Dearest Marcos,

Your family name is Gonsalez. That sounds suspiciously like like a conquistador name. Are you sure your ancestors are pure as the driven snow?

If you're going to hang the sins of people I am unrelated to - and never knew - around my neck simply because of the color of my skin, you may want to pause for a second and contemplate your own family history. Perhaps they helped Cortez set fire to his ships, or marched with Pizarro, or simply went exploring with de Soto in the southeast USofA.

This person is obsessed with "whiteness" because he has been properly indoctrinated: the whiteness of other people is the ENTIRE reason he is not more successful.

I wonder if he can be made to notice that illegal immigrants of Hispanic origin are routinely reported in criminal blotters as "white", because it is politically incorrect to note that they appear in far too many crime reports to be allowed to stain the image of the noble refugees from everywhere.

Only the culture capable of delivering prosperity can be BLAMED for not giving it away - by those who simply wish to GET things, not DO things.

Thanks to literature, I have made the transatlantic journey as a slave, I have cast spells, and I have been a princess. The reason that books are such powerful tools is that you get to experience another life and live as another person regardless of historical period, sex, ability, or race. That is how we grow.

If every book is from the same perspective and the course is a general course rather than a specialty course, something is wrong. There is power in diversity.

If you insist that every book that you read comes from the same perspective, you are missing the power of books. They show us that no matter how different you are, there are still things that we have in common. They let you imagine how you would be if you had led a different life, thus developing empathy. If you can see things from only one vantage point, you have not learned empathy, a powerful tool.

I was raised in the suburbs of LA, but found a had something in common with a farm pig. Later, as I read the book as an adult, I found I had something in common with a faithful farm spider.

I was very angry when I looked at the new literature for young children. I kept seeing these “diverse” books about Hispanic children and Black children and children going through divorce or who had gay parents. I couldn’t find The Hungry Caterpillar, Charlotte’s Web, or other stories featuring animals (eliminating the racial divide completely) While those “diverse” books may have a place, the problems situations seemed so specific that they didn’t seem to apply universally like the themes seen in classic literature.

Spot on Amy: "Tiresome, Racist Turd"

If the reader/listener cannot relate to another person because that person telling the story isn't the same race as the reader/listener just who is the narrow-minded one?

Speaking of reading, I finished "A Man in Full" by Tom Wolfe last night. What an excellent book. Excellent characterization. A real page turner once you immerse yourself in the characters. The book explored some racial themes as well as the corrupt nature of our society. Highly recommended. Wolfe had a real way with fiction.

Two of the characters in the book discuss the teachings of Epictetus, a prominent Stoic philosopher and teacher. I going to try to find some writings by Epictetus, or by his students. Based on the references in the book, many of the teachings of Epictetus are strikingly similar to those of Christ. I'd like to learn more.

I just started "The Looters", by John Reese. Published in 1968, this was the basis for "Charley Varrick", a brilliant and overlooked little heist movie from 1973. The book is a good deal darker than the movie, but still excellent.

He took a class on Jane Austen and then complained that it was "too white?"

That's like taking a class on Tolkien and complaining about the elves.

"Oh no. Not another fucking elf." ~ CS Lewis

I finished "A Man in Full" by Tom Wolfe last night. What an excellent book. Excellent characterization. ~ roadgeek at December 14, 2019 8:13 AM

It's been a while since I read A Man in Full, but I remember preferring The Bonfire of the Vanities to that one.

If you enjoyed A Man in Full, you might want to try Campusland by Scott Johnston. The plot revolves around a professor targeted by the cancel culture for teaching Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn in a class on 19th century literature. University politics and rivalries among the campus' various progressive groups create havoc along the way.

I’ll take “Things That Never Happened” for $1,000, Alex.

I went to the source piece and frankly this reads like bad fiction to me. I doubt he ever got a B, was dismissed by by his white female professor, or flushed his paper down the toilet. The dramatic rendering of that scene is just a little too much to swallow. Also, who goes to a grad school that only gives A’s on everything? Mine sure didn’t, and neither did my husband’s. I think you would also be very hard pressed to find any professor who would be dismissive of a student so high up on the intersectional scale.

I am always wary of any story that confirms too many of the teller’s biases. Life is rarely that neat. So no, this is BS and as long as journals are willing to reward these hoax stories, we will get more of them.

