Leukophobia & other obsessions

 

he personal history of Dan-el Padilla Peralta is by design inseparable from his scholarly work. So a brief review of his biography is needed to make sense of his latest offering, Classicism and Other Phobias.¹ Like his earlier book Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League, the new work is autobiographical and self-referential. Sadly, it otherwise constitutes one of the most poorly organized, badly written, and racially obsessed books to appear recently from a university press.

Padilla may have ample reason to assume that the small circle of his readers—classicists especially—are familiar with his personal details, given the widely published profiles, features, and puff pieces about his past. Indeed, for more than twenty years the currently forty-two-year-old Princeton classicist has been the subject of dozens of laudatory stories focusing on his remarkable ascent from a young Caribbean immigrant to a stellar Ivy League classics scholar.

In Undocumented and in several other venues, Padilla has written extensively and dramatically about his personal journey to America from the Dominican Republic as a child with his middle-class parents. Both of the latter then overstayed their visas. That decision rendered the four-year-old Padilla an undocumented alien, who was subsequently raised largely by his mother.

Padilla’s life changed radically at nine. Jeff Cowen, a young prizewinning photographer and scion of an old Manhattan investment-banking family, met him and discerned talent in the young Dan-el. Cowen soon saw to it that Padilla was admitted with a full scholarship to his own alma mater, the Collegiate School—a prestigious, nearly four-hundred-year-old Upper West Side K–12 private school where Padilla subsequently excelled in history and languages. The current $65,000-a-year tuition and five-to-one student–teacher ratio explain why it is one of the most prestigious schools in the country, with an exceptional record of sending its graduates to the Ivy League—as Padilla can well attest.

After graduating from Collegiate, Padilla was embraced by a number of elite supporters. Admission to Princeton followed, fully funded by the university. Upon receiving his undergraduate degree, Padilla was next awarded a two-year fellowship to Oxford, winning exemptions (with the help of influential sponsors) for his still-illegal status that enabled him to travel abroad. His Oxford sojourn (M.Phil.) led to a graduate fellowship at Stanford, where Padilla completed his 2014 Ph.D. dissertation on aspects of Roman religion in the early republic.

He next received another prestigious two-year postdoctoral appointment, to Columbia’s Society of Fellows. Upon its conclusion, he was quickly hired by his alma mater Princeton as a tenure-track assistant professor of classics. Padilla’s meteoric academic climb (from assistant to full professor in eight years) and media adulation were clearly reflective of his own talent. Yet his success was also facilitated by the magnanimity of well-connected and influential patrons and champions, and by the prevailing atmosphere of diversity and elite higher-educational outreach to the underprivileged.

His Dominican heritage and illegal status were not drawbacks to academic advancement—though he has since argued as much—but in fact proved unique advantages, at least in his adopted and insular world of elite academia. In truth, it would be difficult to find any young classics student in America who has been the beneficiary of comparable largesse and attention, resulting in more than two decades of top-flight private education—with a likely aggregate million dollars’ worth of free tuition, stipends, grants, and fellowships.

Initially, at least, Padilla seems to have appreciated such unusual opportunities and benefactions in a field where unemployed Ph.D.s are now the norm. He once expressed an overriding fascination with the wonders and beauties of classical antiquity. Early on, he reminded interviewers that his love of the ancient world had been first instilled as a small boy.

But at some point in his graduate education at Stanford, Padilla experienced a road-to-Damascus revelation. He now rather abruptly embraced current academic orthodoxy, including a radical reinterpretation of his prior good fortune. At Stanford, Padilla soon proved a sharp critic of the West in general and in particular his newly adopted country. He came to look back at the former generosity of his many patrons and institutions as the typical condescension of the white establishment to the Other—as if they, not he, had cynically used his unusual background for virtue-signaling advantage.

