To some extent, this will feel like a sequel to the piece I wrote last month, but in important ways it is not. Last month, I described, in general terms, how I became the Indo-Dutch classical scholar that I am now – here I describe a something that happened to me, earlier this year. Last month, the response was overwhelming – and overwhelmingly positive. This time, it may be different and more complex. However, stuff happened – and before I move on, there are a few things that I want to say. I will say it politely, and constructively – my aim is not to cause any upheaval or anger – but I will also have to be clear.

In the first half of this year, I was involved in a serious and lengthy battle for the post of professor of archaeology at the university where I had studied classics and where had set the first steps in my academic career. I was highly motivated. It would have been great to return ‘home’ to the place where so many of my friends still live, to work with nice people, and to live closer to my family. It also would have been a great story: my grandparents had arrived in The Netherlands with almost literally nothing – even their diplomas from the Dutch Indies were invalidated upon arrival; my father’s career at school and university had been difficult, with episodes of ethnic bias and marginalization, and my own start at the university and in classics also had been challenging, as I explained last month.

I felt it would be really important if, finally, someone like me were to do this kind of job: as a scholar of colour with a colonial migration background, I belong to a group that in The Netherlands is barely represented at the professorial level. Hence, I applied not only with the intention of doing great and innovative archaeological teaching and research, but also with an ambition to contribute to improving the ethnic balance and multicultural sensitivity in our field, and in the humanities at large. It is 2021, and it is an anachronism that we, Dutch people of colour, are so badly represented, particularly in the humanities – the place where our sometimes quite divergent perspectives on culture, history and society can have a real added value.

I got close. I got very close. But I did not get the job. I had more than convinced the committee of my suitability for the position, so they told me, but they put me in second place. This was sad, but it can happen: nobody gets through an academic career without losses and disappointments. Over the years I had built up some experience with the process, and I handle it relatively well. It was of course disappointing that the committee remained unconvinced by my plea for multiculturality and ethnic diversity – but that is an ideological choice that university departments are, and should be, free to make. Nevertheless, an uneasy feeling has remained. Something, in my view, is not right. In what follows, I will try to explain what.

One

Taken at face value, the result was remarkable: I was better qualified for the job than the chosen candidate. I will avoid the details here, but I had ten years more experience, much more knowledge of and affinity with the Dutch academic system and Dutch society, a very strong network in The Netherlands, and a well-developed public profile as an archaeologist. On top of that, my research profile and fieldwork expertise fitted better with the local academic environment and with the student population. Multiple people in the field expressed surprise about the outcome. Again, this happens more often, and it generally is a reason for frustration more than for alarm. Yet it struck me that even committee members would not commit wholeheartedly to the result. One reassured me that he had not participated in the final vote. Another one told me that ‘another committee would have made another choice’. It seemed as if even the people who had made the decision did not fully understand why it had been made, or how it could be translated into a convincing narrative.

The interviews had been surprising. Only the external member of the committee was an archaeologist, and he led the interviews on the topic of research, but his questions painted a remarkable picture of my work. In the first interview, my research was somewhat dismissively characterized as ‘economic history’. In reality, I am an urban archaeologist with an emancipatory agenda: I study architectural remains – workshops, shops, houses – to understand the lived experience of non-elite communities in their everyday urban environment. This was no secret: the archaeologist who asked the question had been on the committee that funded my fieldwork on the houses of Roman Paestum. In the second interview, as I explained my intention to focus on the lived urban environment, it was questioned as to whether I actually had the expertise to do so. This was odd: not only had I just published a volume on the topic, the archaeologist who asked the question had actually been at the conference from which the volume originated. In the third interview, it was suggested that my proposed research plans were ‘not innovative’. Yet they very clearly were – but they focused on contexts, debates and frameworks that were beyond the committee’s expertise – space, and social difference. In all three cases, there was an awkward fallacy of presupposition. The problem was not that I could not deny what was suggested – of course I could. The problem was that it left me with little time to tell my own story: my ideas long remained marginal to the conversation.  

