When a woman told Dan-el Padilla Peralta at a classics conference this month that he had gotten his job at Princeton University only because he’s black — a claim he’s heard before — he felt rage.
He felt rage when he realized that the woman’s attack would divert attention from the paper he had just delivered — research on how journal publication in classics is a “whites-only neighborhood” — wrote Padilla, an assistant professor, in a Medium post on Monday. It was a moment of “white fragility disrupting the practice of grounded and data-backed critical scholarship,” he wrote. “What a surprise.”…