In August 2018, almost four years ago, as a new seventh grader, I started taking Latin. Since then, I’ve learned what the subjunctive is, how to form endings for a first declension adjective, and what happened in the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BCE. I’ve learned to love the language and hearing about Roman history and culture. But something has always felt a little off about my Latin experience, and it wasn’t anything relating to Latin itself, but rather a social issue.
Being the only black person in a room is not new to me, but it’s certainly something I notice, especially when my class hasn’t changed all that much since seventh grade, again, almost four years ago. When I started high school in the wake of the 2020 BLM protests and after dealing with a racist incident in my eighth grade Latin class earlier that year, I started to think more about being black in Latin and the lack of people who look like me in the subject.