After his makeover, Padilla became, in mock-heroic fashion, a supposed academic maverick on the barricades fighting the calcified and all-too-white classical establishment. Yet Padilla’s earlier expressions of gratitude to his multitude of benefactors and his demonstrated fascination with the complexity and power of classical literature were his true but fleeting unorthodoxies. In contrast, his graduate-school conversion embraced the stale postmodern academic status quo of the last half century.

Once the switch had been made, Padilla hit the accelerator on what he later called the “decolonization of my mind.” He now joined the trendy generation of careerist classicists, centered at Stanford, who call for the destruction of their own traditional discipline—complete with the dethronement of Latin and Ancient Greek language study from classics at the undergraduate level, and perhaps from the field itself.

The logical, and indeed likely anticipated, results of his radical conversion were even more laurels, which came thick and fast to Padilla from the very establishment that he had assailed. Padilla has often been praised by his peers as one of the most impressive classical scholars of his time. One Princeton classicist was quoted early on in Padilla’s career as predicting that he “will be one of the best classicists to emerge in his generation.”

Perhaps someday. But for now, Padilla has only authored one book in his field of classics—a revision of his 2014 Stanford Ph.D. thesis, issued in 2020 by his alma mater and current employer, Princeton. He also published the aforementioned autobiography in 2015, which details his triumph over poverty and his academic success, but also his gradual transition to victimhood. This present short book, then, is his third. But it is not really an analysis of classics and its pathologies, as the title might imply. Instead, Classicism and Other Phobias is mostly a rehash of his earlier embittered personal essays, now pasted together onto short excurses on Caribbean art and literature.

Yet for all his counterclassical posturing, Padilla still appears no maverick. Rather, he has become indistinguishable from the elite academics he attacks. In his biographical writings, Padilla meticulously cites every scholarship, every award, every fellowship, and every degree that he has won or earned. In the present book’s bibliography, he lists essays in online journals and unpublished lectures. He adopts the off-putting but revealing academic habit of citing a “forthcoming” work. And he then adds a novel sort of padded entry, for a work cited as “in progress.” This tic, if normalized, would ensure that academic bibliographies are longer than the texts themselves.

Classicism and Other Phobias suffers from three unfortunate characteristics of presentation and methodology, well aside from the repetitive and often wearisome content. First, it appears that Padilla can no longer write. His earlier autobiographical narratives about his own accomplishments were readable and occasionally engaging, perhaps to ensure a wider audience. But when he now offers scholarly analyses, his prose appears to be ossified in stale 1980s-style postmodernism—
characterized by unfathomable syntax, bizarre grammar, and invented vocabulary.

A few random examples suffice (these could be multiplied on every page):

Most urgent of all, though, is responsibly confronting the prospect that the forms of classicisms most legible to those of us situated in the twenty-first-century predominantly White Euro-American academy are—because of their historical imbrications and present-day vortices—incommensurate with levelly human recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, no matter how aggressively the “Indigenous turn” in ancient and medieval studies is pursued.

The development and fine-tuning of theory in close dialogue with this structure’s stabilization has steered my research along several axes in recent years, primarily in connection with the historical mechanics and institutional forms of epistemicide.

On an honest and searching examination of the research protocols and disciplinary genealogies of Greco-Roman classics, it emerges that the field is suspended in space-times either adjacent to or ensconced firmly within plantocracy and its direct beneficiaries.

The knowledge-work of these communities of inquiry has to be recognized as making a legitimate claim to unique forms of interpretive power that derive their potency equally from identitarian situatedness and fluency in theorizing that situatedness.

A lexicon is needed to translate all the made-up slang and silly neologisms throughout the book that Padilla passes off as either erudition or hip theorizing, such as copropolitics, doulology, problem/atic, ’tude, and toolsing.

