English Teacher Won’t Teach Shakespeare Because He’s White and Dead

Shakespeare is arguably the most influential writer of all time. He was a brilliant man whom we owe for many of our common phrases and saying, as well as plot structures that still to this day influence popular television, movies, and plays.

Despite this, the Washington Post has published an editorial from an English teacher in Sacramento who argues students shouldn’t be taught Shakespeare anymore because he is a dead, white man.

Dana Dusbiber (who is white herself) wrote that she avoids Shakespeare because her minority students should not be expected to learn about a “long-dead, British guy.”

Dusbiber claims Shakespeare is only regarded as great because “some white people” declared him to be.

Dana Dusiber

“Why not teach translations of early writings or oral storytelling from Latin America or Southeast Asia other parts of the world? Many, many of our students come from these languages and traditions … perhaps we no longer have the time to study the Western canon that so many of us know and hold dear.”
The answer to her questions is obvious: because you teach English, Ms. Dusbiber. English, which is the language of the British. This point is obviously lost on her as she labels current English curriculum “Eurocentric.” Of course it is, why would an English class be focused on cultures that don’t speak English?

“If we only teach white students, it is our imperative duty to open them up to a world of diversity through literature that they may never encounter anywhere else in their lives,” she says.

“I admit that this proposal, that we leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely, will offend many.”

So Dusbiber believes white students should be made to study other cultures and minority students should study their own.

She also ignores the many universal lessons of Shakespeare.

Themes of young love, power lust, betrayal, and social injustice are prevalent and all audiences can relate to them. If she wants something more applicable to minorities, Othello is about a Moorish man who faces racism and discrimination.
The real injustice here would be to her students.

Regardless of the race of their author, these are some of the greatest stories ever told. Shakespeare’s influence on writing and the English language is inarguable.

Reading him also expands a child’s vocabulary and provides a study in the evolution of language.

But therein lies the problem. Dusbiber confesses that she has a “personal disinterest in reading stories written in an early form of the English language that I cannot always easily navigate.”

So the real reason for this illogical rejection of Shakespeare is probably rooted more so in her own frustrations concerning her limited ability to navigate the language in which she holds a degree, and less in the fact that he was white and is dead.
This seems to be nothing more than ineptitude masquerading as progressivism. The real shock here is how someone with such an obviously flawed opinion ends up published in the Washington Post. Okay, maybe that isn’t such a shock…