The fall after the summer of solidarity
An essay on READS For Black Lives and our mission.
In its narcissistic monologue the colonialist bourgeoisie, by way of its academics, had implanted in the minds of the colonized that the essential values- meaning Western values- remain eternal despite all errors attributable to man. The colonized intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal. But during the struggle for liberation, when the colonized intellectual touches base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed to smithereens. All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless trinkets. All those discourses appear a jumble of dead words. Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged. And first among them is individualism. --Franz Fanon, “On Violence”
Any discussion among women [across categories of difference] about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger. This discussion must be direct and creative because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here…[T]he strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we inherited without blame but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform differences through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.--Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger”
Black poverty and genocide is state violence…[W]hen Black people cry out in defense of our lives, which are uniquely, systematically, and savagely targeted by the state, we are asking you, our family, to stand with us in affirming Black lives. Not just all lives. Black lives.[...][W]e need less watered down unity and more active solidarities with us, Black people, unwaveringly, in defense of our humanity. Our collective futures depend on it. --Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”
If only for a second, the members of Eos’ Executive Committee (as it was then comprised) wondered if we should issue a statement of solidarity with the Global Movement 4 Black Lives and in response to the state-sanctioned murders of Donnie Sanders, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others in quick succession during 2020. However brief its duration, that instant strikes me as even more momentous in the wake of our fall event, READS for Black Lives, and of the discussions that this special session of READS has generated. Without that moment of consideration, I doubt we would have so confidently affirmed the plans we made in 2017 to work beyond what we had absorbed about how things operate in the field of Classics. Given the history of the discipline’s relationship to anti-Blackness, we knew we could not treat working beyond as an emergency measure to be employed only if necessary: it would best serve the society’s goals as a matter of fact and would become, in short order, the source of our strength as a team.
2020 had already been a year of horrors by the time that meaningful second occurred. Covid-19 had become a fact of life everywhere. Still, in the United States, the coronavirus pandemic was taking a disproportionate toll on Black and Indigneous communities especially. At the same time, America and much of the world watched a series of Black people slaughtered with startling vividness by the police and the self-deputized alike in different parts of the country. Wildfires raged, though without the national attention they deserved. Of course, more horrors waited in the wings: the 45th president had only started laying a path towards delegitimizing the electoral process; a whistleblower had not yet alerted journalists to the fact that an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, was sterilizing women in their custody without their knowledge and/or consent. Even so, the summer proffered enough to make what was happening clear. Whether it was the rapid hierarchization of labor that saw some of the lowest-paid workers in the United States deemed “essential” and therefore made more vulnerable to the airborne virus while others (me included!) were allowed to remain in the relative security of seclusion for most of the week without losing income, or it was the sound of another Black citizen asserting that he can not breathe as a so-called public servant continued to obstruct his airways, all too familiar cycles of violent inequity had made another fatal revolution.
But the prevailing winds had seemed to change direction in at least one respect. Corporate entities had previously considered the phrase “Black Lives Matter” nefas dictu: understanding the assertion as antithetical to peace, civilization, law, order, and patriotism, these entities judged it too “charged” and “political” and therefore likely to threaten the commercial success that comes from widespread appeal. This summer, however, many of these same corporations as well as a host of corporate-aspiring organizations decided to publicize statements of solidarity with the struggle against anti-Blackness if not, more explicitly, with the Global Movement 4 Black Lives. They pledged to re-examine representation and diversity, an impetus familiar to the corporate world for the last 20+ years, and to think about how the systems and structures of white supremacy must be undone in order to create a more just society for Black people in particular. From museums to soda brands, hyperlocal social media platforms to clothing manufacturers, universities, musical groups, artistic communities, and television networks, industries that had once kept an arm’s distance from the reality of racism began to acknowledge their role in the national Thing (a phrase from Žižek via Rinaldo Walcott then Tavia Nyong’o), to acknowledge that they had contributed (some intentionally and overtly, others as a matter of course that did not require any intentionality) to the organized, multigenerational oppression of Black people for the sake of their profit and their thriving.