What made this uncomfortable – in hindsight – was that the colleague who led this conversation enjoyed close intellectual affinity with the candidate who would eventually be chosen. He had served as discussant in a volume co-edited by the successful candidate, and it appeared later that he also had been the peer reviewer of a recent monograph by this person. Their work is also theoretically, and to some extent ideologically, aligned. Of course, this is not uncommon: we are a small field, and to some extent, close intellectual ties and overlaps of interest are unavoidable. Yet intellectual affinity comes with a risk of intellectual bias that needs to be actively counteracted. In this case, the approach to interview questions should have been much more explicitly neutral. He should have refrained from framing my research, and simply let me tell my story.

Two

On top of this, there were errors in the organization of the process. Several of the decisions that the committee took in setting up the application process gave an advantage to one candidate. First, before the second round of interviews, it was decided not to ask the remaining candidates to put their research plans on paper. This is unusual: a written research plan of a couple of pages is a normal part of Dutch academic hiring processes – it gives individual committee members the possibility to reflect upon the plans of the candidates before, during and after the interview. Leaving it out meant that the committee only heard about the plans of the candidates during the interviews, starting from the questions of the archaeologist in the committee. Yet if the committee member who leads the discussion about research enjoys close affinity with the work of one of the remaining candidates, there is an imbalance of knowledge that puts the others at a disadvantage. This does not need to be ill will – it is simply that ideas and approaches that already are better ‘anchored’ in the expertise of a committee need less effort to make an impression.

A second decision that gave the winning candidate an advantage was the choice of topic for the trial lecture. The committee was very specific in its assignment: rather than giving the candidates the possibility to strategically highlight their strengths by asking us to simply cover an aspect from a broader topic like ‘Roman art’ or ‘Roman architecture’, they asked us to give a lecture on the Pantheon. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this – The Pantheon is right at the heart of Roman archaeology as a discipline. Yet if – as happened to be the case – one of the finalists has investigated the emergence and history of Roman concrete, that candidate has quite a clear advantage over the others. This work cannot have been unknown to the committee: it was published in the edited volume in which the archaeologist in the committee had been the discussant.    

A third decision concerned the organization of the campus visit, which the committee added after the second round had not resulted in a clear victory for one of the candidates. The first two rounds, including the trial lecture, had been conducted digitally via Zoom – and the campus visit was meant to physically encounter the remaining candidates. Thus, alongside a third interview, they planned a ‘social event’ for the candidates, to meet with the committee in slightly less formal setting. To my astonishment, they took the candidate whom they would ultimately choose for dinner in a restaurant, whereas the other two candidates got a brownbag lunch in the university cafeteria. This not only meant that one candidate got considerably more time with the committee than the others, but also that this time was significantly better in quality.

Three

I hate to say it, but my background did not help either. My candidacy came with a range of vulnerabilities that were directly shaped by the way I, as a person from Indo-Dutch descent, had developed as a scholar. I described that, at length, last month. The fact that my research had ended up outside the mainstream of classical archaeology proved a liability when my work was represented erroneously during the interviews – it was very hard for the rest of the committee to see why the questions I got did not make sense. The fact that, as a student, I had come to be seen as a somewhat ‘difficult’ figure also came back to haunt me. Twenty years on, the committee still worried whether I would be able to be a good colleague. I have become used to the prejudice, but still, this was harsh, given everything I had built up at Leiden and within our research school, OIKOS.

The committee also had difficulty handling diversity as they encountered it. For instance, I had suggested in my cover letter that I looked forward to contribute to debates problematizing ‘Europe’ – the shared research focus of the institute where I was applying. This was seen by some as provocative – and put me on the defensive during one of the interviews. Yet for me, problematizing Europe is not provocative, but lived reality: if you come to the humanities from an Indo-Dutch background, the very idea of ‘Europe’ as a research focus is hugely problematic and exclusionary – it essentially denies the existence of part of who you are. That what I wrote landed uneasily with the committee highlights the divergent perspective that a migration background may bring – and the small frictions that may result from that in academic environments where migration backgrounds are badly represented.

