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I am so sorry I am so late jumping in on this chat on the NY Times article about Padilla...reading the article and my heart....In so many ways I can identify with him and I feel I need to write a whole blog post. This part really got to me:
"At last, Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
In so many ways, I think many of us want a "different kind of Classics." I can see it in all of our tweets and those who want to stick with how it has been traditionally been presented tend to unfollow me just before tweeting something rude....
I identify with him, because of what I have gone through in predominately White churches, Christian schools and universities. I am new to the classics world but it seems what my experiences have been in the White world may be similar to what he is explaining about Classics.
What I do find inspirational is in looking at how my people who, READ THEM FOR THEMSELVES, have responded to Classics. The same Bible used to justify their enslavement was used to form Negro Spirituals to disguise an escape to freedom.
Classics are littered through Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I could go on and on in the list of Black people who read the texts for themselves and found a different world, where Du Bois says, "Is no scorn or condescension."
Just because racist and/or blinded White people have taught them wrong, ignoring, "whiting-out" the African presence and translating them through a Whiteness, does not mean it should be thrown out, but instead we need to change how we present them.
Herodotus doesn't hide the diversity there. Yes there is slavery, domination, patriarchy, etc. yet it was not just the Greeks...it was Cyrus and the Ethiopians too. And there is Antigone and other powerful woman too.
All this to say that I don't feel that Classics is the problem, but how it has been taught.
