origins, rather than as the world our equals inhabited, we lose the ability to learn from it. Closing ourselves off fro

This is another big issue with Germán’s approach: it closes readers off to forms of life beyond the horizons of the present.
Germán is worried that, by teachers keeping the classics in their educational rotation, their students will imbibe the values of past eras. But here is another worry worth having: students uncritically adopting the values of our own day and age.
When the past functions merely as a useless record of our pre-evolved states, as a cautionary tale about our morally primitive origins, rather than as the world our equals inhabited, we lose the ability to learn from it. Closing ourselves off from pre-1950s literature blunts, rather than sharpens, our moral faculties.
Third, Germán’s gloss on the classics is bizarre in that the very authors who comprise our canon often critiqued their own eras. Many of these works were rebukes to the societies of which they were part, the authors often being both products of their time and in another sense foreigners to it, standing outside their own eras in prophetic judgment over them.
Condemning these works as useless for our purposes today requires fundamentally misunderstanding them, which is, um, not ideal for an educational reformer. My point isn’t anything as presumptuous as insisting that the classics are so much better than today’s works for today’s students, but simply that they’re not harmful to them.
Just What Is Political Literature?
For political literature to thrive, it must be able to stand on its own literary merits
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So, rather than discounting everything about the #DisruptTexts initiative, my point here is that Germán’s argument actually works better with an adjusted conclusion. Instead of dropping the classics, or even deemphasizing them, we should resolve to teach them well.
What would this look like? It would partly look like interrogating the cultural backdrops of the works in question, asking what are the values, perceptible or imperceptible to the characters or even the authors themselves, that foreground the dynamics of power in these stories. Doing this would involve elucidating the ways in which those prior contexts enabled injustices to occur. I am certain Germán would be on board for this.
I say “partly,” above, because matters of justice and power are just two of many analytical dimensions we ought to concern ourselves with in literature. If those are the only — or even main — things we’re looking at, we’re doing it wrong. Because we would be woodenly flattening more expansive works into a confined space that is much too small for them to fit.
The point is there’s a lot we can do to teach precisely the things that “antiracist educators” want us to teach without abolishing our classics canon altogether, without sealing ourselves off from the “contaminations” of the past.
My proposal is not going to completely satisfy Germán and other antiracist educators. Germán, after all, believes that if an educator “must” teach Shakespeare, “the only responsible way to do so is by disrupting his plays.” That’s because, when schools require his plays, this stems from an “ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization.” Germán’s recommendation is that, “considering the violence, misogyny, racism, and more that we encounter in Shakespearean texts,” we ought to instead “open our minds and classrooms to texts that celebrate the voices and lives of marginalized people.”
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