Happy Easter to my Christian friends -- and chag Pesach kasher vesame’ach to the Jews!
Now let the perturbed muttering commence.
I hope everyone who's reading this is praying for the victims of the terror attacks in Sri Lanka. That the perpetrators chose to murder innocents who were gathered to worship the risen Christ just further highlights, for me, the fallen nature of our world -- and the need for the Crucifixion.
To Macron and the rest of the French government:
From what I hear, your countrymen are already very upset with you. If you ruin a central landmark of the French nation (and of Christianity) by adding glass or any other modern bullshit, you will only make things worse.
We have complete 3D models of Notre Dame before the fire. You don't need a redesign competition. You don't need an architect. What you need are skilled tradesmen who can repair what was damaged and restore the cathedral to its former glory.
Sincerely,
Me
So apparently, library collections are evil now because they're just so hu-white. Clearly, what we need to do is throw out all those dusty tomes to make way for the "marginalized." After all, it's not as if old books can teach us anything of universal importance.
SIGH.
Ideas don't have skin colors, you unbelievably racist buffoons. To be sure, it's true that, for a good chunk of our history, certain races were barred from full participation in our educational institutions and consequently don't appear often in the products of our intellectual patrimony. But once upon a time, prominent people-of-color still claimed so-called "white ideas" as their own; indeed, they were rightfully angered to be denied access to those ideas. W.E.B. Dubois, a firm African-American critic of the U.S. and a leftist, once famously wrote:
"I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"Though Dubois struggled mightily with the dual consciousness brought on by his second-class status, you can see here that he still considered the works of Shakespeare and the others to be his by birthright. Why? Perhaps because we all have a common humanity that these writers, in their brilliance, brought to the fore.
If you want more people-of-color to be represented in our libraries - a worthwhile goal, I think - don't start by tearing down what's already there. Instead, tell kids in minority communities that "white" books belong to them too -- that conversing with "dead white men" does not make them any less authentically themselves. Allow them to plunge into a knowledge-rich curriculum that interrogates whether certain notions are true or false -- not whether certain notions are advanced by writers of the proper shade. Do this and you will equip these kids to enter university as skilled, confident scholars ready to go toe-to-toe with their white peers. Do this and you will see the demographics of library collections and journal citations organically shift.
And lastly, a Twitter thread:
I would like to echo the frustration I've seen in my TL regarding the equation of "strong woman" with sassy bitch. BRITTLE women are bitchy. Strong women can assert themselves w/o resorting to rudeness, and they generally don't get in a lather over minor insults.
— Stephanie Souders (@TheRightGeek) April 19, 2019
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