So, here's a poll for the whitefolks on this forum:

How many of you have rich relatives who can raise your prospects in life? By "rich", I don't mean send their kids to private school, live in a large suburban home, vacation abroad, and have a cleaning lady, gardener and nanny... I mean live on an estate, with a large staff of full-time servants, and own their own village full of tenants which is enough to support the whole family so no one needs a job.

Anyone? Anyone at all?

Are there many Austen readers who live that sort of life?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say for most of us, the solicitor uncle on Cheapside seems pretty posh.

Sheep mom said it sounds like fiction. I agree. Not possible to flush a term paper down the toilet unless you shred it first.

The same people who can't stand "whiteness" are quite happy to appreciate hospitals that heal them, planes that fly, internet that doesn't go out all the time, clothes that fit, medicines that work. Their revulsion of whiteness merely is an expression of bigotry.

I have experienced many things (not getting a promotion, hard to find a job, getting pulled over by cops, getting a bad grade, getting cut off in traffic) that I could easily explain as due to prejudice if I wasn't white. Life is full of jerks and bad things that happen.

Nicole asks who has rich relatives. My sort-of-rich uncle gave me a summer job in high school in a hot dirty factory working my butt off for minimum wage. Yeah, gave me a real leg up. Real white priv.

File this guy under 'Ignore' along with the Flat-Earthers and anti-vaxxers.

Time to re-read the 1991 award-winning essay, "Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me" (Pollitt is an English professor, among many other things):

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2014/01/why-we-read-canon-to-the-right-of-me-by-katha-pollitt.html

You'll be glad you did. Yes, she has critical words for the radicals.

Nonsense and Insensibility.

"How many of you have rich relatives who can raise your prospects in life?" ~NicoleK

Well . . . define relatives.

I've got a guy who was once married to the mom of my brother in law's baby momma. He doesn't have the estate but he does own multiple businesses that he employs various family members at. He also acts like a TV Italian mobster. Rather Godfatherish. I don't really interact with the fellow but it was interesting to go to his holiday parties a few times.

I do know a couple of people (not relatives) with assets in the $10-20 million range. But they don't live on estates or have servants. Instead they live in $100k-200k houses in suburbia. Most of their neighbors don't have a clue they are doing that well. The few people I've met with estates and servants aren't that wealthy. Usually in debt up to their eyes. Probably also true of my Godfatherish.

An experiment: I try to retell the story of Mansfield Park with a cast of poor Puerto Rican and Mexican people that resemble my family... but have no rich relatives in which to move to in order to increase my prospects... I don't know how to make the template of the story fit the world I would need to create. I probably can but I don't know if I even want to. I don't want to fit into Austen's story--I want to fit into mine... The remixing of white literature by writers of color has shown how these are stories can be ours, too, for our particular artistic and political goals.

Holy crap, what a grandiose, self-centered bigot. He sounds like he's offended that, as the only non-white person in his class, he's not exalted and fawned over by the white students; that his classmates are more interested in Jane Austen's stories than in his. He seems to think that the purpose of reading Jane Austen is to affirm or validate his own experience. I wonder if he's ever thought of reading, as Jen said, to get a taste of the experience of a completely different person, place, time, culture, life.

Minority and People-Of-Color students are incredibly unaware/ignorant of the cultures of most of the people around them. They should be required to take an intense, cultural-awareness course on the highly diverse cultures of white people. White students are just as ignorant and should have to take it too, so they know their culture didn't emerge from hoards of blood thirsty Pilgrims storming the beaches of Massachusetts and slaughtering defenseless Native Americans living perfect lives (the Pilgrims were more like refugees fleeing political and religious persecution in hopes of finding a better life in America) But I doubt that such a course could be taught without pushing all the racist, bigoted, anti-white stereotypes and hate progressive schools are infected with.

"Minority and People-Of-Color students are incredibly unaware/ignorant of the cultures of most of the people around them. They should be required to take an intense, cultural-awareness course on the highly diverse cultures of white people. White students are just as ignorant and should have to take it too, so they know their culture didn't emerge from hoards of blood thirsty Pilgrims storming the beaches of Massachusetts and slaughtering defenseless Native Americans living perfect lives (the Pilgrims were more like refugees fleeing political and religious persecution in hopes of finding a better life in America) But I doubt that such a course could be taught without pushing all the racist, bigoted, anti-white stereotypes and hate progressive schools are infected with."

It has never occurred to most that even the term, "African-American" is a hoax.

> It's been a while since I read
> A Man in Full, but I remember
> preferring The Bonfire of the
> Vanities to that one.

Coney's judgment is:

✓ Affirmed

> "Not another fucking elf."
> ~ CS Lewis

See also: "Awful."

