In praise of dead white men - Prospect Magazine « Prospect Magazine - 0 views
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Efforts to make education more "relevant" to black people can be both patronising and harmful. The western literary canon should be taught to everyone
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Dead white men, the pillars of the western canon, remain supremely relevant to black people in the 21st century, because their concerns are universal. At its best, the canon elucidates the eternal truths at the heart of the human condition
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As black people, we cannot change history, and should not try to reject knowledge because of its provenance. It would be far better to focus our attention on understanding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of the canon, or why the humanities have, on the evidence of history, so comprehensively failed to humanise.
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We should accept the truth of history, which is that white men have dominated intellectual life in the west. Let’s not resist this; let’s run with it.
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championing a Eurocentric canon can help reinforce the prejudice that white is cerebral and black is physical.
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the way the canon has been refracted through racist lenses does need to be incisively and intelligently critiqued.
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here’s the rub—and the main reason why I come to praise dead white men, not to bury them: the overwhelming majority of black thought and literature of the last 400 years, by simple dint of the painful exigencies of human history, is devoted to chronicling man’s inhumanity to man. Naturally, if someone has me in shackles, is holding a gun to my head and denying me my basic human rights because of the colour of my skin, I would choose to firstly devote my intellectual energies to addressing that injustice. But it is undeniable that man’s inhumanity to man is only one part of the human condition.
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Our perspective is impoverished if we only seek knowledge from the writings of those sharing the same colour skin as ourselves. Black school students today are not shackled in the way their predecessors were, so they should not seek to limit themselves, and can only benefit from access to a wider range of intellectual riches.
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When teachers seek eagerly to give black students “relevant” literature, they inadvertently send patronising, and essentially racist, messages about expectations and aspirations—ultimately denying black students their own humanity.