Second, Padilla poses as a brave apostate. Indeed, he has earned attention for calling for the destruction of his own present field of classics, mostly as a way to expunge from history, in neutron-bomb fashion, its alleged racist white pedigree and innate ethnic and gender prejudices. Yet Padilla cannot compose a single page without virtue-signaling his solidarity with obscure postmodern scholars. Often he does so in a chatty fashion that is extraneous to his narrative and thus serves only as an obsequious appeal to a perceived senior authority.

Granted, Padilla boasts that he relies on the race and gender of scholars‚ and not necessarily the validity of their analyses or their depth of scholarship, to determine whether they will be awarded his prized references or citations. He apparently considers his race-based footnotes and allusions as valuable academic capital to be doled out to the like-minded in order to further a shared anti-whiteness agenda:

The first proceeds from the recognition that citation is one currency of the academic realm, where capital regularly accrues to those in senior/permanent positions—predominantly White and male.

But the fact that Padilla wishes to exclude so-called white authorities from his citations and references does not reduce the sheer monotony of his name-dropping. The result is that the book reads like a toadyish graduate student in the front row nodding for his professors’ approval:

After all, to channel Shelley Haley’s channeling of Ann duCille, the Euro-American discipline of Greco-Roman classics has had a nasty habit of boxing the histories and practices of Black classicists into the taming spaces of Whiteness.

In principle it is certainly possible, as Tilman Bechthold-Hengelhaupt has detailed with reference to the work of Jula Wildberger and Andreas Dörpinghaus among others, to fashion critically self-distancing pedagogies that deny exemplary authority to ancient authors and their texts.

My recourse to the language and framework of overrepresentation is a homage to and application of a core concept in Sylvia Wynter’s writings, as sharpened in the recent work of Mathura Umachandran.

Either as complement to or in place of the scheme of the “open field” that Brooke Holmes and Constanze Güthenke have proposed in response to the polar tendencies of “hypercanonicity” and “hyperinclusivity,” one could opt instead to search for and elevate an “oppositional set of communities of inquiry,” for exposition of a counternarrative that proceeds from the understanding that Greco-Roman classics in its Euro-American iteration is bedeviled by the same absences and silences that mark other White-centering epistemic projects.

Third, Padilla cannot cite evidence or sustained arguments to support his thesis of the needed destruction of “White” classics. Instead, he mostly recycles his tedious anger and racial bitterness. His fixations on racial chauvinism and anti-white invective become obsessive-compulsive. Indeed, on average they are found more than once on every page of his slim book: within a mere 148 pages of text, his pejorative “White” appears seventy-three times, “Whiteness” twenty, and “Blackness” forty-seven; “Black” itself shows up in more than a hundred fifty places. Such race-based vituperation in nearly every paragraph should remind readers that abject racialism is exactly what is not needed in these times of rising cultural tensions.

Otherwise, Padilla’s targets are seemingly endless. At times, his pantheon of evil includes not only the entire white academic community that suppresses blackness, but also the enemies of environmentalism; the old settler colonialists who ruined North America and now in new manifestations oppress the Palestinians; the nativist, xenophobic immigration restrictionists; the clueless black accommodators who lack his savvy; and countless more.

Note that Padilla does not even claim to live in New Jersey or work at Princeton. Instead, he dwells in the mythical land of Lenapehoking, the ancestral home of indigenous peoples—at least before New Jersey, along with much of the eastern seaboard, was stolen and exploited by the sort of whites who originally funded the ancient grant-giving Collegiate School and the fellowship-laden Princeton, Stanford, and Columbia.

Padilla assures us that “I research, teach, and raise family in Lenapehoking. It is to these lands and their ancestral caretakers that I owe first and lasting thanks.” Really? Yet he nonetheless often transitions back to his academic self, as when he signs off the book’s formal acknowledgments with the bylines “Princeton, NJ/American Academy in Rome, July 2024”—respectively, a state that illustrates his category of a “settler-colonialist structure” and a nation home to the archvillain of European colonialism, Christopher Columbus himself.