Each day saw our inboxes filled with these statements, our timelines and feeds peppered with them. Days turned into weeks. News came out in clusters about the persistent mistreatment and exploitation Black Americans had been experiencing in various quarters. Some institutions backed away from their promises once it became clear that the tried and untrue strategies of decades of liberal diversity work--forming a committee or task force to review existing policies and to suggest new ones--would no longer suffice, that following through with solidarity would elicit taking a risk and, thereby, walking on untrodden ground on their part. Retreating from the demands of reckoning with their racism, corporations played their role in the curtain call to our national drama about anti-Black racism where white embarrassment and “reflection” remanufactures white racial innocence without accomplishing much else. Others, when called out for the insufficiency of their initial statements, caused further surprise: admitting malfeasance, they recommitted to the work of unlearning the racism they had talked around or simply denied ever existed within their organization months prior. It was in this context that we wondered whether Eos should follow suit with what now seemed as the de rigeur way of performing support for the struggle against anti-Blackness in 2020.
Before deciding on a course of action, we returned to our mission statement:
Eos believes the resurgence of nationalist and nativist movements across the globe demands a thorough commitment to redressing reductive narratives of the ancient Greek and Roman world and to studying the full spectrum of its reception. However, we do not view this historical moment as unique. Rather, Eos acknowledges the long history preceding these contemporary events wherein peoples of African descent have been systematically denigrated and ignored while being exploited for their labor.
Written in 2017, this part of our mission reflected on a sobering fact well-known to Black people and their long-term allies in the fight for Black liberation but increasingly denied by adherents of post-racialist triumphalism. True, the galvanization of the right that began during the Bush administration, found new purpose and vigor during the Obama administration, and bloomed under the Trump administration produced a more vulgar, brazen, and en-masse espousal of white supremacist anti-Black jingoism than many Americans remember seeing in public “civilized discourse” for some time. Nevertheless, this more unabashed resurgence merely permuted the anti-Blackness that had been subtending every aspect of American life all along. We had witnessed flurries of activity related to combating systemic racism in the academy and other parts of the corporate sector before. And in those prior instances, those very flurries of activity inevitably died down as the familiarity of the racist status quo beckoned like the warm sensation that overcomes the human body before it finally succumbs to frostbite. Whether in the wake of a disastrous conference or a Unite the Right rally, Black scholars had received emails and text messages with sentimental outpourings of “solidarity” and/or grief in the immediate wake of an event before. And, like clockwork, their daily confrontations with racism, occurrences just a hair’s breadth away from that event, would still be treated as insignificant, merely inconvenient aspects of life that they spent too much time worrying about instead of their “real” responsibilities. Yet, Black people and their long-term allies had always understood (and repeatedly explained) that the machinations of white supremacy are life-structuring, life-altering, life-threatening, life-denying, and, as we have, quite literally, seen, lethal. So rather than busy ourselves with the quick metabolization of outrage in 2017, we took strength from these truths and then structured our organization around it.
