Hat tip Campus Reform
A Sacramento teacher says she won't teach Shakespeare because he is white.
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6596
Comment:
First of all, teachers are supposed to teach according to established curricula and lesson plans.
Secondly, if Shakespeare is not worthy of her students' attention because he is white, then why should this teacher's students pay any attention to her since she is also white?
This is not to suggest that African literature has no value. When I was researching my book on Papiamentu, the creole language of Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire, I learned about the African trickster tales involving the trickster spider, Anansi. These oral stories were transported to the Americas during slavery and survived, in one case evolving into the Brer Rabbit tales that were written about by Joel Chandler Harris in the Uncle Remus tales. Harris, who was white, had heard these stories from black farmhands in the post Civil War years in Georgia when he was a boy. Sadly, political correctness in the 1960s judged them to be "racist" and an important part of our literary history disappeared.
But I digress. Shakespeare is important because of his contributions to the development of English. If this teacher doesn't recognize that, she is in the wrong profession. What this is is just another example of the silly demonization of white people in the name of political correctness. It is not only silly, but divisive.
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5 comments:
This reminds me of the black nationalist "radicals" who said Marxism is wrong because "Karl Marx was a white man." So what? Either what he wrote is true, or not. Either Shakespeare's plays are good literature, or not. Incidentally, this teacher might want to seek some remission from their chronic ignorance by looking up Paul Robeson's study of Shakespeare's Othello, done before Robeson began acting the title role on the stage.
Only in California?? Where was she, or someone like her, when I was struggling with Shakespeare in high school and college??
I guess this ditz can more easily navigate African, Spanish/Portuguese, and whatever untold number of SE Asian languages which would necessarily be involved than she can "an early form of the English language"?? WHAT A CROCK!!!!!
elwood... are you saying you wish you had had this teacher, so that you would not have had to struggle with Shakespeare?
Siarlys--a little joke, a little sarcasm. Lighten up.
Two can play at that game... if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
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