Within the first few pages of introductory material, Padilla already seems not to take his top-heavy, performance-art ideology too seriously, and so such paradoxes and hypocrisies are ubiquitous in what follows. We learn that whereas Padilla is properly proud of his fluency in Latin and Greek and the awards that it earned him, he can now afford to reinterpret such past praise as condescension—as a master’s pride in his accomplished pet.

So, when an elder classicist who was fond of Padilla brags about the latter’s non-white ancestry, Padilla bristles and finds therein proof of the sort of insulting head-patting that he has endured:

At the conference’s book exhibit, I ran into a retired White historian of ancient Mediterranean religions whose teaching and writing had mattered much to me. We fell into friendly memories. Then when one of his old friends approached, he made an introduction putting the old-boys network to work in the service of my advancement. This was the time-honored practice of an elder wielding his social capital to augment mine. But these transactions do not come without a cost, and there is always a tax to pay for upward conveyance within an academy that forever minoritizes folks like you. In this case, it was the handshaking introduction itself that assessed the tax. “Dan-el Padilla Peralta,” the retired historian said, enunciating the syllables of my name with relish, “how rare a name in our fields is that!”

And with that speech-act I was converted into the rarest of creatures.

The rarefied among us burn to escape. Indeed, when even the well-meaning Whites regularly demand from us the labor of circumnavigation, the only recourse is flight.

Not quite, Professor Padilla.

Padilla, after all, is now the Princeton full professor with clout, and the retired historian no longer such in the snobbish hierarchy of the academy. If Padilla now urges “flight” from such grandees, it is certainly late in coming. He apparently missed a multitude of earlier opportunities to “flee” from “the well-meaning Whites” at his various Ivy League and elite billets, where they “minoritize folks like you”—and no doubt do so with all of their insultingly white scholarships, grants, and awards.

It may be, however, that this “well-meaning White” was not remarking so much on Padilla’s Hispanic Caribbean nomenclature. Names like “Peralta” or “Padilla” are not necessarily uncommon in today’s academy. Rather, the supposed fuddy-duddy may have sincerely found rare Padilla’s stylized and hyphenated first name, “Dan-el,” which is certainly infrequent anywhere. One wonders what would be more offensive to Padilla: the retired scholar’s earnestly “enunciating the syllables of my name with relish,” or his making no effort at all to reflect proper Spanish accentuation and intonation.

Elsewhere, Padilla manages to kill two academic birds with one stone when he contrives to remind the reader of his own brilliance while mocking those who were unwillingly forced to recognize it:

I craved opportunities for showing off my skill at reproducing Latin and ancient Greek verb and noun forms, especially in front of those classmates and teachers whom I suspected of under- or misestimating me; and I wanted to bask forever and ever in the warm glow of report card comments that I was the pater familias of my class. . . . Nothing fired me up quite like the desire to vault right over my peers; like Suetonius’s Julius Caesar, I wanted to jump right on all their heads, and I was not deterred by their elitist derision—which, after all, was only another language to master.

Continuing at length, Padilla juxtaposes his earlier superiority over his peers in classical languages with his later liberation from their insidious patronizing:

[B]ut when the moment came to translate Latin or ancient Greek, I warmed to the heat of competing for authority: authority over texts, authority over language, authority over them. How I later unlearned the habits forged in this crucible, how I found kinship and strength in the move away from mastery and towards Julietta Singh’s vision for “unthinking mastery,” is a story for another day.

In fact, this moment supposedly “for another day” has become a repetitive theme of most of Padilla’s proliferating autobiographical diatribes. This current book itself, as noted, has very little to do with any sustained or coherent critique of classics. The phobias of the title, as we have seen, are all Padilla’s own, mostly racial, and not shared by many outside his small academic circle.

