Dead White Authors Matter?

February 13, 2015 10:51 AM

Irvin Weathersby, Jr writes about teaching white authors too during Black History Month. "When they first began to appear on my students’ desks, I struggled with how to handle them; I certainly hadn’t assigned them. At least they were reading, I would rationalize. But from the few I read, they all seemed like pulp, offering little in terms of character, plot, and structure. Once I even read some of the more racy lines aloud to show how base they were, but the display only served as an advertisement and became another set of distractions that derailed my lesson. They were mostly trash, sex-laden glorifications of drug culture, full of typos and grammatical errors. When I asked why they read them, James said, "Because it’s real. We relate to what’s happening in the streets." He was right. Donald Goines had mastered the tradition and Sister Souljah had written a classic. But there’s so much more to the world, I tried to explain—there’s so much more to experience." (slAtlantic)
posted by Kitteh (7 comments total)

....So, he wanted to counter the "street literature" he was seeing, and the ONLY option he could think of was Shakespeare and Emerson?

What about James Baldwin? Or Zora Neale Hurston? Or Ralph Ellison? Alice Walker? Toni Morrison? Langston Hughes? Richard Wright? Amiri Baraka?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:58 AM on February 13, 2015 [5 favorites]

This is one of the worst articles I've ever read on The Atlantic.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:01 AM on February 13, 2015

How we got from "black lives matter" to "all lives matter" to "dead white authors matter" is going to take a hell of a lot of explaining.
posted by naju at 11:03 AM on February 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

I found this article via a lot of black writers I follow on Twitter and when I read it, my jaw just dropped. I mean...what the actual shit, dude.
posted by Kitteh at 11:05 AM on February 13, 2015

ugh just what the fuck.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:07 AM on February 13, 2015

I... I just... Why write this article?

I get that what most people deem "the classics" are important no matter who you are. Yes, teach them. I get that having a discussion about teaching non-white kids from rough backgrounds to find value in the literature of people who are not like them is also worth having -- though, perhaps, we should be having a discussion with white kids about literature of people who are not like THEM.

But if we have a hard time finding older books that fit those "classic" criteria and represent non-white, non-male points of view, so be it. Do it anyway.

A black colleague once told me that while white people have to learn to deal with the presence of other cultures, most black people don't have to learn to deal with white people and what white people's lives are like because that's all they see all the time anyway.

Wait a couple damn weeks already, dude. When it's White History Month, also known as all the damn time.
posted by St. Hubbins at 11:07 AM on February 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

I find the title of that article really disrespectful. Maybe that makes me too touchy. But the fact that someone involved felt that was an appropriate title for the piece colored my read of it. As did this:

Reading is an important product of language that serves as a foundation of civilization. Without it, humans would essentially function on sound and instinct alone, much like beasts.

And the fact that up until the last paragraph, the piece's concern with diversity in reading focuses on "teach white people's writing during Black History Month" instead of "teach great works of literature by people of color all year round."

Would the whole world fall apart if a class read nothing but writing by people of color for a whole year? Because for many, many, many, many years, students read nothing but writing by white people, and the world didn't stop spinning.
posted by sallybrown at 11:07 AM on February 13, 2015