The immersion program is begun, and it is worth noting that there are no black participants. For a Classicist this is nothing unusual – indeed, for anyone involved in the high levels of almost any academic discipline, this is not unusual. In the United States, where blacks comprise about ten percent of the population, it is a bit less noticeable. In general I hardly think that equal distribution of any of these pursuits is necessary – they are our chosen pursuits, not necessary in themselves, and people should do the things they want; and cultural background does make a large difference: it is fine if scholars of American jazz tend to be Americans, and with a lean towards black Americans, rather than Indonesians or Russians. But still – in a country which is ninety percent black, it is striking. And I suppose a little disappointing.
Michael Lambert, a Classicist teaching in Pietermaritzburg, writes of the racial aspects of the Classics in his book The Classics and South African Identities:
In July 2007 the Classical Association of South Africa celebrated its golden jubilee at its twenty-seventh biennial conference, held at the University of Cape Town. The theme was “Aspects of Empire” and, of the eighty-nine delegates, sixty-one were South Africans or foreign classicists working at South African universities; the rest were from the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, the USA, Canada, and Australia. Of the South Africans, fewer than half were Afrikaans-speaking; there were no black South Africans present and no delegates from other countries in Africa. Before 1994 and the first democratic elections in South Africa, CASA’s biennial conferences were markedly different in some respects. There were almost no foreign delegates, as many countries (certainly all of the above) actively supported academic and cultural boycotts of apartheid South Africa… In one respect, however, the face of the CASA conference in 2007 and of those held before 1994 was depressingly similar: the virtual absence of black South African delegates, with the exception of an occasional South African classicist of mixed race, from the so-called ‘coloured’ community, who may or may not have identified himself as black (21-2).
In other words, Classics belongs to the European diaspora; and this is no surprise, as they are, after all, the European Classics. As I have said, I don’t inherently object to this, though Lambert himself might note how odd these constructions of identity are. None of my ancestors ever spoke Greek or Latin, and any of them would have been willingly enslaved by people who did; why should Latin be more my possession than a black South African’s? And even if my ancestors were Romans, that is nothing in itself either; I am not my ancestors. My grandfather was a car mechanic, but that does not mean that I have any aptitude or desire for fixing engines.
“European” may be merely a way-station on the way to creating a larger identity: just as identities coming from certain towns and regions yielded to national identities, perhaps someday all literature and culture will be human literature, and we will truly feel that it all belongs to us. If we ever met an extraterrestrial race, we would suddenly all become humans, and all our distinctions small; but presuming that does not occur anytime soon, we will be divided, and the visible differences, like race, will be particularly hard to overcome. This creates that feeling of “I don’t belong here” which people of different races feel when in a cultural context “belonging” to another race: blacks in a white church, or whites in a black church, or whatever it might be. Some people overcome those feelings, and perhaps a select few do not feel them at all, but in general it is still with us, and puts racial barriers around certain activities. And in this way South Africa feels very much like the United States: blacks and whites live here, but mostly living separate lives. I saw this vividly in a funeral in New Orleans, at which every mourner was black. This is true everywhere in America. We live side by side, but separately: when we die, people of other races do not even mourn it.
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