Is there an adjective shortage on, that we need to ration them? She’s clearly nutty and stupid.
Now, Faulkner himself was racist, and it might be a good idea when discussing a Faulkner story that illustrates that to sit down beforehand and explain that he was a product of his times, and that when he wrote that nobody would have seen a problem with it but that we do see it now, and that just because someone had some wrong ideas, doesn’t mean they can’t be a great writer. But ignoring the whole issue and pretending that slavery and racism never existed? That’s just guaranteed to perpetuate racism. We can’t learn from the mistakes of the past if we don’t remember them.
Wait… A Rose For Emily? She thinks *A Rose For Emily *is racist? What, there’s some offhand reference to the black help? (I have no idea; it’s been a while since I read it).
I can understand a mother on Planet Snowflake getting upset about… well, there’s a lot to choose from here. Straying fiances, murder, living with corpses- but racism? That’s pretty out of the left field.
Well, who’s the teacher here, you or Ms. Snowflake? She shouldn’t be criticizing it unless she’s read it. And, being the parent, she doesn’t have to read it. She should count her blessings.
Also, if you’re teaching it, you should get the title right.
Yeah. “Those who forget history are cursed to repeat it”, or some such.
Refraining from teaching any historical period where slavery existed or bigotry was a government policy would cut history classes very, very short. Refraining from reading the work of any author who was bigoted or lived in a society where bigotry was normal/a basis for law would kill literature classes outright.
Expansion: Mrs. Snowflake is a more generalized moron, not entirely of the racist type, but is still racist.
I wonder what will happen if her offspring go to a liberal arts college and are exposed to liberal arts. For example, TCM just showed Birth of a Nation. Why? Because it has historical and artistic merit. Were this film shown to one of her children, Mrs. Snowflake could scream racism at the top of her lungs: She’d be right but, and this is the important part, she’d be so irrelevant nobody with tenure would be obliged to acknowledge her existence.
I remember, years ago, reading a book, it’s name long forgotten, that, three quarters of the way through, suddenly mentioned the protagonist’s beard. As I had not pictured one in my mind’s eye I angrily cast the book aside.
Until now I had never realized that the internet is like that, for you are an effete white guy. Tall and thin, almost cadaverous.
So it’s a bit late in the piece to suddenly become black.
Eh. Birth of a Nation directly maligns one of my ancestors – “Evil Senator Stoneman”, the villain of the piece. He’s portrayed just about as negatively as could be managed. I wasn’t traumatized or damaged by being shown that in school. Mrs. Snowflake should stuff it.
(… mind you, Ancestor Stoneman was a profiteering carpetbagger from what I understand. but the portrayal in Birth of a Nation was utter propaganda.)
The more I consider this woman, the more I am leaning away from ignorant and over to batshit insane. I mean, I have met some super sensitive, ready to be offended, extremely racist and ignorant women in my day…but I have never ever bumped into one that suggested that slavery should just be FORGOTTEN! That sounds just fantastic to me. Instead of trying to educate the poor thing, I think I would just steer quite clear of her.
I’d also thought Skald was white. It’s not my fault; skalds were Norse poets. The Vikings are depicted as being white and blond. Ergo, someone named “Skald” should be Nordic-looking.
Totally not my fault, and certaintly not worth waking up the flying monkeys for.
I wrote a story once which included a race of shapeshfiters whose animal forms were falcons and whose name was a shout-out to Freyja. I made them all black in their human forms just to be irritating.
Well, there was another reason we won’t get into that here.
But how can we even hope to understand, if we don’t read it because we won’t understand it? Isn’t that part of the point of reading or studying things outside what we already know?
Just to be clear here, I agree with you. Somehow when I read it over, it sounded a bit snarky.[
Apropos of nothing, but there is enough information here to find me on facebook. Sort of.
I protest any implication that I would challenge don’t ask to a fair fight. Ionly engage in personal combat when I have a huge and unfair advantage. Ideally thee other fellow would have already been subdued and bound by mercenaries engaged for that purpose.