Chapter 1 is unfortunately incoherent. It appears to be a stream-of-consciousness opportunity for Padilla to unshackle himself from classical studies (“the overrepresented classicism of the plantation”). That way, he can take flight to Caribbean literature and culture (“a classicism of fugitivity and insurgence, grounded in the histories of the Caribbean”). What follows, however, consists of very few “histories” but instead a meandering chat of a dozen or so pages about a few notable Caribbean “maroons” in the Spaniard Juan de Castellanos’s sixteenth-century epic poem Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias.

Castellanos did, in fact, write of notable “maroons,” such as the insurrectionary leader “Lemba.” From the earlier chapters, we might have assumed that Padilla would judge the veteran Spanish conquistador turned “settler-colonialist” priest as deserving as much ostracism from his new pantheon as did his bête noire, the nineteenth-century Confederate, apologist for slavery, and veritable founder of Greek and Latin philology in America, Basil Gildersleeve. Absent Castellanos’s poem, however, Padilla would apparently have no sources to draw on for his heroic maroons, so he is forced to embrace this presumably suspect author.

Readers will have no idea what was the intended theme of Chapter 2. It appears to be mostly another rehash of various vignettes from Padilla’s early life, whose common denominators are people and things that might have been well-meant but harmed him personally, or at least offended his sensitivities.

The guilty prove a diverse bunch. They range from the Purdue University president Mitch Daniels (for “ill-considered remarks”) and the classicist Eric Adler for his book on contemporary struggles in the field (specifically, for claiming the culture wars were over by 2006), to the idea of the Western canon (he is left “chuckling” by those who ascribe his success to his “‘great books’ education”), the previously mentioned professor who labored too long over Padilla’s names, and that omnipresent elephant in the room, “Whiteness.”

The title of Chapter 3, “Let Me Clear My Throat,” is redundant, since throat-clearing has characterized the previous seventy-five pages. The rest of the chapter is a mishmash critique of the black intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Padilla finds him guilty of trying to master, and then impress others with, the very Eurocentric norms and signs of learning that he failed to understand were also his shackles. Translated, this seems to mean that, unlike the unenlightened Du Bois, Padilla has proved savvy enough to use “Eurocentric” tools not merely to advocate for blackness but even to seek to destroy the edifices of “Whiteness.”

Padilla also judges Du Bois culpable of ignoring the original victims of European racism, the Native Americans. Obsessed as he was with slavery, Du Bois apparently was not fully up-to-date with trendy critiques of “settler colonialism” (a phrase Padilla uses no fewer than thirty-seven times in the book):

At the very least Du Bois’s case should be a warning to those who quest after the silver fleece of classics and classicism without taking the settler-colonialist preconditions of its existence and production seriously.

He ends his attack with a warning “not to trip where Du Bois tripped.” We learn for the umpteenth time that it was that old, insidious whiteness that foolishly prompted Padilla to excel in prep school, yearn for approbation, be proud of his tony education and degrees, and win fellowships and remuneration. Lest one believe that Padilla at this point might be an insincere grifter who lapped up beneficia in his ascendance and then, once he reached the acme of his academic quest, conveniently resituated his career within the emerging anti-white majority, he fires off a preemptive salvo: Dan-el Padilla Peralta will not be accused of “biting the hand that feeds you.”

The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.

Chapter 4 centers on the second-generation Nigerian American artist Kehinde Wiley, best known for painting the official presidential portrait of Barack Obama. Wiley’s reputation as an artist centers around repainting the classical and biblical themes of the Old Masters with black men and women inserted in place of the white subjects. Wiley’s more recent notoriety—unmentioned by Padilla—arose from his remaking of a seventeenth-century painting by Giovanni Baglione, Judith and the Head of Holofernes. Wiley redid Baglione with a scowling black woman holding up the head of a white woman whom she had apparently just decapitated. As Wiley lightheartedly put it, “It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing.”

