White supremacy and the 'canon'

[vass]

[crossposted to my journal]

I was going to buy and read How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler, because Susan Wise Bauer recommended it in The Well-Educated Mind. So I checked his Wikipedia page to find out what else he'd written and so on, and came to this passage: "Asked in a 1990 interview why his Great Books of the Western World list did not include any black authors, he simply said, "They didn't write any good books."" My jaw dropped. That is more than aversive racism. That is more than active prejudice. That is actual white supremacy right there, blatant and visible.

To be honest, it's making me question my commitment to reading the 'canon' at all. I knew the whole idea was problematic, I had some idea of what I was in for. But I really thought I could just avoid the really dodgy books, and add in a bunch of books by authors of colour throughout history to compensate. I was so naive.

It's not enough. The 'Great Conversation' is one in which the voices that need most to be heard are intentionally shut out. This is not okay, and pretending will not make it go away.

I don't know what to do about this. You can modify aversive racism with exposure. You can try to dispel prejudice through education. But what do you do about someone who believes - no, not a person, a whole system founded on the belief that there is only one group of people capable of greatness? He didn't even say "They didn't write any great books," although that on its own would have been enough to set off this horrified questioning for me. He said "They didn't write any good books." You heard the man: Black people throughout all of history have written nothing of value at all.

My current planned 'history of the novel' reading list for this year includes 10 authors of colour, out of 26 books. I'm thinking I need to add three more classics by POC just to make it only half white. And for the rest of my reading (I have a minimum of 50 books per year) I'm going to make the same rule for authors of colour that I've made for female authors: not less than 50%. That rule is appropriate with female authors because women are slightly more than 50% of the population. For POCs, it's less appropriate, since more than half the world's population is of colour, but I am not yet ready to set a higher minimum than 50%.

Comments

[harborshore.livejournal.com]

When I took philosophy in high school, we had to read articles by him. As well as his list of 100 great works, or whatever. In addition to having no works by POC authors, it has two or possibly three by women, I can't remember exactly. Charming, charming racist and sexist asshole.

[recklessblues.livejournal.com]

That's the dumbest thing I ever heard! I can pull a zillion titles out of my ass, without even thinking about it, of good books written by black authors. I don't care what universities he went to, he wouldn't know a decent piece of literature if it walked up and bit his nipple off. What a load of bullshit.

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

The canon has been questioned a lot in recent years, and expanded greatly, and it makes me glad.

Your icon is great. Can others use it?

[vass]

Your icon is great. Can others use it?

Yes, if you credit me.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

Not sure if you're interested in books that have been classified as YA, but you can find many excellent novels by people of color as well as women in the list of Newbury medal winners and honorees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbery_Medal).

Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry comes to mind, especially.

[slammerkinbabe.livejournal.com]

Seconding Roll of Thunder and its three sequels (well, two sequels and a last-published prequel). They're amazing.

[nonniemous.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, lack of color and variety in the canon was part of what broke me from The Well-Trained Mind and that mode of homeschooling. Yes, I understood that the "canon" is essential for being able to comprehend a lot of Western culture, but there's honestly not that much that has to be read for that. Shakespeare, a working knowledge of the basic bible stories, and the Greek myths. Otherwise? Forget it. I threw out the canon and went for my own stuff, adding in writers of color and women (and female characters) and so on. Not to mention that I think reading Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and works by Michio Kaku and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are FAR more important than Aristotle and Euclid.

So keep the format, perhaps, of what works for you from the book, but make your own canon. As far as everyone else is concerned, the "canon" won't change if we don't change it at some point. Might as well do what we can when we can.