More troublesome was the way in which my seniority was misinterpreted. When discussing leadership, it was stated by someone, looking at me, that I was ‘very young’. In reality, I am not at all very young: I am in my mid-forties. I have gotten used to the confusion: because of my physical (Indo-European) appearance, familiar indicators of age are absent, and people often underestimate how old I am. Usually, this is not a problem, but when my underestimated age is used in framing a conversation about academic leadership, I am being put at a disadvantage. Had I looked more senior, our conversation about leadership would have started differently. Of course, these are issues of diversity for which interviewers can be trained – but if universities have not invested in this, it makes things more difficult for candidates coming from a different background.

Four

I think that what happened is problematic. Yet there are two things that I want to emphasize. First, I am touched by what happened, but I am not angry. I have issues with practices, not with people. All people involved were very kind throughout the process, and the atmosphere was good. I would have loved to work with them, and I regret that this is not going to happen. That does not make right what has gone wrong, but it is important that all eyes remain on the ball: I am not looking for trouble, but for better, fairer practices. Second, I do not think that I should have been given an edge because of the fact that people like me are underrepresented in the humanities. Of course, I think that lack of representation is a serious problem: the humanities belong to all of society, not just to people of fully European descent. The fact that, in the humanities, the number of full professors from Flanders or Germany completely eclipses the total number of full professors with a Dutch-Indonesian, Dutch-Caribbean, Dutch-Surinamese, Dutch-Moroccan and Dutch-Turkish background taken together points to systemic inequalities that should worry anyone with a heart for our disciplines. Underrepresentation is a form of academic injustice, and it should be addressed – but not, I believe, by positive discrimination. At least, not at this point.

I accept that the road towards better representation will be long and winding. As long as people like me are not represented in hiring committees, people like me will more often face an uphill battle – the examples I gave in section three illustrate why. A lot of that is hard to avoid. I am prepared to deal with lack of affinity, conceptual distance, and ideological misunderstanding. I accept that more will be asked if you deviate from the implicit ethnic norm – this is the inevitable cumulative effect of all the small things you will encounter in your career. Yet what should not be accepted under these circumstances is that well-qualified candidates from underrepresented groups have to witness their work being misrepresented during interviews. Their ideas should never remain marginal to the conversation. Hence, interview questions should be truly open, and should leave out the ideas and concerns of interviewers as much as possible. Similarly, candidates from underrepresented groups should not be disadvantaged because of the organizational choices made by the committee. The why does not matter here: candidates should simplyget the same treatment, and assignments should be chosen so as to give all finalists equal opportunities.

Five

Professorships are important: Dutch professors have a lot of power. This is not reconcilable with sloppy hiring processes. From my perspective, this would mean that the result of this process can not credibly stand and should not be legitimated by the chosen candidate. Yet – obviously – I cannot be a judge in my own case. Hence, my final point here is different: whatever happens, I hope the people at the university where this took place will have a very serious conversation about whether these practices really meet the standards according to which they want to operate – and if not, then about what that means. Additionally, I think we will need to see a broader, serious effort to understand why the higher echelons of our disciplines have remained so incredibly white. My case may be unique, but it was not, I believe, an incident. Ethnic underrepresentation is a big problem that seriously threatens the long-term credibility of our disciplines. I will hopefully be around for a couple of decades, and alongside doing innovative stuff in archaeology and ancient history, I am going to put this on the agenda, again and again, until we are going to see some real change. The irony, of course, is that I would have had much more power to contribute to change if I had become a full professor.

Change is long overdue: my family arrived in 1954, and it was 2021 when I was advocating against structural underrepresentation of our ethnic group. It was also 2021 when my ethnic background, at a career-defining moment, caused me all kinds of disadvantages – directly and indirectly. Given that it was so close, there is no doubt that I would have had a better chance had I not had this extra weight on my shoulders, and that really makes it indefensible that the trial lecture and the campus visit were not organized as they should, and that my work was erroneously represented. More importantly, however, I belong to an ethnic group that is relatively privileged: there are multiple other groups of people with a migration background for whom all of this is much harder still. Yet if people in academia already struggle to handle the relatively modest amount of diversity that I bring in, please make no mistake: the systemic problem we are facing is real and serious.

