“What would it mean to ‘decolonise’ the Classics?” asks David Butterfield in The Spectator:
Have I really chosen the career of racism-pedlar? Are classicists really promoting ‘white people’ as racially supreme over the rest of humankind? Given that racial discrimination is at once repulsive and illegal, just how guilty is present-day academia? In a fair trial, the onus of proof lies with the prosecution, but their evidence is yet to be presented. Scour as I may 21st-century Classics, I read no racism, I hear no praise of ‘whiteness’, and I find no colleague denouncing non-westerners as uncivilised barbarians.
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