The English language is too white. That is what a group of Yale students is claiming in a complaint to their English professors.
Some Yale University students are demanding changes to the English Department curriculum: specifically, they don’t think it should feature so many English poets who were straight, white, wealthy, and male.
“It is your responsibility as educators to listen to student voices,” the students wrote in a petition to the faculty. “We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.”
The “Major English Poets” sequence, a mandatory two-course commitment for English majors, is particularly problematic, according to the students. These classes cover Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot. It’s not the most diverse line up, to be sure, but it’s the one that best reflects history the way it actually happened. Inarguably, these are the most influential poets in the English language.
But students think this sequence “creates a culture that is hostile to students of color.” They write:
When students are made to feel so alienated that they get up and leave the room, or get up and leave the major, something is wrong. The English department loses out when talented students engaged in literary and cultural analysis are driven away from the major. Students who continue on after taking the introductory sequence are ill-prepared to take higher-level courses relating to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, ability, or even to engage with critical theory or secondary scholarship. We ask that Major English Poets be abolished, and that the pre-1800/1900 requirements be refocused to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.
It’s time for the English major to decolonize — not diversify — its course offerings. A 21st century education is a diverse education: we write to you today inspired by student activism across the university, and to make sure that you know that the English department is not immune from the collective call to action.
This attack on whiteness is senseless in every application, but it is particularly so when attached to the English language. Even white history has to be diversified, or — like everything else — it’s a racist institution.
Source: Reason
Hebrew are dark skinned cause the Muslim’s too…… Just kidding was just saying so bs like yours lol
Humans from Spain are a brown color cause the claimant not cause they are secretly Muslims alright. Have you actually read history before?
That’s like sayings the Chinese are that way cause the Mongolians kicked their$#%&!@*forever ago. No their skin is that way cause guess what? Oh the claimant an environment they live in. Well I’ll be a cat’s tongue.
Take a trip on your LSD back to the Romantic Age and find some non-white poets. And bring a few back with you. Is this the best we can put in college now?Remind me not to donate to Education, it’s a complete flop.
Let’s hear it for all those black poets !! I can’t hear anything !!
Now we are too intelligent What is it no BLACKS know how to recite poetry and we have to worry about it. Well tough$#%&!@* Suck up to the fact that BLACKS may not be as intelligent because they are just too lazy
Do they not realize how stupid they sound
YOUR JUST JEALOUS, BECAUSE YOUR ANCESTORS WERE STUCK IN AFRICA IN TREES