Miko Flohr, 15/10/2021

Het is goed, heel goed, dat onze overheid Nederlanders met een migratieachtergrond niet langer bestempelt als ‘Westers’ of ‘niet-Westers’. Op het oog zijn het wellicht handige containers, in realiteit zijn de termen eurocentrische vergaarbakken van kortdoordebochtheden, misverstanden en inconsistenties. Gisteren publiceerde de WRR een Working Paper waarin gezocht wordt naar alternatieven, en waar, in plaats van het binaire systeem, een categorisering wordt voorgesteld op basis van etno-linguïstische criteria, waarbij men uiteindelijk tot een indeling in zes groepen komt. Wat mij betreft – geen expert, wel betrokken – is het een grote vooruitgang. Zes categorieën zijn per definitie minder grofmazig dan twee, en etno-linguïstische criteria zijn in principe helder en dus bediscussieerbaar. Dat is, op zich, een veel beter vertrekpunt dan wat we hadden. Zes categorieën zijn er bovendien geen twintig, dus de categorisering blijft ook nog een beetje betekenisvol.

Groepen die niet in het systeem passen

Toch is het voorlopige resultaat problematisch, en niet zo’n beetje ook. Wie in de zes op de website vermelde categorieën zoekt naar een plek voor Surinamers en Antillianen – toch geen onaanzienlijke migrantengroepen in Nederland – komt bedrogen uit: ze staan er niet bij. ‘Latijnstalige en andere Mediterrane Landen’ komt op het eerste gezicht nog het dichtst in de buurt, maar de WRR zal toch vast niet denken dat Italiaanse, Griekse, Surinaamse en Antilliaanse Nederlanders tot eenzelfde groep behoren? Dat klopt inderdaad: de WRR denkt dat niet. De WRR rekent de Surinaamse en Antilliaanse Nederlanders, als ik het rapport goed begrijp, tot mensen met een herkomst in de ‘Anglo-Germaanstalige’ landen maar houdt de mogelijkheid open om voor sommige doeleinden een zevende categorie (‘Cariben’) te gebruiken waar zowel Antilliaanse als Surinaamse Nederlanders in zouden vallen – maar om dit te ontdekken daar moet je dus eerst het volledige rapport voor openen, en dat vervolgens helemaal doorploegen – en dan nog staat het er ambigu.

Nederlanders met een Indische of Indonesische migratieachtergrond denken wellicht op het eerste gezicht dat ze in de nieuwe systematiek terug te vinden zijn onder het kopje ‘Overig Azië en de Pacific’, maar zo simpel is het niet: ook zij worden allemaal op etno-linguïstische gronden in de Anglo-Germaanse container gelumpsumd. In een voetnoot wordt het uitgelegd: de meeste migranten uit Indië waren totoks (Nederlanders) of Indo’s (Indo-Europeanen), en dat zijn, zo stellen de auteurs ‘individuen met een Continentaal-Germaanstalige achtergrond’ – de voetnoot noemt hen dan ook, veelzeggend, ‘repatrianten’ (auw). Vervolgens – ik verzin dit niet – stellen de auteurs doodleuk dat de Molukkers, omdat zij ‘op basis van de gegevens uit het bevolkingsregister’ niet te onderscheiden zijn van totoks en Indo’s, dan óók maar in de Anglo-Germaanse groep worden ingedeeld. Hier gaat natuurlijk iets heel erg mis. Je kan niet een categorisering hebben waarin Nederlanders met een Molukse, Surinaamse, Antilliaanse of Indo-migratieachtergrond tot dezelfde categorie behoren als Nederlanders met een Duitse, Vlaamse of Deense migratieachtergrond. Dan gebruik je het verkeerde criterium om onderscheid te maken.

Cultuur of geschiedenis?

