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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
[This related article is recommended in its entirety.]
“In 2007 a home affairs select committee produced a report about young black boys in the criminal justice system, calling for the department for education and schools to consult with black community groups to make the curriculum more relevant—and to find 'content which interests and empowers young black people'. We can safely assume they were not talking about Ovid, Chaucer or Shakespeare. […] But the literary canon should not be the preserve of any one race. As both a writer of colour and an ardent (but not uncritical) devotee of the canon, I have little time for people who say that black people cannot relate to books written 2,000 years ago by a bunch of dead white guys, or that Maya Angelou is better than Shakespeare. This denies us our shared humanity across racial divides. […] The dead white men never had to face the evils of slavery or the physical and emotional oppression of racism. Thus their minds were freer to range over the great philosophical questions, metaphysical quandaries and cosmological dilemmas. In short, they have been allowed to address man in relation to the macrocosm, as opposed to just the microcosm. […] However unpalatable it might be to our sense of racial pride, we as black people need to read the dead white men with alacrity. If nothing else, the canon will help us understand why, even to this day, the annals of human history are callously besmirched with the blood of so many dead black men. As the African-American scholar Dr. Molefi Kete Asante has said, 'It is not enough to know. One must act to humanise the world'.” [emphasis added]
— LINDSAY JOHNS, 23rd September 2010 — Issue 175 (prospectmagazine.co.uk)
As my friend Craig Newmark stated, the above excerpted article is a "well-crafted argument that everybody can learn a few things from". Moreover, there are opportunities for learning stemming from additional divides to our common humanity. Among the most bitter divides are those of the religious and ethnic persuasion.
The ancient peoples I refer to (with endearment) as "The Juice" (no relation to O. J. Simpson that I am aware of) are no strangers to persecution. In a sense, they are the religious and ethnic community for whom the concept was devised. From biblical slavery in Egypt, to the Holocaust at the hands of Nazi Germany, to present day threats of extermination by Iran, Juice have been on the receiving end of bigotry and persecution for millennia. Their history as a people of books and traditions is way beyond the scope of a mere blog post, but it is reasonable to assume that theirs is a story of lessons worth learning for all who aspire to success, not just tenacious survival in the face of the most oppressive circumstances imaginable.
And what is the essence of their means for survival and ultimate success? I submit it is threefold: Darwinian fitness for adapting to ever-changing circumstances and adversity; a thirst for knowledge; and, their faith in the righteousness of their agon, in the broadest sense of that word.
Post 1,441 In Praise of The Juice
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