. But I also worry about how this obscures the growing sense of COLLECTIVE I've felt budding for the 1st time over the past year.

I hope this piece becomes a stepping stone towards further collective solidarity. I'm not particularly confident that that'll be the only impact (I know what kind of publication the NYT is, and the responses they often garner) but I can at least act to make it the most lasting.