Precies bij de criteria ligt dan ook de bron van het probleem: de WRR wil, in een streven naar objectieve meetbaarheid, criteria voor cultureel onderscheid die verankerd zitten in een logica van universaliteit – en daarom komen ze uit in het etno-linguistische spectrum en op het idee van ‘culturele afstand’. Dat werkt op veel vlakken misschien best wel goed, maar het gaat voorbij aan één, toch niet onbelangrijk punt: migratie – zowel de beweging zelf, als de hechting aan het land van aankomst – wordt niet gedreven door culturele oorzaken, maar door de loop van de geschiedenis – en in het geval van een aantal zeer grote en zichtbare migrantengroepen in Nederland meer specifiek door het verleden van Nederland als koloniale macht. Precies dat verleden, en de manier waarop mensen vanuit voormalige koloniën naar Nederland kwamen werkt vaak sterk door in de manier waarop zij in Nederland geïntegreerd en gepositioneerd zijn – we zien dat in de ook in 2021 nog hoogoplopende discussies over het Nederlandse slavernijverleden, en over de Indonesische onafhankelijkheidsoorlog. Het is niet de taal of de cultuur die hier doorslaggevend is – maar de levensloop en historische wortels van de families die het betreft.

Het is niet zonder treurigheid dat de groepen die niet in de nieuwe categorisering passen net die groepen zijn die hier zijn vanwege die ongemakkelijke, vaak wat weggemoffelde bladzijden uit de geschiedenis van ons land. Het is tekenend voor de krampachtige omgang van Nederland met het eigen koloniale verleden, die in wezen de ontkenningsfase nog nauwelijks is ontgroeid: die V.O.C.-mentaliteit, daarover kan men pochen of schertsen in de Tweede Kamer – maar zeventig jaar nadat de demografische consequenties van die mentaliteit naar Nederland begonnen te komen is er, als het op beleid aankomt, nog steeds geen conceptueel kader waarbinnen deze migrantengroepen passen. Dat is zonder meer laakbaar, al zou het te ver gaan om dit toe te schrijven aan de auteurs van dit ene rapport: dat conceptuele kader is, zo lijkt het, voor weinig Nederlandse wetenschappers een halszaak geweest, en vermoedelijk ligt de oorzaak hiervan in ieder geval deels in het demografische spectrum: er zijn simpelweg te weinig Nederlanders met een koloniale migratieachtergrond in academische machtsposities geweest waarbij ze op dit terrein een verschil konden maken. Als dat inderdaad zo is, is het hoog tijd dat dat verandert.

Postkoloniale migrantengroepen

Natuurlijk, het is niet makkelijk. Ieder label dat je gebruikt is imperfect. Desalniettemin denk ik zelf dat het uiteindelijk het beste compromis is om de Nederlanders met een koloniale (of postkoloniale) migratieachtergrond te noemen wat ze zijn: Nederlanders met een (post)koloniale migratieachtergrond. Dat is een grote, gevarieerde groep, met mensen die zichzelf eigenlijk volledig Nederlander voelen – veel van de koloniale ‘totoks’ en hun nazaten, en een deel van de Indo-Europeanen, en mensen die zich heel nadrukkelijk niet Nederlander of Europees voelen – veel Molukkers zullen zichzelf vermoed ik tot deze laatste groep rekenen. Anderen zweven ergens in het midden, in onbestemd terrein. Dat de groep gevarieerd is, mag nauwelijks een bezwaar zijn: deze groep is nu, als ik het goed begrijp, in zijn geheel onderdeel van een nog veel grotere, en veel gevarieerdere groep – de Anglo-Germaanstalige landen.

Je kan zeggen dat de nu voorgestelde indeling de koloniale ‘totoks’ uit Indonesië impliciet het uitgangspunt maakt voor categorisering van alle migranten uit de voormalige Nederlandse koloniën. Dat is fundamenteel fout en doet de andere postkoloniale migrantengroepen sterk tekort – niet in de laatste plaats omdat het betekent dat ze ook in de postkoloniale realiteit in een koloniale, witte mal worden geperst die hen niet past en die niet aansluit bij hun ervaringen in het kille kikkerland. Het is van groot belang om de niet-witte postkoloniale migrantengroepen in hun eigenheid te erkennen: zij (wij) zijn hier omdat de Nederlanders ooit daar waren. Dat is wat hen (ons) definieert, en wat juist als het gaat om het bestuderen van processen van integratie centraal moet staan.

