We, diverse scholars and students of global antiquity, hope to unite and advance our various approaches to race, identity, and inequity in ancient societies as they inform modern social and epistemic justice. We are collaboratively building an open-access online educational resource (OER) that will showcase anti-racist scholarship, share research and pedagogy across geographies and time periods, equip and inspire new teachers and learners to carry on the inquiry into ancient cultures as they affect the present-day, and ultimately transform our various disciplines, from within and in public perception. We are grateful to the Society for Classical Studies (SCS), Johns Hopkins’ Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation (CTEI), Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (AGHI), Department of Classics, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation for their sponsorship of our efforts, and to the numerous scholars who contributed ideas and expertise during our March 2024 “Futures of Ancient Race” unconference here at Hopkins — we hope the first of many.

Our modern lives are shaped by legal, political, and educational institutions formed in conversation with the past. Yet the Greco-Roman cultures widely considered ‘foundational’ to Western societies never understood themselves as ‘white’ or ‘European.’ They themselves were deeply indebted to other Afro-Eurasian cultures. They inspire us to collaborate across national and disciplinary borders toward a more global approach to antiquity.

Furthermore, not everyone has equal access to this past. Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, and James Baldwin overcame huge obstacles to engage with classical antiquity. Our disciplines’ high barriers to entry and perceived synonymity with whiteness, as reinforced by far-right appropriations of the Greek and Roman past, continue to alienate potential students. Please join us in correcting the record and making the study of antiquity more racially and globally inclusive, in keeping with the pluralism of many ancient societies themselves.

We believe that everyone deserves access to the pasts that shape our present. We hope to fine-tune and disseminate tools for understanding how ancient cultures constructed – and can challenge – modern societies’ configurations of race, class, and other forms of inequality, in hopes of building a more informed and equitable future. The resultant website will serve as a “Khan Academy” for critical ancient studies while advancing dialogues among experts and students from diverse perspectives, foregrounding underrepresented voices, and sustaining living communities of scholarship and advocacy. Please join us if you share these goals or would like to contribute!