On teaching about black people

In 1970 Frank Snowden published a pioneering work “Blacks in Antiquity”, examining the presence and lives of dark skinned people in Greek and Roman times. I began my degree in classics at Cambridge in 1970, and sailed (well, plodded) through the entire degree without ever being made aware of Snowden's work, or of any of his successors. I am not sure what to make of that now, apart form it being an interesting snippet of history. But there may be more to it, in the sense that I can remember learning that Roman historians tended to concentrate on Rome and on the doings of great men. (I am pretty sure I was not even aware at the time of the gender limitations implicit in the word “men”.) What seems apparent to me now is that the syllabus, though providing that critique of Tacitus' limitations, reflected it. Black people did not get a look in, any more than did women, slaves or indigenous peasants. And of course that was true of much of our teaching about the world at that point. The turn to oral traditions and of history from below has done much to widen perceptions, which I am thankful for. I am sure we are as much culture and time centric as we used to be, but today, I think, there is no excuse for not being aware of that fact.