Postkoloniale migrantengroepen zijn in allerlei opzichten gevormd door het land van hun herkomst en door de diepere historische migratiewortels die daar voor sommige groepen weer onder liggen. Cultureel gezien zijn ze echter deels in nog veel sterkere mate gevormd door het simpele feit van hun aankomst hier en de racialisering die hen in het witte Nederland ten deel viel. Een categorisering die dat niet erkent ontkent de postkoloniale realiteit waarin we leven en ontkent, in feite, niet-witte postkoloniale migrantengroepen in hun bestaan – en dat lijkt me, in 2021, echt volstrekt onacceptabel, al is het wel symptomatisch voor een land dat na zeventig jaar niet echt goed zoeken nog steeds geen goede plek heeft gevonden voor het eigen koloniale verleden.

Miko Flohr, 08/10/2021

I grew up as the oldest and darkest-skinned kid in a mixed Indo-Dutch family in a terraced house in a small village in the southern part of The Netherlands. My mother is Dutch, my father was born on Sumatra in an Asian-European family that was forced to ‘repatriate’ to the Netherlands in the years following the Indonesian Independence War. They arrived on Christmas eve, 1954 – by boat, with almost nothing, in a country that they did not know, and which was unprepared to give them a warm welcome. I think their first years were very tough, but eventually, my grandparents and their children ‘landed’ relatively well in their new continent – at least, if you forget the war- and migration-traumas and look at it in purely socio-economic terms. My parents were not wealthy, but they were not poor either, and, besides some of the food, the only thing that in practice would distinguish us from most other people in the village was the way some of us looked. Culturally, I think we would count as ‘Dutch’, and we were – and my parents and one sister still are – active members of the local community. As a kid, I did well in school, and eventually would proceed to study Classics in Nijmegen, followed by a Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology and some years in Oxford. Eventually, I would become lecturer in Ancient History in Leiden, a position that I still hold.

Ethnic solitude and the ‘model minority’

The Indo-Dutch identity is strangely undefinable, and works completely differently with different people, even within families. Some feel very Dutch, others feel very different; some people look very Dutch, others look very different. Throughout my youth, I was of course aware of my background, but it seemed to play a relatively limited role in the way I developed as a person. The one recurring thing that I recall very well was that I was always looking for people ‘like me’, but rarely found them. I remember that I felt some excitement when, in the first year of my secondary school in the big city nearby, I was suddenly surrounded by a multitude of ethnicities instead of being the different one – but after I had ended up in the gymnasium track, with Greek and Latin, most of that diversity quickly disappeared from the classroom. I got used to it. It was only when I was the only one in my group of friends not to be allowed in the discotheque that I was made aware of the difference – but this only happened one or two times. Otherwise, there were some confusions, ‘jokes’ and ‘where-are-you-really-from’-questions at the everyday level, but, luckily, there was no meaningful racism.

In Nijmegen, at the university, my ethnic solitude was similar – and seemed similarly irrelevant. I came to see it as two different things: I was studying classics, and I had an Indo-Dutch background, and while I sometimes did see a certain tension between the two, in practice, the two did not really interfere. While the people around me may have known my ethnicity, I rarely publicly self-identified as ‘Indo’. Why would I? Nobody would understand. It was thought not to be an issue. This was the 1990s, the Netherlands were a self-proclaimed beacon of multicultural tolerance, and ever since I was a kid, the Indo-Dutch, had been seen as a kind of ‘model minority’, which meant that we were thought to have fully blended into Dutch society – culturally, socially and economically: in Dutch culture, a good migrant is an invisible migrant – and invisibility is something for which many Indo-Dutch people proved to have an enormous talent. By the late 1990s, we had, in many ways, stopped being regarded as a minority. Reality was much more complex, but it did not occur to me to make my ethnicity an explicit part of who I was.