Padilla does not elaborate much on the usefulness of Wiley for classics, but one can imagine how demonic whiteness might be cleansed from classics by the use of Wileyism. Could we learn to translate Homer into hip-hop? Or perhaps the more talented can redo the Elgin Marbles to show a Black Lives Matter march? Padilla ends his chapter with more of the impenetrable but now customary “end Whiteness” prose:

Hegemonic modes of White-centering classicism have got to go. Otherwise, they will continue to threaten the cultivation and elevation of other classicisms, by hogging the material and cognitive resources through which these can be most effectively and enduringly reproduced. A future where that hogging persists is no future for me.

This, of course, is nonsense. Elite campuses have created all sorts of new racial-studies programs, centers, and “safe spaces” and race-based admissions and fellowships, as well as de facto racially segregated theme houses and graduation ceremonies. In September 2020, the University of Chicago’s department of English, to take one example, announced that it planned to admit only black-studies Ph.D. candidates for its 2021 cycle, a decision, it claimed, that was inspired by the contemporaneous protests organized by Black Lives Matter and made in light of the field’s “complicated history” with regard to race.

A survey of yearly dissertation titles and university-press listings in classics reveals a plethora of “theory” titles focused on race. Until recently, admissions and hiring committees often demanded so-called diversity oaths that required applicants to document the degree of their prior commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in order to be considered seriously. Even Padilla seems to acknowledge that the idea of ongoing reparatory higher education is reaching critical mass, asking near the end of his booklet: “When (if ever) minoritized classicisms reach overrepresentation, will we know then the work is done?”

As for “hogging” resources, currently unemployed classicists from less-prestigious graduate programs might see Padilla himself as feeding amply and inordinately at the fellowship and award trough. Reading his boasts, they might pause to reflect, with Horace: Quid rides? Mutato nomine et de te fabula narratur.

Padilla’s brief conclusion doubles down on his phobia of “Whiteness” by offering halfhearted replies to critics of his various visions for a new non-white classics. Padilla singles out the German scholar Jonas Grethlein for criticism. He had apparently dared to suggest, correctly, that American research and higher education in general are often “seen less as the production of knowledge than as an expression of identities through which oppressed minorities can emancipate themselves.”

So what are we make of Padilla’s monotonous screed?

Unknowingly, Padilla has offered a morality tale about the current pathologies of academia itself. Modern higher education as practiced at the elite level possesses a uniquely destructive ability to transform even the most idealistic entering students. In the case of classics, they are quickly disabused of the notion that the ancient world could inspire a love of learning and a genuine appreciation of transcendent values. Perhaps Padilla himself once felt that the study of Greek and Roman literature was not bound by identities, but was rather a discipline devoted to exploring unchanging human nature across time and space—a pathway open to those of any sex, race, or class who wish to read the ancients.

Classical wisdom was not limited by or solely intended to appeal to a single culture. Nor was it a product of specific Greek or Roman tribal affinities and identities. Instead, the greatest thinkers of the ancient world sought to enlighten a common humanity, and thus could appeal to anyone of any background who came to appreciate such universal human tenets. This may explain why classics programs today exist in Japan and China, as well as in African and Latin American countries.

Again, Padilla at an early point in his academic life—one that he now seems almost ashamed of—seemed to understand that universality. It initially drew him to a distant classical world—at least until he was apprised by the academic brotherhood that his initial instincts were parochial, reactionary, and reflective of his own false consciousness.

As a result, Padilla has become exactly what he once might have feared—an elitist, name-dropping pedant, navigating to the top of the heap, now by traditional philology, now by voguish theories of identity and oppression. The one constant, then and now, has been the rewards that he now trashes as obsessively as he once eagerly coveted them.

Indeed, for someone who is so proud of his classical-language fluency and his expertise in the tools of classical scholarship, Padilla shows little insight into what classics was and is really about. In Padilla’s worldview, the racist eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European settler colonialists—Germans, British, and Americans especially—created the damnable field of classics not to establish vital professional and foundational methods of learning about the classical past through archaeology, epigraphy, manuscript studies, numismatics, papyrology, prosopography, and historical and textual criticism, but merely to reinforce their own fragile sense of white superiority over colonial subjects and conquered indigenous peoples:

Ancient Greece and Rome come to be lashed to the hegemonic projections of North Atlantic liberalism as White-supremacist and settler-colonialist structures of exploitation increasingly capitalized on their ideological and semiotic potency.