The pandemic did, however, alter the frame through which we had to understand this most recent surge of interest in solidarity. White supremacy’s machinations made the knee, the absent knock, the neck, the excess of force, the absence of due cause and due process, the empty clip, the pleading, the eyewitnesses, the camera lens, mere suspicion, the lackadaisical passing of critical time that could have preserved life, the criminalization of refusing to turn a blind eye, and the valorization of white supremacist violence as righteous freedom (as well as the product and producer of innocence) anything but new. This year too, as in 2017, consumer technologies like cell phone videos and the proliferation of social media platforms facilitated the documentation of details that police accounts and some mainstream outlets had once shrouded in mealy-mouthed euphemism at best. However, Covid-19 had mostly shut down the activities through which many Americans readily and pleasantly conceived themselves as participants in some collective social action. As whole industries halted, if only to figure out how to deal with this new factor of their existence, it became more difficult to define oneself as a sports fan (Dub Nation!; thanks to Wilburn Williams for this insight), a frequent movie goer, world traveler, a foodie, etc. and to thereby console oneself in the consumerist pleasures that allow one to feel part of something in our neoliberal present (“Did you see those dragons!?”). At the same time, the locally and federally mismanaged pandemic emphasized the need for mutual aid as a part of human flourishing, rather than as antithetical to individual success. The invisible hand was not providing for those so loyal to its beneficence, but the hands of neighbors, strangers, self-sacrificing health care workers, delivery people, and the previously ignored cadre of so-called “low-skilled” laborers provided time and again in ways that could not go unnoticed. The pandemic’s disruption of the status quo afforded particular segments of the public time to protest, to learn about the history of policing and governing Black bodies to produce white safety, and even to formally join many of the local organizations that comprise the Movement 4 Black Lives as more and more intuited that human flourishing was no longer a given raison d’etre or even the ostensible priority of American institutions. Indeed, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to racialize the virus through xenophobic and/or eugenic terms (i.e. “common sense” and “healthy” living would suffice to keep you safe = you deserve to die if you have any pre-existing condition including poverty; only the weak will die and that might be for the best; if health resources become limited, the lives that really matter will be protected), the break from routines enabled risk to feel democratized in a way that could not be laundered through right-wing spin machines with unmitigated success. Consequently, as greater shares of the non-Black public invested themselves in going beyond learning about the details of a specific incident or the particulars of one lawsuit to actually resisting the carceral state, the hyper-militarization of the police, and the disenfranchisement of Black communities, the businesses that depended on that public were increasingly incentivized to soften their stance. As they dared to utter the simple, but powerful statement--Black lives matter--and adopted the movement’s hashtag on their social media profiles, businesses could also further insinuate themselves into the lacunae created through generations of hollowing out civic institutions in the name of efficiency and individual responsibility.
Nevertheless, a gap remains between solidarity statements as the near automated corporate response to the state-sanctioned murder of Black people and the actual implementation of changes that discontinue leeching off of the material existence of Black people. The corporat(iz)e(d) awakening of the American public to anti-Blackness involved a lot of our labor. Black staff members, colleagues, diversity consultants, heretofore ignored neighbors, and the like were in hot demand this summer and fall, overworked as usual to write documents, to populate photos, and to conceptualize gestures that would lend solidarity statements substance when they were not also being asked to validate the feelings of others. Understood as figures of grievance assumed to be available for public consumption, Black people in the summer of solidarity statements were still being repeatedly robbed of the time and the space to grieve (a formulation of Kevin Quashie, author of The Sovereignty of Quiet).
Because we had long since planned to perform a self-audit in 2020, the Executive Committee could discuss the issue of solidarity as we scheduled the next slate of Eos’ activities. When we began attending to the nitty gritty of forming a scholarly society, we gave ourselves the first three years to experiment with the structures that we dreamt up and decided to reflect on what we had learned up to that point. We had never formed one of these before! Even so, it had not escaped our notice that we were an unabashedly, unapologetically pro-Black organization in a predominantly white field and with only one Black scholar on the Executive Committee: this reality linked our work as a team of scholars to the society’s public facing programming and activities inextricably. All of us were formally trained in the Classics by mostly, if not exclusively, white classicists. So we were steadily trying to learn and/or to implement the very changes that we advocated for and that we hoped could become mainstream in the field so that those of us committed to this area of research, artistic output, and pedagogical development would be actively dismantling anti-Black racism with less personal risk, isolation, and, alas, actual harm. For these reasons, the trends we were observing in those days and weeks punctuated by the issuing of solidarity statements led us to wonder amongst ourselves: a) how could we resist the urge to auto-reply, satisfying the summer itch to declare solidarity without materializing longer-term change?; b) what did the particular moment reveal about our workflows as a team and as members of other communities with regard to Black flourishing?; c) how could we avoid compounding Black grief and Black fatigue while demanding acts of solidarity from non-Black allies? Some things, like the very fact we were a team, we recommitted to. Some things we adjusted based on the experiential knowledge we had gained over three years and due to the fact of changed circumstances (i.e. promotions, relocations, parenthood, newly formed interests, increasingly diversified skill sets). Still other things we felt we had to add to the next few years’ agenda, and we look forward to rolling those out in due course.