Classics as a post-colonial challenge

Still, there were challenges. I arrived in Nijmegen with the privilege of not being a first generation student, as my father had studied and even worked at the university. Yet the way in which he, in all his difference, had been marginalized there, meant that I arrived with an enormous distrust in the internal machinations of (white) university departments, and I was ill-prepared to grant a lot of a priori authority to those in positions of power. This occasionally resulted in tensions in the conservative university environment where I studied. Moreover, as I immersed myself in classics forty hours a week, I noticed I felt a distance between the (white) European elites who had traditionally dominated classical scholarship, and the much more down-to-earth and multicultural place where I came from. I had difficulty embracing the classical tradition as something intrinsically valuable without questioning it. This put me, intellectually, at odds with most of the people around me, but I quickly discovered that I was about the only one who got really very excited about this debate.

My start in the field, thus, was not straightforward. I did not know what to do with ‘classics’ and its elitist ideology, and some people at Nijmegen came to think of me as a bit strange or difficult – when I started my Ph.D., my supervisor-to-be was even warned of my difficulty by some of his colleagues. Right now, it is easy to understand that this was part of my ‘post-colonial challenge’, but at the time, I was at a loss, as ethnicity was simply not on the radar. I even remember that I felt a bit ashamed when, after graduating, I could take part in a funding competition that was specially designed for people of a post-colonial or ‘non-western’ ethnic background: that surely could not be meant for people like me? I did not get the money, but I now realize that I was wrong in my judgement: my troubles with the classical tradition made that I had ended up in a somewhat remote corner of the field, in an intellectual no-man’s-land between two subdisciplines, where I was trying to give a voice to people who had been marginalized by classical scholarship on the basis of badly preserved archaeological material. This allowed me to do great and innovative research, but it put me, again, at odds with most of the people around me, who were very much into elite art, elite literature, and elites more in general, and did not necessarily get what I was getting so excited about. At one point, I was explicitly advised to stop questioning the elitist ideology underlying the field. I followed the advice.

Becoming an Indo-Dutch Classical scholar

Yet as I embarked on what would become an academic career, the world began to change in a way that would bring my ethnic background much more to the fore. The security panic that struck the Western world in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks made it crystal clear that when it really mattered, people with my colour of skin were going to be found on the ‘other’ side of the trustability divide: suddenly, European authorities saw me as a security risk, and I needed to be checked, thoroughly, time and again, when on the move. I began to dress up for traveling. Moreover, the increasingly heated ‘debate’ about foreigners, migrants and refugees touched upon a raw nerve in a family where there were very vivid memories of a forced migration and a cold, racist reception. As I began to participate in this debate, I developed a visible public profile in the Netherlands. My academic colleagues knew about this, and some identified it as somewhat ‘different’ or ‘peculiar’, but I am not sure they fully understood where it came from. They may have thought that I was being controversial for fun, or that I simply was in search of the spotlight. I can hardly blame them: I still kept my two identities rigidly separated. After my initial struggles, I was not going to be difficult (or different) before I had a permanent position.  

When I had job security, there came more space for reflection, and things began to change. This was a slow process, but it was sped up immensely by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020: the discourse that emerged over that summer hit me in the face – with the double-faced colonial past of my Indo-European family and with the deep-rooted whiteness of classics as a discipline. It is through these intense debates that I came to recognize the post-colonial cobbles that had caused the bumpy ride through the first stages of my academic career, and came to accept that the two identities that had grown in me were much more intimately entangled than I had wanted to acknowledge. Why did I end up studying classics? Because I was an ambitious second-generation migrant in search of social mobility and intellectual recognition. Why did I end up in the relative margins of the discipline? Because most mainstream classical scholarship is ideologically problematic if you do not subscribe to the white, elitist tradition that in many ways still dominates it – and ethnic difference makes that scenario a lot more likely. Why did I experience tensions with the academic establishment? Because I am the dark-skinned son whose dark-skinned father had had some very bad experiences with academic establishments, and with racism more in general, and because I ventilated an ideological criticism for which not everyone had a frame of reference. Why did it take me two decades to link the Dutch Classical Tradition that I was studying to the fact that my grandparents (and their parents and grandparents, etc. etc.) had grown up in a Dutch colony ruled from a place called ‘Batavia’? Because I kept my background and my academic field rigidly separated. Why did none of my professors bring it up when we were studying classics? Well… that brings me to the more general issue at stake here.

