Most of the educators stayed away from anything too revolutionary. A couple are bolder. “Shakespeare was a tool,” claims Ayanna Thompson,
used to ‘civilize’ Black and brown people in England’s empire. As part of the colonizing efforts of the British in imperial India, the first English literature curricula were constructed, and Shakespeare’s plays were central to that new curricula.
In her political circles this is bedrock fact. The definition of a “tool” would seem to reside in the eye of the beholder. That the plays also were central to traditional curricula in white schools in Great Britain would not seem to place her observation in wider context.
Lorena Germán, educator and a co-founder of DisruptTexts, continues the blunter tone. Germán, in fact, is something of a rising star in the also rising Anti-Racist Movement — a more aggressive non-violent progeny of the Civil Rights Movement and post-Modernist Identity Politics. The SLJ article posted at pretty much the same time that a featured interview of Germán was posted in the much more radical White Supremacy in Education issue of the Learning for Justice group’s Teaching Tolerance Magazine. Learning for Justice was founded by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The interview with Lorena Germán is entitled “What it means to be an Anti-Racist Teacher”. The bio that introduces it informs us that she has “worked in education for nearly 20 years”, at least some of the time as an English teacher, and is “chair of the National Council of Teachers of English Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English and co-founder of Multicultural Classroom”. She is also co-founder of the DisruptTexts Twitter movement.
A considerable amount of the program advanced among the authors in the White Supremacy in Education issue cites genuine issues and offers measured responses. But far more radical claims are interleaved here and together with demands for breathtaking leaps of faith completely replacing tested methodologies and curricula. Still more radical demands are discreetly sprinkled throughout the text.
Among the many disappointments the headlines in response to the SLJ article bring is that the issue is not going to be discussed based upon the merits. The audience is being called to protect its own identity. The same is true of the audience of the White Supremacy issue. No studies were or are going to be cited. No debates. None undertaken.
Shakespeare’s fate is dependent upon the fact that shock value translates to page- and ad-clicks. In the School Library Journal piece Ayanna Thompson does actually bring Shakespeare into the picture. She suggests studying Shakespeare’s plays together with texts approved by Identity Politics advocates. Other voices hardly mention him at all
Those dedicated to Shakespeare scholarship, or the mainstream teaching profession, are rushing into the fray like so many lemmings. Even the articles in the much more radical White Supremacy issue are only about Shakespeare because his name makes the most shocking headline, provokes the most useful response. Actually, all of the canon is tagged for removal. To remove Shakespeare first reduces any resistance for lesser figures.
Incidentally we learn, in the White Supremacy in Education issue, that mathematics and science are to be redesigned, as well, to remove inherent racism. In fact, all of Western Civilization is to be removed and replaced. We learn from Dani Bostick’s “The Classical Roots of White Supremacy” that it all simply must go.
“Western Civilization” is aligned with whiteness. In schools, the glorification of classics and its artificial linkage to whiteness is a toxic combination.
All the voices sing their text in concert. All history and historical texts are racist, tools of oppression. They must be replaced by contemporary works by authors approved by the principles of Identity Politics.
Again, Bostick discreetly leaves those of us who parse a morsel in passing:
An uncritical veneration of a white classical world has a foothold in K-12 schools, where ancient Greeks and Romans are protagonists across the curriculum. In the humanities, this focus influences what history is taught and which texts are viewed as scholarly or rigorous enough to be worthwhile.
To require replacement texts to meet scholarly or rigorous evaluation is also White Supremacy. It is difficult to see this as meaning anything but that texts should be chosen for their Identity Politics value as opposed to how well they are written, researched, or how factual they are.
Should the general reader think this all only refers to the humanities, Germán’s interview will be instructive.
We have to deconstruct the way that science is taught, the concepts that are included and the concepts that are excluded, because what we’re not talking about is also a problem — those silences in our curriculum are problematic. The same goes for math: We need to think about the way that math has been implicated in the project of racism.
Bostick highlights further crimes.
Across education, curriculum signals the superiority of knowledge from ancient Greece and Rome. In math classes, for example, Euclid and Pythagoras figure prominently, while contributions from Babylonia, Egypt and Arab-Islamic cultures are often invisible.
Math and science, too, are products permeated with White Supremacy and must be redesigned. Mostly how they are taught but also the disciplines themselves must be altered. No specifics would seem yet to be offered beyond interpreting purported White Supremacy out from data sets.
Let no one or thing distract our attentions in such a vital matter. Especially not headlines. Whatever one’s investment in one or the other of the Shakespeare industries, his work is far less important than the totality of Western Civilization. Not because we’ve grown used to it, or even attached, but because it is the civilization that gives us railroads, space satellites, computers, smartphones, the ongoing struggle for civil rights for women and minorities, health regulations and technologies, food supplies for 7 ½ billion people, and vastly more. It is the civilization that maintains, advances and expands upon it all. True, all of them seem insufficient, poorly distributed, too slow in being realized, etc., but it is utterly irrational to think that they will continue without the enormously complex, inextricably intertwined, functionality of each successive iteration of Western Civilization. The best that can be hoped for after its radical “deconstruction” would be an unpiloted glide-path — rather than a nose-full-down crash — to a terrain in which ravaged populations with short life-expectancies scavenge chips from derelict personal devices.
Also from the Library of Babel:
- Mrs. Trollope observes Andrew Jackson. July 26, 2020. “This resolution was hardly acted upon when the news reached us that the General had arrived at Louisville, and was expected at Cincinnati in a few hours.”
- An Excerpt from Joseph Addison’s Spectator #94. July 4, 2020. “Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Tatler and Spectator papers were a brilliant addition to the daily sheet. They developed into prototypical society pages.”
- A Memoriam for W. S. Merwin. April 17, 2019. “It took about three days, as I recall, for me to surrender to the fact that W. S. Merwin was the finest English language poet of his time. I wished I’d been prepared to read him years ago.”
- The American Garden. January 16, 2019. “Among the first of many "featured plant" histories in Mickey's lushly illustrated America's Romance with the English Garden are the American mayapple and black-eyed susan, both wild native plants, he informs the reader, that were domesticated in England before finding their way back to America gardens during the 19th century.”
- Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.
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