When we decided to host a public facing event to grapple with the last two questions, READS became the obvious avenue for such an endeavor. READS was never about us simply providing a universally applicable template for classroom use. That programming stream had always been conceptualized as a mere stepping stone towards further work and change by classicists responding to the demands of their particular pedagogical situations. Inviting participants to think about how to teach a text together, the workshop’s format was designed to collectivize what is often ignored or individualized in graduate training and professional life thereafter, however much teaching remains central to the life of a professional classicist. For many trained in Greek and Roman studies, these texts from Black diasporic authors were new, whether altogether or as part of their training rather than their personal “enrichment” (a concept to which I will return with regard to funding and the rhetoric of austerity). For most, the workshop format being employed for pedagogical praxis was just as new.
But the special session of READS required changes if it was going to satisfactorily respond to those aforementioned questions. We included much more explicit background on the workshop for those unfamiliar with the society and its politics. Likewise, we provided suggestions for the procedures of local sessions. In light of the fact that anyone could register--even those with a new interest in Africana receptions of ancient Greek and Roman cultures--we directed attention to the necessity of critical reflection. Also in concert with our mission’s focus on the teacher-scholar as a whole person rather than a unit disembedded from the world outside a campus, we highlighted that hosts could create a local session with members of any community, academic or not. Previously, every iteration of READS during the same academic year focused on one text. For this one, we chose to pair texts from separate eras, with different intellectual contexts, and that diverge in their relationships to the academy’s incorporation of racialized difference. Creating a temporal delay between our announcement, the local sessions, and the convening of our special session, we intended to emplot reflection on anti-Black racism at a temporal remove from the shock of a specific incident. This interval attempted to afford Black people the time and space they are so routinely denied as a result of both our culture’s ongoing demand for busy-ness and the ongoing racialized imbalances of power: leaving sufficient time for non-Black people to (learn how to) organize against, to (re)read about, and to do that first order reflection on their anti-Black inheritances, we were attempting to reduce how much Black labor is always involved in the performance of non-Black solidarity. Moreover, making discussion of these texts in conjunction with the Classics the “price of admission” for the workshop rather than its hopeful outcome intended to signal that merely attending any event would never suffice for actual solidarity. Actual solidarity and allyship (and other similar positionalities) refuses to recenter privilege through tropes of enlightened saviordom or guilt. It entails leveraging power in situations and spaces from which others are excluded to undermine and, ultimately, to destroy the systems that routinely produce that exclusion.
Yes, the Black woman used the word destroy (cf. Lorde).
Image: Quilt, Dr. Cleota Wilbekin
Pairing Hendricks’ 2019 remarks with Fanon’s “On Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth meant that we could encourage participants to think about Black liberation as a diachronic and multilayered project, attentive to the variety of situations and subject positions it has and has to involve(d). Neither author’s words--as is the case with any topic in depth--would suffice as an emancipatory panacea; we advance(d) neither author as a possible savior. Hendricks’ comments speak directly to academics, especially those in literary and premodern fields: addressing the temptation to join burgeoning areas of research while ignoring the risks that brought that research into being, Hendricks’ specificity could be especially appealing for those who desire a roadmap of sorts for how they should proceed. This temptation is well worth noting since institutions have retreated to austerity measures once more in response to a crisis. As grants proliferate for studies about racial inequity and projects geared towards racial justice these areas of research will no doubt grow more attractive as individuals try to secure a path through the next few years post-pandemic and as institutions demand exertion while rather conspicuously tightening their ‘belts’. Though there are inevitably those who still grumble at Hendricks’ provisos, her remarks’ references to an adjacent field with demographics and a history in the academy similar to that of the Classics accommodates a particular sensibility about the field as it relates to anti-Black racism much more readily than the passages from Fanon we assigned. The chosen selections from Wretched of the Earth lean into the linkages between Classics as it currently exists in the postcolonies and the priorities of respectability, a politics which demands that Black people prove they deserve the benefits and protections of their non-Black neighbors. [If you can read Latin and Greek, perhaps you have a soul! If only you did x this way and not that way, you would be able to be safe in your own home, they say. If you wore this hairstyle and not that, then you would be treated with respect.] We did not want to shy away from discussing the active, targeted dismantling of systems that engineer and profit off of Black death. By picking Fanon, we very much wanted to confront the reticence to make that commitment.