Ben, re your relative, just thought I'd say:

You can look rich or BE rich, but seldom both.

In the meantime, here's an excerpt from the link I posted:

...Well, a liberal is not a very exciting thing to be, and so we have the radicals, who attack the concepts of 'greatness', 'shared', 'culture' and 'lists'. (I'm overlooking here the ultraradicals, who attack the 'privileging' of 'texts', as they insist on calling books, and think one might as well spend one's college years deconstructing 'Leave It to Beaver'.) Who is to say, ask the radicals, what is a great book? What's so terrific about complexity, ambiguity, historical centrality and high seriousness? If The Color Purple, say, gets students thinking about their own experience, maybe they ought to read it and forget about ------, and here you can fill in the name of whatever classic work you yourself found dry and tedious and never got around to finishing. For the radicals the notion of a shared culture is a lie, because it means presenting as universally meaningful and politically neutral books that reflect the interests and experiences and values of privileged white men at the expense of those of others -- women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, the working class, whomever. Why not scrap the one-list- for-everyone idea and let people connect with books that are written by people like themselves about people like themselves? It will be a more accurate reflection of a multifaceted and conflict-ridden society, and will do wonders for everyone's self- esteem, except, of course, living white men -- but they have too much self-esteem already.

Now, I have to say that I dislike the radicals' vision intensely. How foolish to argue that Chekhov has nothing to say to a black woman -- or, for that matter, to me -- merely because he is Russian, long dead, a man. The notion that one reads to increase one's self-esteem sounds to me like more snake oil. Literature is not an aerobics class or a session at the therapist's. But then I think of myself as a child, leafing through anthologies of poetry for the names of women. I never would have admitted that I needed a role model, even if that awful term had existed back in the prehistory of which I speak, but why was I so excited to find a female name, even when, as was often the case, it was attached to a poem of no interest to me whatsoever? Anna Laetitia Barbauld, author of 'Life! I know not what thou art / But know that thou and I must part!'; Lady Anne Lindsay, writer of plaintive ballads in incomprehensible Scots dialect, and the other minor female poets included by chivalrous Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the old Oxford Book of English Verse: I have to admit it, just by their presence in that august volume they did something for me. And although it had not much to do with reading or writing, it was an important thing they did...

One of the reasons to read the classics is that they have historical interest. The novel did not first appear with "the color purple" nor poetry with James Baldwin. They developed over 3 centuries, entirely in Europe and later America. If you want to read early novels, that is where it happened. A novel written in Africa in 1850? Nope, none exist.
If a novelist cannot write about anything but his own experience, then novels cannot exist, because a male author could not include female characters. It would just be biography. There could be no science fiction because no one here is an alien or a robot. The complaint of the person quoted reflects narcissism--it must be about him/her.

I think it's important to remember that if you're white, in the USA, that means not thinking about your color very much - if at all. If you're black, that means you'll be thinking about your own color CONSTANTLY - because even white strangers will be reminding you of it in non-verbal ways, such as pulling their kids away from you.

It also means that you'll likely be constantly forced to consume books, music and movies about the white experience while leaving very little time in school, at least, to read much about the black experience - whether in fiction or in ancient history. (As in: "I have to live in your white world, but you never come to mine.")

So it's only natural to demand changes in both of those areas. It's been said that true tolerance comes not when you think "wow, sometimes they're just like me" but when you think "wow, sometimes I'm just like them."

Oh, and Jen, when you said "I was very angry when I looked at the new literature for young children" you didn't make clear whether you're talking about your local school - or what! Certainly not your local library or bookstore, right? Every year, within a particular genre, there are new bad books and new good books, and one can only wait for the bad books to go out of print. Obviously, "the classics" have had the bad books sifted out, as a rule, but there are quite a few classic black children's authors to choose from already, so why complain about the new books? Especially when we're talking about a theme that's REALLY recent, such as having legally married gay parents - AND being raised by them? Every truly new genre will have its growing pains. (Btw, two books about gay parents - "Daddy's Roommate" and "Heather Has Two Mommies" still get praised, despite being 29 and 30 years old.)

Not to mention that while "Charlotte's Web" will, deservedly, never go out of print, that doesn't change the fact that after a few years, kids who are actually going to keep moving up in school very much WANT to read realistic novels about people, not talking animals, plus books about people they can "relate" to - and who can blame them? If they never get to read even one book that they can relate to more than 50%, why wouldn't they demand more?