Even if that were correct, the Greeks and Romans are no more responsible for what later and often less enlightened cultures choose to appropriate from them than Haiti is for Night of the Living Dead. And Homer and Cicero are no more responsible for the toxic Klansman who thought the adaptation of the ancient Greek kuklos added a veneer of refinement to his hatred than they are for the German socialists and Marxists who near the end of World War I dubbed themselves the “Spartacist League,” playacting as classical slaves oppressed by warmongering capitalist masters.

What Padilla further fails to understand is that classical scholarship’s fascination with the Greco-Roman world rests upon that subject’s singular self-criticism of its own standards and values. The tools of mockery that Padilla employs—caricature, cynicism, parody, sarcasm, and satire—all derive from classical roots, which is to say that they were invented by the very Greeks and Romans he dismisses. Many of the Western pathologies that Padilla cites—class privilege, the “establishment,” male dominance—were long ago objects of criticism more virulent and yet more sophisticated than Padilla’s adolescent rants.

Misogyny? Read the Antigone, Medea, and Lysistrata.

Slavery? “No man is born a slave,” wrote the fourth-century polymath Alcidamas. Aristotle’s argument for natural slavery acknowledges a host of critics who felt otherwise. Slaves in drama from Aristophanes to Plautus often appear smarter than their masters.

The poor and the oppressed? From Solon to the Gracchi, there is plenty of classical admiration for the efforts of the underclass to get even with their exploiters.

Rather problematically for Padilla, the whitest people whom the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans met were often the most negatively stereotyped—whether the savage, milk-drinking, tree-worshiping Germani; the wild, tattooed, and red-haired Britons; the supposedly pathologically lying white-skinned Gauls; or the purportedly innately savage Thracians. In contrast, Homer names as the noblest of foreign peoples the black Ethiopians—a race Herodotus thought the tallest and handsomest.

Settler-colonialism? Recall what Tacitus had his Scottish leader Calgacus say about how the historian’s fellow Romans make a desert and call it peace. For all the “settler colonialism” of Alexander the Great, his ideas of race might be better described as “assimilationist” or as a sort of proto–melting pot, accomplished by forced Persian–Macedonian mass marriages to pave the way for his dream of a brotherhood of mankind.

Homosexuality? Transgenderism? The ancients for the most part had no intrinsic prejudice against either—except perhaps in worrying about the need for marriage and fertility in a premodern society where nearly half of all newborns did not live beyond the age of five. Long before gender-affirming care for the transgendered, the complexities of sexual dysphoria were described in the poems of Catullus and in Petronius’s Satyricon.

Padilla condemns classics not for what the ancients thought but for what some later Europeans claimed they thought, although the tools of classical scholarship are the best means to enlighten audiences about just such a disconnect. But even here, Padilla must cherry-pick his villains to produce a false picture of right-wing classicists pushing their whiteness down the throats of the non-white through all sorts of exclusionary standards and norms. Such paranoias have little resemblance to the reality of the modern campus.

Of the thirty or so undergraduate and graduate-school classics professors whom I knew in the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps 90 percent were left-wing. Unlike Padilla, however, they felt their politics were incidental rather than essential to their professional lives. In Greek history, we were assigned the leftists G. E. M. de Ste. Croix and Moses Finley, but rarely a conservative such as Raphael Sealey or Donald Kagan—an imbalance perhaps often to our disadvantage, but never one occasioning much worry.

In truth, even well before the contemporary, left-dominated Western university, classics was every bit as much a home for leftists, socialists, globalists, and radicals—such as George Grote, Gilbert Murray, Alfred Zimmern, and George Cawkwell—as for the whiteness-glorifying bogeymen of Padilla’s diatribes.

