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by sneed_chucker
965 days ago
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I wonder how "Native Son" or "Invisible Man" would have been handled by the same cohort. Frankly, the "Acceptable" way to talk about race nowadays is already so far removed from what it was even in 2003, that it's easy to see why today's high schooler would be uncomfortable with literature from the 1960s. And we live in a day and age where being uncomfortable is tantamount to personal violence in the eyes of many. It really feels like the average person just isn't capable of processing works of art or literature with the historic context in mind. So as cultural norms continue to shift, I wonder where this leaves many works of literature which we've long considered "classics" or at the very least, important. |
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In my final year of English class, in the 90's, I studied a play. I forget the title now, but a line in the play that also formed the title of my essay about it, would not be allowed in a school setting at all today.
Basically a young white boy is talking to their family slave and says he wants to build a kite. The slave says he would show him how, and the boy naively was shocked and said, "What does a n**r know about flying a kite?"
I was one of two white people in the class. Times were such, that short a time ago, that the class loved my essay, which was about how slavery was so normalized at the time of the play, that this child couldn't even imagine life any other way. He learned, through building and playing with this kite with the slave that Black people were actual people, deserving of the same respect his (white) family received, and that his off-hand remarks, which everyone took for granted, were really awful.
Today I would be cancelled for even writing the word, let alone reading it out loud in front of a classroom! Call it "naming and shaming," perhaps, because replacing it with any other word would have killed any power that play had about the topic of racism.