First they came for the history and now they’re going after the culture in a effort to wipe out America and Western civilization. William Shakespeare, regarded as the greatest writer of all time, is being summarily cancelled because he’s apparently a white supremacist colonizer or some garbage like that. At this pace the only thing we’ll be allowed to read is Barack Obama’s new book “Everyone I Hate Is Racist” or Al Sharpton’s classic “How To Hustle The Honkys.”
The School Library Journal reports that the works of William Shakespeare have been deemed problematic by academics and is no longer being taught:
Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir. Which raises the question: Is Shakespeare more valuable or relevant than myriad other authors who have written masterfully about anguish, love, history, comedy, and humanity in the past 400-odd years?
The answer is “no” according to leftist teachers.
A growing number of educators are asking this about Shakespeare, along with other pillars of the canon, coming to the conclusion that it’s time for Shakespeare to be set aside or deemphasized to make room for modern, diverse, and inclusive voices.
Ayanna Thompson, director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and professor of English at Arizona State University has a serious problem with Shakespeare because…
“Shakespeare was a tool 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,” said Thompson.
Jeffrey Austin, ELA department chair at Skyline High School in Ann Arbor, MI says, “We need to challenge the whiteness,” of the idea that Shakespeare’s works are universal.
Cameron Campos, an English teacher at Foothills Composite High School in Alberta, Canada, has generally moved away from teaching what’s considered classic. “My grade 11 and 12 courses use texts almost entirely written by Indigenous authors, except for a few Canadian classic short stories and some works by contemporary poets,” Campos says.
Liz Matthews, a ninth grade English teacher at Hartford (CT) Public High School, a school that is 95 percent Black and Latinx, has also chosen to pass on Shakespeare.
“I replaced Romeo and Juliet with The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros last year and Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds this year. Simply put, the authors and characters of the two new[er] books look and sound like my students, and they can make realistic connections. Representation matters,” said Matthews.
If only Shakespeare had written his plays in Ebonix or Spanish, he wouldn’t be cancelled.
“I know we must do better in the ELA classroom to stray from centering the narrative of white, cisgender, heterosexual men, and eliminating Shakespeare was a step I could easily take to work toward that,” said language arts teacher Claire Bruncke.
Not just cancelled but eliminated.
Liberals tell us that math, science, and history are racist and now Western literature has been added to that list of grievances. Where does it stop?
That’s a trick question because it never stops with the left. They will continue to cancel everything until American culture and Western civilization are erased unless they are stopped.
