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The Proletariat Is Getting Counter-Revolutionary
This piece in the Atlantic is a very good read. Reed College, in Portland, OR, has endured 13 months of outrage over Humanities 110, the college’s signature humanities course. In the course, students are trained to engage in critical reading of various ancient works from the perspective of different disciplines. A group of snowflakes formed themselves into “Reedies against Racism” in response to a call to protest police violence against blacks. Of the list of demands, one was reforming Hum 110.
But for RAR, Hum 110 is all about oppression. “We believe that the first lesson that freshmen should learn about Hum 110 is that it perpetuates white supremacy—by centering ‘whiteness’ as the only required class at Reed,” according to a RAR statement delivered to all new freshmen. The texts that make up the Hum 110 syllabus—from the ancient Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt regions—are “Eurocentric,” “Caucasoid,” and thus “oppressive,” RAR leaders have stated. Hum 110 “feels like a cruel test for students of color,” one leader remarked on public radio. “It traumatized my peers.”
Blah blah blah. We’ve heard it before. But something interesting is happening with freshmen starting to push back against the increasingly aggressive rhetoric of the leaders of RAR. The first class was canceled due to another protest by RAR inside the classroom, disrupting the lecture. The freshmen had enough.
Two days later, a video circulated showing freshmen in the lecture hall admonishing protesters. When a few professors get into a heated exchange with RAR leaders, an African American freshman in the front row stands up and raises his arms: “This is a classroom! This is not the place! Right now we are trying to learn! We’re the freshman students!” The room erupts with applause.
Here’s that video. The “discussion” begins around the 5-minute mark.
I don’t know about you but I felt my heart skip a beat. Who’d of thought that students, of all people, would lead the revolt against their own peers?
Published in General
That’s simply what happens when the revolutionaries abandon the proletariat.
Wow!
So Iranians, Iraqis and Egyptians are now all white people? This should shuffle the deck pretty good on questions multiculturalism and white supremacy.
RAR vs. UNRAR
But seriously, here’s the sad truth. These types of protesters have demonstrated that they aren’t really trying to ban “white” literature. They’re trying to ban old literature. They want to only study contemporary literature, presumably because the language is easier. The only ancient stories they are interested in are pre-literate ones.
It’s pretty racist to assume that students of colour can’t hack reading ancient literature.
My favorite is the Indian guy yelling “you took over their lecture.”
This is proof positive that the best way to question groups such as RAR is to make them discuss specifics and expose their lack of critical thought, rather than letting them skate on the rhetoric they spout.
Traumatized? By a Humanities class?
Listen, Cupcake … I’ve been through worse. Three semesters of Calculus — one of those was from a guy who didn’t have English as a second language; he had English as his next language. Two semesters of Statistics from the professor whose nickname was “the Mumbler.” Combinatorics, Linear Algebra, Symbolic and Non-Symbolic logic, Theory of Computation …
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Differential Equations.
Those are my favorite. I remember one math teacher saying that there were no classes after a certain date because they had been banned by the university. (It was just the last day of classes for the semester, but it always makes me smile. He probably came from a country where classes could be banned.)
It’s worse if the person who can barely speak English actually is talking nonsense.
My “Introduction To The Frankfurt School” class (it was not advertised as such, but that’s what it really was) was taught by a Hungarian prof who barely spoke English.
For the longest time I thought it was my fault everything she said sounded like nonsense.
By the time I figured out what was going on, the deadline for dropping the course had already passed.
This warms my heart–the freshmen standing up to them and showing the SJW what it means not to have small minds. Thanks, Bereket!
I read this in the Atlantic, the video is awesome.
Three things occured to me:
As much as I’ve read about these types of occurrences, I’m still unaware of what alternatives they are proposing. If black lives matter, presumably there must be some robust curricula from Africa that we’ve ignored all along? I’m being serious here, is there? Same with Asia and South America.
Are these protesters demanding that schools teach content that is taught in other countries to their own native students? If so, then those countries are doing the same thing we are, teaching subjects that are relevant to their own tastes and interests.
