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Lucy T's avatar

The problem I have with this otherwise sophisticated argument is that it seems to take the term "whiteness" seriously. What exactly is "whiteness?" Its connotations, as far as I can tell, are entirely negative, revolving around stereotypes of the abuse of power. The term is used by academic theorists, "anti-racism" activists, corporate diversity trainers, and journalists in the halls of power (ahem) as if it had absolute validity, as if it expressed a reality to question which is to reveal oneself as a "racist" and so to risk expulsion from the human community. I feel like I'm watching a cultural coup unfold, one that continually extends its reach to obliterate more and more of what used to be a shared history and culture, open to expansion, and to impose a narrow canon of righteousness. I find it ironic that people who use "sensitivity" as a strangehold on discourse nonetheless feel free to impose pejorative labels on whole groups of other people, indeed whole histories and cultures. To judge harshly and to seek to obliterate the works and deeds of those who have lived in previous centuries is to reveal an absence of historical imagination and of intellectual humility. And to what end? Will a Western Cultural Revolution benefit poor and economically disadvantaged people, who come in all colors, or just the practitioners of revolution themselves?

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Adrienne Scott's avatar

"Perhaps this is the best lesson to learn from the Enlightenment thinkers. They may have had all kinds of “blindspots” that we now recognize in our incomparable wisdom, but they were never content to stick to what they happened to be born into. They tried to find their answers everywhere, and the world is still the richer for it."

That was so well said. It is BECAUSE writers like Shakespeare and the ancient Persian poets expressed the universality of the human condition that they are still celebrated and revered. Love, loss, good, and evil are part of the HUMAN condition.

The reason I spent the bulk of my career teaching international students at a university is because I wanted to learn more about cultures from around the world while simultaneously helping students understand how best to navigate the United States. My students from Cameroon, Korea, Saudi Arabia, China, India, etc. were rightly proud of their cultures; it was a privilege to share and explore facets of each and find how the most important value in one (hospitality: Saudi Arabia, community: Laos) exists in all but to a different degree.

You also write, "the whiteness of these writers is their least interesting facet" and again I concur wholeheartedly. By all means, broaden the curriculum to include the "greats" from multiple cultures and times. But to "cancel" the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen because of their "whiteness" is the height of intellectual laziness and hubris.

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