The Sunday Read: ‘He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?’

For years, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Dominican-born teacher of classics at Princeton, has spoken openly about the harm caused by the discipline’s practitioners in the two millenniums since antiquity — the classical justifications of slavery, race science, colonialism, Nazism and other 20th-century fascisms. He believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. Today on The Sunday Read, how Dr. Padilla is trying to change the way the subject is taught.