To put it another way, if the Hendricks passage offers a critique that could allow a classicist to imagine their work would retain value with a few minor adjustments, the selections from “On Violence” provoke by disabusing that same classicist/academic of this very preciousness:
During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle- the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution. Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?'' And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective working model.
Throughout this section of Wretched of the Earth, Fanon excoriates the colonized intellectual as part of a larger inquiry into what it takes for those oppressed by the colonial order to develop a sense of self beyond it. If the colonized intellectual is not so much attached to whatever knowledge s/he is credentialed to produce but more so to the status that knowledge grants him within the system of things, the move from being above to being among would be a drastic one. If the model of intellectual one holds onto entails a stable mastery, the confrontation Fanon imagines here crosses over from humbling to humiliation. But there are models other than mastery available. And in light of those models there is no shame in admitting that the way we have been trained, the skills we have learned to complete projects recognizable within our disciplines, may not empower us to do the work that emancipatory projects demand. We may very well have to unlearn those skills and, instead, learn from those excluded by the framing of our disciplines and the gates of our institutions. That is, as Fanon schematizes how various segments of the colonized could work together to dismantle it, he pushes his readers to think about what other attachments the colonial order has prevented us from forming and why. Thus, with old canards and the usual talismans “smashed to smithereens'', to harken back to the passage with which I began this thinkpiece, we still have a duty to contribute to the project of emancipation and a role to play alongside others.
I acknowledge that, for many of us trained to get some objective distance from the Romans and Ancient Greeks in order to study their culture and the violence we routinely encounter as we do so, retraining yourself to be in the struggle might be difficult if you have the privilege to think you can opt-out of it. (Everyone is already involved; prevailing systems don’t require your active consent.) Surely, though, if we can learn languages not spoken for millenia and argue increasingly finer points about these cultures from the remote past, we can imagine the ways in which we might contribute to the fight on our doorsteps, to respond when asked how the kinds of knowledge we are said to produce might support life concretely.
Or, summoning Fanon, what will it take for us to see ourselves as more than whatever the discipline needs us to be for it to continue?
Image: The Great Emancipator oversees the military police deployed liberally against Black Lives Matter protestors during the summer of solidarity. Getty Images
Of course, we ought to critique these and plenty of other passages from Fanon’s oeuvre as hindrances to the larger project of emancipation. The masculinist logic and misogynist language that circumscribe his understanding of what women can contribute to this fight, for example, warrants criticism. Alicia Garza’s thoughts on the movement she co-founded with Patrice Cullors and Opal Tometti (above) demonstrate and other reflections on it explain how Black Lives Matter has sought to go beyond the attachment to a form of leadership that is gendered, abled, classed and sexualized in ways that claim legitimacy by mirroring other structuring hierarchies, like heteropatriarchy: understanding racism’s many ruses productively complicates how one fights for justice and expands that fight’s various goals. Her comments remind us that no singular, unchanging entity, as in the BLM movement alone, could ever be capacious enough to win that fight. That fact and the setbacks it anticipates enlist analysis and critique as aides for the fight’s sustainability rather than as causes for despair and defeatism.
