Including Diverse Voices
Finding diverse voices is not as hard as it might seem. There are growing communities of Latinists of color as well as of gender diverse and neuro-diverse scholars. I strongly recommend following these folx on Twitter and then follow the people that follow them. Facebook has some of these organizations, but you will miss younger voices.
You can also find a lot of more diverse voices in our field on the hashtag for the "Our Voices in Classics" conference.
So how do you actually include these voices?
Make sure you have books on student accessible bookshelves (and your own) by authors from a variety of backgrounds.
Try to include the work of wider group of scholars when you cite work or have clips of scholars talking about something in Roman society that you play in class.
Include some of the new novellas that have been written to include characters of color. I have incorporated parts of the Regina Amanirenas novella in my unit on Egypt in the second CLC book. Here is a database that lets you filter for different identities.
Posters with a variety of faces are hard to come by despite the clear variety of people in the Roman world. I made this one with an accompanying website to explore some of the cultural diversity in the empire. If you want the graphic for free just email me, but it looks best at poster size. I also recommend this redbubble shop.
Working on your own racism/bias: As members of a racist society we all have absorbed some of the biases of that society's social norms and if we have any power at all (and all teachers have power) we can do racist things.
Did this statement just make you feel uncomfortable? That's ok, being uncomfortable is actually an important first step, but most of us have a lot of other work to do, and if you don't do this work you are risking hurting the students you are trying to help. See below for some places to start this work.
Some places to start (the last three are linked directly to their sources):
Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Beverly Daniel Tatum
Me and White Supremacy Layla F. Saad
“Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools” with Bettina Love, Gholdy Muhammad, Dena Simmons and Brian Jones (90 min.)
Podcast: Teaching While White
“20 Judgments a Teacher Makes in 1 Minute and 28 Seconds” by Jill Barshay (and watch referenced portion of video)
If you are in Massachusetts and get the opportunity to take the IDEAS class, I strongly recommend it and a lot of the readings I have suggested came from their syllabus.