Spiritual Synthesis

This is a response to Cornel West & Jeremy Tate's article in The Washington Post, as well as Brandon Hogan & Jacoby Adeshei Carter's article in The New York Times.

Antiquity will never disappear, it stands in our mind as the past and every dusk that follows perpetually reaffirms its existence; we can never truly forget about the past. But the study of antiquity is far more than the "study of the past", in fact it is a thematic commitment to engage with what we deem important from the past, while also alienating the principles we deem worthy to carry on into the future.

However, antiquity does not stand on its own as an objective subject, antiquity is contextualized and understood within socially constructed paradigms. When I entered the undergraduate Classics program at McGill University, the oldest Classics department in my country and one of the oldest in North-America, I was eager to learn about ancient Sumerian history, ancient Egyptian history, and other non-Greek/Roman related topics. Alas, I would quickly come to realize that not only are these aspects of antiquity seldom taught, but, in the larger psyche of the department and the student body, they are considered fringed topics in what we could call the Classical doctrine.

Aside from the ancient Egyptians building the sturdiest monuments in history, or the fact that the first authors on earth came from what we now [inadequately] call the Middle East, any good classicists can recognize that the greatness and beauty of ancient Greek culture was directly sourced from older non-traditional sources; in the most literal sense, what we call the Greek alphabet is actually a derivative of the Phoenician alphabet.

But my digression is not for naught, I still to this day read Hesiod's Works And Days, Sophocles' Theban plays, and even Herodotus' The Histories, because the education I acquired from my time studying Classics was truly fruitful. To address Dr. Hogan's article, as well it is for Plato's work to survive in Howard's philosophy curriculum, Plato and Aristotle are only cogs in the larger grand scheme of antiquity. It is imperative for Black classicists to explore, for example, the linguistic aspects of antiquity, where most of the study is probably going to come from reading/translating ancient receipts written in Latin, since most of the papyri that survive to this day are ancient receipts. Indeed, the graffiti inscriptions that survive in Pompeii tell us much more about Roman society than all the works of Suetonius. In parallel to the world that exists today, culture and society is constituted of so much more than the intelligentsia of said society, and as much as we respect academia and its gifted academics, Snoop Dogg's Gin N Juice probably captures American society better than any work produced by Robert Plomin.

When Francesco Petrarch's devised the studia humanitates, i.e. the liberal studies/arts, he believed that studying the ancient Latin scholars would garner fresh new intellectual thought, and so the Renaissance would be characterized for its reverence of the Roman classics, hence the term Classics. Even so, Petrarch was influenced by his contemporary social context; with the rise of the Italian nation-states, reverence for Roman culture increased as well. The Medici family were perhaps the greatest patrons of Renaissance culture, but they also pushed for humanist pedagogy as well. Thus. antiquity during the Renaissance was framed by its social and political context, and many aspects of antiquity were forgotten and even worst, were lost forever.

Philosophers and modern historians rarely have to be reminded of the harsh reality of time, when you study the entirety of antiquity, you quickly realize how fragile it is, and truly how much of a mirage it is. Although objective facts are something I firmly believe in, to be a good classicists it is imperative for you to doubt any and every source in front of you, because the past has forever and will always exist, but what we retain from the past has been influenced by what we have chosen to keep, what we have chosen not to destroy, what we have chosen to remember. In more colloquial terms, antiquity is like a band of scotch-tape that has been handed down to you from several hands down. It is transparent, and on its own its purpose is evident, it is tape, however you can't help but see the smushed fingerprints from every past holder of the tape. Sometimes, these fingerprints actually damages the tape to the point where you cannot use it anymore.

In conclusion, Classics and the current thematic study of antiquity is so important, it is so vital and enriching to both the individual and society as a whole. However, I could never in good faith bash a historically Black university for cutting its Classics department in the midst of austerity measures. The study of antiquity continuously gets remodelled, what Cornel West fears might happen to some of the ancient "greats" has already happened several ways over in the current Classics curriculum. The civilizations and authors I hoped to study have been severely sliced from most undergraduate programs in the world, and this was the result of conscientious white supremacist decision-making in the late 19th century. Henceforth, although I lament Howard's cut of the Classics department, I could never publicly shame it for its decision. Instead, I believe Howard University is looking onward towards the future for when the current Black greats will become the classic works of antiquity, they are laying the groundwork for when Baldwin will be admired like Aristophanes in the future, and truly, that is the most important thing for the longevity of Black academia; or so I believe...