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Should we destroy the classics to save them from whiteness?
A friend of mine the other day asked me if I had read an article in the New York Times talking about Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, of Princeton University, and his crusade to save the Greco-Roman classics from their (alleged) whiteness. I looked, and my first thought was “this is far too long, is it really going to be worth my time?” You see, one of the classic authors in question, Seneca, always reminds me that time is by far the most precious commodity we have:
“But they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity — time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.” (Letter I.3)
In the end, I decided to read the article, which turned out to be both fascinating and more than a bit irritating. And now here I am, sharing my thoughts with you so that I can convince Seneca that I haven’t entirely wasted my time.
Padilla has had a remarkable life, which the author of the article, Harper’s Magazine deputy editor Rachel Poser, covers in some detail. Born in the Dominican Republic, he was brought to the United States by his parents when he was four. The family had a hard time legalizing its situation, and his father went back to the Dominican Republic, leaving Padilla’s mother to fend for herself with two young boys in New York City. They changed various apartments and eventually ended up in a stinky homeless shelter in Chinatown.
Padilla’s life changed one day when he found a small book in the shelter’s small library. It was entitled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome” The boy took the book and never returned it to the library. It had a major impact on his life. Some time later he met a photographer named Jeff Cowen, who recognize something extraordinary in the then 9-year old Padilla and helped him apply to Collegiate, one of New York’s elite prep schools, where he was admitted with a full scholarship. He started to study Greek and Latin and felt, as Poser puts it, overwhelmed by the emotive power of classical texts.
After that, Padilla went from one ivy educational institution to another: full scholarship as an…