As for Padilla’s obsession with burning down the current field of classics in order to destroy whiteness, the reader wonders about the point of such fixations. Padilla seems to think a declining, endangered discipline is almighty and at the center of the universe. Thus, in a ponderous Classics did it! fashion, he faults a now nearly impotent field for all sorts of cosmic sins. Classics caused Dominicans to ignore Santeria, the folk religion of blacks in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Classics sowed confusion about the real nature of the Haitian Revolution. Classics made us valorize written texts and ignore all the other “non-textualized” information from the past that was not so privileged. Classics played a prominent role in everything from the Confederacy to racial violence.

Still, Padilla hopes that classics can become—like black studies—an instrument for revolution. America is a free country, at least for a while longer, and he might do better to found his own department of Caribbean classics or black classicism while allowing the ancient discipline of classics simply to go its own way and, as he wagers, to die in solitary peace.

If Padilla is wise, and if he does not prove successful in incinerating his chosen field and those less fortunate struggling within it, he might avoid such embarrassments as this recent book and return to the classical scholarship of his dissertation, where he displayed incipient talent. Surely there was some moment as a classicist when he was not driven to write so unhappily and endlessly about himself and his myriad white oppressors.

A final irony: only in fleeting moments amid his racial fixations does Padilla touch upon elite academia and class (classicism, he thinks, is a “cog in the machinery” of capitalism). Even then, class awareness mostly serves as a defensive trope to preempt any notion that he is an elite hypocrite. Indeed, he blasts such criticism as a “pretend class analysis.”

Given that class might serve as a barometer of privilege well outside his binaries of racial victims and victimizers, an overly sensitive Padilla carefully guards his hard-won privileged turf from criticism that is

directed at those [like himself] who are actively involved in the labor of disciplinary critique, that slyly or not so slyly seizes on the relative economic privilege and institutional security of some of these critics as a pretext for dismissing their criticisms.

So, if anyone should state the obvious about the substantial privilege that Padilla himself enjoys but trashes in others, let him beware:

But this analysis, which by seeking to swap out race for class reveals itself as a class-reductionist project for enacting White innocence, fails for the simple reason that it cannot honestly engage in what Fred Moten, improvising on Fred Hampton, calls “the problematic of coalition.”

In the end, an embarrassed and sputtering Padilla is reduced to exclaiming:

And just think for a moment about what would happen if I were not credentialed in the ways that I am: how hard it is for Black people to be so much as heard if they do not come swaddled in White-affirming capital and prestige?

I doubt Padilla would appreciate an honest answer to his rhetorical question—for if he were teaching at Cal State Stanislaus, then Princeton University Press would never have published this book, not because he is black, but because it would be found an embarrassment by accomplished scholars of all races.

Padilla knows that academia in general and classics in particular is a pyramidal structure predicated not on race but on class. Full professors like Padilla enjoy compensations undreamed of by adjunct lecturers and itinerant part-timers. Padilla believes that the university descends from the slave plantation, but if that is the proper metaphor, then he is far more akin to the master than to the servile class.

In truth, any poor white, Hispanic, or Asian student, put into the strange world of elite Upper West Side schooling amid rich kids, would feel the same natural unease as did Padilla. But unlike Padilla, others of many races might weigh the downside of their current discomfort about aristocratic and plutocratic pretensions against the generosity of a free elite education and with it a fast track into the professional classes.

But then that circumspection would require a small shred of gratitude, perhaps an obsolete concept in Padilla’s racialized cosmos. It seems instead so much easier and more sophisticated to envision opportunities not as calling for gratitude, but as proof of the insincerity or manipulative nature of the gifts, which nonetheless will be eagerly accepted and profitably exploited.

This confused anger at past benefaction and Padilla’s own racialist obsessions are the only real messages of Classicism and Other Phobias.