Garza’s statement also reflects on violence in Fanon. Even after accounting for the developmental framework with which Fanon the psychiatrist analyzed revolution, his focus on violence can not be spit out as merely distasteful, ineffectual revenge fantasy considering the history of liberationist movements the world over. At a time when the phrase Black Lives Matter rolls off the tongue of many, there is an ironic urgency to repeating that Fanon’s call for the destruction of the colonial regime and the racism that functions as that regime’s primary technology is anything but metaphorical. The deaths we have all been called to witness have been anything but metaphorical. And, what is worse, we know there will be more.
Image: White nationalists infiltrated the Capitol while the Senate was in session and posted up, unharmed and uncuffed, against officers of the law. Getty Images
Having to repeat this in conversations with classicists took on its usual weight even before the events of January 6th 2021. But in the wake of a Trump rally where Rudy Giuliani spoke of “combat” and the Pro-Trump takeover of the Capitol building, it seems preposterous. Nevertheless here goes: the revolution Fanon called for is not a yearning for violence for violence’s sake because the disenfranchised can think of no better option. Nor is it an original creation, one that emanates from a racialized pathology as mindless, illegitimate anger. It is an awakening to the violence 1) already normalized by the colonial (and liberal) order so as to be curiously invisibilized and forgotten as violence, 2) meticulously privileged for the State and those the State recognizes as legitimate citizens through, amongst other things, the law, and 3) that creates the subjectivities through which people interact with the world: or, as one of the women who took part in the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol so tidily summarized in her fear and confusion, “They’re supposed to shoot BLM...” Our current era of colonial violence not only involves batons and pepper spray, Humvees and barricades. It also employs “school choice” and food deserts, pseudoscience about pain tolerance and years without clean water, chemical exposure and the life theft of mandatory minimums, predatory loans and gentrified neighborhoods, election day intimidation and gerrymandered districts. It includes what Americans just witnessed and are no doubt still processing: being loved for ransacking the Capitol; being allowed to walk away from insurrection alive when not being helped by the police or taking congratulatory selfies with officers (https://wapo.st/3nLYAbr; https://bit.ly/2JReHGy; https://bit.ly/3nNS7N5; https://bit.ly/35fXoqc); the irony that this took place, as journalist Joy Reid summarized, near a neighborhood swiftly and thoroughly militarized after officers beat Freddie Gray and then rode around with his beaten body unsecured in their van. It has always been the split second granted by the benefit of the doubt between a trigger being pulled and noticing that it was a toy gun, and that same benefit of the doubt binding the thin blue line to a jury’s decision. In response, the colonized have neither violence nor the short term release it might offer as their end goal. But, seeing the colonial/liberal order for what it is, they recognize that every action they take in the multi-faceted and coordinated fight for life, every action that remains rightfully wary of bidding for the dregs of power called inclusivity will nevertheless be called violence, will still be policed as thuggishness and terrorism.
This state of affairs demands wariness even after the colonized realize they possess a power beyond that abjection the prevailing order consigned them to. Remaining wary of the siren song of colonial/liberal respectability (i.e. legitimacy) as well as apolitical catharsis (e.g. individualist opportunism) attempts to keep both the hard-won power and the new subjectivity that power creates from reinstating everything the colonized once fought against. In place of that futile busyness respectability and apolitical violent catharsis mires us in, the arduous, never-ending work of creating something politically, culturally, and ethically new takes center stage.
And so, while research leave has allowed me more time and space to pursue my scholarly work and my life work this year, I have found myself asking familiar questions. What is this knowledge about the Ancient Greeks and Romans for? Why learn with the people we do? Why teach the people we do? Whom do we need to learn more from? What do we need to further unlearn? What truths are we excavating? Most importantly, what are we building?
I have to be honest, though. Something changed. In the fall after the summer of solidarity, I came to understand, perhaps more clearly than ever, that these and the other questions I ask myself, my colleagues, my collaborators, my friends, my family members, my mentors, and the like amount to more or less the same thing:
What good are trinkets to the dead?
Sasha-Mae Eccleston is one of the co-founders and co-presidents of Eos. Currently on research leave as a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is completing a manuscript on race, Classical reception, and the rhetoric of time post-9/11.