At the same time, of course, anyone who's old enough to drive really ought to be ready to read about protagonists they don't relate to.

https://electricliterature.com/shopping-for-a-boy-give-him-a-book-about-a-girl/

In the article, a male teacher wisely asks a teen girl: “Do you only read books about yourself?” (But one of the headlines is: "Teenage girls read books about everyone else—here's why everyone else should return the favor.")
________________________________________________

And here's what I wrote in 2014, elsewhere:

I heard it recently on NPR - last week, I think. It may well be older than that. To my annoyance, no matter how simple I make the search, I can't find it! It was told by a graduate school instructor(?) who said, in effect, that that "relatable" is a fairly recent term, but it's also an overrated concept in fiction, these days.

To wit: She said that one of her very brightest students had to read "Anna Karenina" - and complained that she couldn't "relate" to the main character! The professor also said that "likable" characters are overrated, IIRC - that this is just readers' narcissism rearing its head again. (Not to mention readers' constant demand for happy endings long after they become adults - but she didn't mention that.)

Granted, it wasn't clear whether the student meant she didn't like the main character or whether she couldn't understand her motives. There's a difference, after all!

Example: Anyone can argue that Scarlett O'Hara is not "likable" and not someone anyone would want (in real life) as a friend or a spouse, since she's too selfish to do anything for anyone unless there's something in it for her, but if YOU were on the losing side of a war and facing starvation, how hard would she be to understand/relate to, as a character?

I.e., would you really rather be Melanie under those circumstances? I wouldn't. Melanie only survives as long as she does because of Scarlett; even her loving relatives wouldn't have been enough to keep her fed when she was recovering from childbirth.

Our library was the place with all the issue books. The librarian explained that they had received a grant to purchase those books but they weren’t in much demand while the classics and Eric Carle, etc. were.

A few of those books are fine, but...

We ended up going to the other side of town. The library wasn’t as popular and we were able to get a wide variety of books.

Our library was the place with all the issue books. The librarian explained that they had received a grant to purchase those books but they weren’t in much demand while the classics and Eric Carle, etc. were.

A few of those books are fine, but...

We ended up going to the other side of town. The library wasn’t as popular and we were able to get a wide variety of books.

I think Lady Catherine and Mr. Darcey would have more than 10-20million though. I don't think you could afford Pemberly if that's all you had.

Not to mention that while "Charlotte's Web" will, deservedly, never go out of print, that doesn't change the fact that after a few years, kids who are actually going to keep moving up in school very much WANT to read realistic novels about people, not talking animals, plus books about people they can "relate" to - and who can blame them? If they never get to read even one book that they can relate to more than 50%, why wouldn't they demand more?
__________________________________________

Speaking of which...it's important to remember that even in the days before video games, there were compelling obstacles for MANY young people when it came to learning to love reading.***

What could those obstacles possibly be? How about living with poverty and crime - and living with adults who don't like to read or can't read?

From Jim Trelease's "The Read-Aloud Handbook" (1979, chapter 3, pp 52-53):

"...I remember the remedial-reading teacher who told me about her frustrations in trying to find the right book for the worst class she'd ever had. This happened to be a sixth-grade class but the lesson applies to all grade levels. First she tried 'Charlotte's Web'; they thought it was corny. Then she tried 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'...half the class liked it, half didn't. At last she struck upon 'J.T' by Jane Wagner, the story of a black boy straddling the edge of delinquency. The class loved it so much that half of them found extra copies and finished it ahead of her.

"The teacher admitted her mistake was in not tailoring her first selections to the kind of class she had - a group of restless, nonreading, street-wise, inner-city kids. Make your INITIAL choices for a group like that something they can relate to win their interest, catch their hearts and ears. A few selections of this kind and you'll have won their confidence, after which you can broaden the scope of their reading and introduce them to other times and other places than their own."

(end)

Note: Yes, that author, Jane Wagner, ALSO wrote the Broadway hit "The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe," 17 years after writing "J.T."!

More on "J.T." - it became a TV movie in 1969:

http://www.lilytomlin.com/wordpress2/jane-wagner/j-t/

***So today, of course, teaching kids to enjoy reading is a much more delicate process - almost like building a tall house of cards. You can't order them to love books - or even just order them to read in their "spare time" when they're already working 60 hours a week or more on schoolwork, housework and paid work combined.

Lenona, you are right. Our trips to the library were when my boys were toddlers or preschoolers when animal books are more appropriate. When children are older, they need realistic books that they can relate to.