Towards a post-white academic field

Why am I writing this down? Of course, this is a personal account, but the argument is not about me. I think I am trying to make three points. First, the implicit whiteness of the ideology underlying classics, classical archaeology and ancient history is very real, and can have real consequences in the way our discipline ‘works’ with people who do not come from a ‘western’, elitist background. I am not the only one saying this: just this month, Javal Coleman described how, in studying Roman slavery, he essentially ‘was being told what kind of questions to ask by older white men’. Reading his interview set in motion the process that produced this text. Earlier this year, Kelly Nguyen argued how Eurocentrism and elitism are ‘endemic to the field’. In April, the New York Times had a long article on the work of Dan-el Padilla Peralta noticed how he ‘sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity’ – a sentence that I found too recognizable. Some people in the Netherlands would argue that what they are saying is an American discourse that we should hesitate to ‘import’ into Europe. Yet The Netherlands are a post-colonial society with several large, ethnic minorities: there are people here, too, whose experience is in some ways similar – and I am one of them.

Second, the whiteness of classics is not just ideological. It also is, very much, demographic. I’d love to see the day when classics, as a discipline, lives up to its claim of universality by being as diverse as the world in which it operates, but at present, this is patently not the case. Just this week, my old colleague Zena Kamash published an article highlighting the way in which the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conferences had, throughout their history, been dominated, basically, by white men from the Global North. The good news, I think, is that we know that this imbalance does not need to be written in stone: the last decades have seen clear policies and developments in addressing the gender-balance in the discipline, and classics clearly has become a lot less masculine as a result – even if gender parity is still too far away. The bad news is that, as far as ethnicity is concerned, not a millimetre of progress has been made in the last decades. This problem is broader than classics alone: in the face of increasingly diverse and multicultural societies, the western humanities have remained astonishingly white, particularly at the professorial level. In the Netherlands, part of this may be due to the fact that the humanities do not attract a lot of students with ethnic roots outside Europe, but I think we must very seriously entertain the possibility that the imbalance also results from implicit bias. From my perspective, whiteness, and embodying the European elite habitus, contributes significantly to the construction of academic excellence, affinity and acceptability at our universities, while not being white is less easily associated with academic leadership, and more easily with being different, or even difficult – I am not the only non-white humanities scholar in the Netherlands who has encountered this issue. Is there enough space for difference, if our discipline is so demographically homogeneous?  The fact that I for so long did not feel free to make my ethnic identity part of my academic persona – and when I talked about this with other people, they would mostly confirm my intuition – offers me a tentative answer.  

Finally, and perhaps most importantly – I have, eventually, become a relatively senior academic, but I have not forgotten how I got here, and some of the issues and questions I faced have not entirely withered away – ‘am I not making this up?’. I think if I look back on the last twenty years or so it would have helped me enormously if there would have been people like me who would have gone through this before, and who could have told me that I was not mad or difficult, and that, in fact, what I experienced was perfectly understandable given the place where I came from as a person. Someone, perhaps, who also would have told me that there was no need to keep the personal and the professional so rigidly separated, and who could have told me what I know now – that embracing your background (when you can!) can be an enormous source of liberation and strength, while suppressing it might prove a source of doubt and vulnerability; that I’m not like them but I can pretend did not actually work out that well for the guy who wrote that song; that it could be more rewarding to focus on your own intellectual destination than to try to spend your time building intellectual bridges to places where you’ll find no one waiting – even if your destination differs from the main paths offered by your discipline. Never forget that your difference also may be produced by their narrow definition of sameness, and the cultural weight they have attached to it. So the third reason why I write this down is because junior people in the field struggling with these issues should have the opportunity to understand that they are not mad, that what they are up against is real, even if every individual situation is different – but also that some people have found ways out, and that there are other people out there in academia who have gone through this before, whose experience – as far as it is accessible – can be a very valuable archive.

Miko Flohr, 19/09/2021