Next, where in god’s name are the adults? Why are they such cowardly wimps? If they quietly agree with the protesters, then why doesn’t everyone get together and start up a new school if these topics are so darn important?
Never mind, I’m quite sure I’m just speaking about fools, emotionally unstable misfits, and parasites trying to siphon funds off the wealthy who send their kids to these schools.
Actually, I think the objections raised had to do with the race of the authors. They wanted more textbooks from minorities. I think the breadth of literature that’s covered was fine as it takes you through various civilizations. The problem is white people are evil so you can’t learn anything of value from a book written by a white person.
Not even that, I think.
I noticed this back in my college days: When you take a lightweight “pop culture” course, you can (ahem) equivocate your way through the course, since the teacher probably hasn’t given any more thought to the subject matter than you have.
I took more than one class where I was more of an “expert” on the subject than the professor was at the end of the semester. On the other hand, while I got an “A” in each of those courses, so did the rest of the students. Some of them occasionally showed up for class, too…
God bless them.
It’s only if the young are strong enough to insist on their right to examine these increasingly ignored or forbidden books that we have any chance at all of staying free.
I want the syllabus for the course.
Between Amazon and Project Gutenberg, it’s incredibly easy for just about anyone to gain access to the books that college professors and professional agitators don’t want to discuss.
I love title-dropping books to my younger co-workers and friends, with broad hints about some of the concepts in those books that are “revolutionary” to them.
For that matter, I also like media-bombing them, too, with movies and TV shows they’ve never seen. A shocking number of under-25 people have never seen “Blazing Saddles” or anything at all before about 1980.
Re: comment#17
It’s good you do that. I also hope, if kids are going to read, say, an essay on The Tempest from a feminist perspective, that they read also of some well informed person writing in 1965 about the play.
To recover cultural memory, I sometimes think it would be good if we read some things written in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. I don’t necessarily mean great things. You get an idea somewhat different from what you’ve been told people valued in the late 40’s or early 50’s, for instance, from reading even: The Executioners, the novel on which Cape Fear was based.
Oh, the Humanities!
If you really want to be triggered, here’s the course syllabus.
Re: comment # 19
Thank you, She.
Maybe the headline should read like this:
The Proles are Getting Anti-Counter-Recolutionary.
I took Statics from a professor who didn’t even have English as his next language. It took the class the better part of a lecture to realize that the prof was talking about Newton’s First Law, not “New town football.” Thanks the Lord he wrote equations on the board as he lectured, otherwise we would have never figured out what the hell he meant.
The survivors then wrestled with Partial Differential Equations. The carnage was incredible!
G.K. Chesterton wrote that you learn much more about a people or an era from their pulp literature than from their great literature. Great lit is written for the sequestered upper classes of any people/era. Even if you go out of your way to read authors from “developing nations”, they aren’t writing for the common people.
One could hypothesize that college profs are perfectly happy to ban books they can’t make money from.
Gawddamn whitey, forever imposing the Epic of Gilgamesh on the black man.
You just got bumped to the top of my favorite-commenter list.
The deeper idea, I think, is that we experience the world through a lens largely ground by our own race and ethnicity, and that we will become inauthentic — untrue to ourselves — as we are forced to look at the world through someone else’s literary lens. That needn’t be a hateful concept, merely a shallow and cynical one.
But I suspect your formulation of it is closer to the mark, at least as regards most of the young hot-heads causing havoc on our campuses today.
These protesters should have been forcibly removed and then reprimanded, possibly suspended. While I do believe college functions best when ideas are allowed to be exchanged freely, I think that exchange primarily happens within the narrow and formal channel of coursework for context guided by the experience and expertise of professors. Protests are mostly garbage in my opinion anyway, but protests like this which do damage to the mission of the school should be punished and discouraged.
Agreed. It is a trivial and self-defeating literalism that leads us to invoke a First Amendment defense for people engaged in disrupting speeches with protests. That isn’t an exercise of free speech, but rather an attempt to suppress it. The protesters are free to say whatever they like as loudly as they like — but not while someone else is talking.
I’m curious what some future poor schmuck will think having read Chesterton and then stumbling upon a harlequin romance…