As Latin teachers, we strive to help our students understand the ancient world on its own terms. One of the differences between the Romans’ world and ours that is challenging and rewarding to teach involves the construct of race.
“Race is a social construct”: Many of us have encountered this phrase at some point in the past few decades. The idea behind it is that our contemporary definitions of race are social inventions rather than biological realities.
However, knowing that race is a social construct still leaves room for misconceptions, including the idea that race is, and always has been, a superficially observable phenomenon.
For instance, one might imagine that the group of people currently designated as “black” have always been recognized as a group (identifiable by their physical characteristics) in any society; one might think the only socially constructed element is the value assigned to blackness in our society. In actuality, though, physical traits have not been seen, described, and understood the same way across time and place; the idea of clearly recognizable groups is part of the construct.
These misconceptions or gaps in understanding, as it were, are prevalent in popular representations of the ancient world. As Latin teachers, when we are conscious of these common fallacies, we can avoid introducing them when talking about race with our students.
I) The first major misconception is that race and physical appearance are synonymous with one another. Racial definitions vary heavily by region and time. For example, in the United States, ethnic groups that are now defined as white were not considered as such 70 years ago. Even today, one can travel around the globe and have their racial status change as they move from country to country. Yet to people in each place and time, their system of definition may seem natural and intuitive rather than idiosyncratic and culturally determined.
We should keep this in mind when we start ascribing racial categories to ancient peoples. Imagine, 2,000 years from now, reading about a red-haired, light-skinned, freckle-faced man who went by the nickname “Red.” Would you assume that this was the famous black activist Malcolm X? We must consider this when confidently asserting the race of ancient figures based on physical descriptions alone.
II) Another point of confusion is a failure to recognize how wildly imbalanced modern racial categories are in the first place. The modern term “white” can be used to describe a very dark-skinned, dark-haired, brown-eyed person from southern Italy and a very pale-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed person from Norway.
The modern term “black,” for comparison, is used to describe an extraordinarily narrow set of physical features, ones that are only meant to be found in select regions of Africa. It is important to recognize that this imbalance in definitions is intentional. It creates the impression that unless someone has the most stereotypical sub-Saharan African features, they are non-black.
As Latin teachers, we have to purposely leave behind this model of “white unless proven otherwise” when talking about the ancient world with students. Otherwise, one reads irrelevant racial categories onto ancient characters, and the imbalance in our modern definitions invariably leads to identifying characters as “white.”
III) The final gap I want to identify is the myth that the absence of overt racism means the absence of racial diversity. Unless there are time-travelers living among us, none of us has lived in the pre-racial world.
It is almost impossible for us to conceive of a society where race was neither observed nor attached to social rank. Therefore, we naturally struggle to imagine that ancient European peoples would have encountered Africans and Asians and not felt compelled to place them in a separate category of humanity.
As Latin teachers, we have to fight against this programming. Stress the point with students that we know that Ancient Rome in particular was a multicultural society with residents from all over the world, and people would have looked just like they look in any of our cities. Just as being a New Yorker doesn’t imply being a specific race, neither did being a Roman.
When you go back to your classrooms, the main idea to remember is that we can’t look at the ancient world expecting to find familiar terminology, descriptions and responses to our contemporary definitions of “race.”
However, we can’t use the lack of familiar terminology as evidence that the ancient world lacked what would we call racial diversity. Otherwise, if we go by the default assumptions, we’ll end up perpetuating centuries of white-supremacist historical fiction, which purposely claims ancient Greece and Rome as “white” in order to replace what we used to know about the demographics of the ancient world. Once we acknowledge the existence of these gaps in understanding, we can begin the process of filling them back in.
John Bracey has been a Latin teacher in Massachusetts since 2010. He has a B.A. in Classics from UMass Amherst and an M.A. from Boston College. He has taught Latin exclusively using Comprehensible Input for the past few years. He leads workshops around the country for language teachers of all kinds. He is also the 2016 Massachusetts Latin teacher of the year. Connect with John on Twitter @MagisterBracey
Nota bene! This piece is part of our Diversity & Inclusion in the Latin Classroom series. Please let us know what you thought of this piece.
We are now in our second year and with your feedback, we hope to expand the project into a robust toolkit for teachers, adding resources and perspectives to further learning and effect meaningful change together.
To learn more about the series, please visit the home page.
