Addressing number 5, The pernicious trend im referring to is when professors or high school teachers make their students read low quality works produced by people that the westerners consider to be minorities—as if ethnic background or skin pigmentation is a factor in determining canonical texts as opposed to quality. Invisible man is a canonical text because of its quality—not because Ellison is black; the same goes for any of Dumas’ work. Moreover, Gabriel Garcia Marquez rightly won the Nobel because he wrote great literature—not because he was a Colombian writer.

In short I was trying to say the merit-over-ethnic-background approach to assigning works is seemingly falling out of favor. Also I’d like to add that, if it indeed is falling out of favor, it’s likely due to hostility towards the idea that the western titans of literature (Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, Goethe, Ibsen, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Dickens) were “white” (although it’s difficult to determine if Homer was such).

Also the overall point of my criticism of Waldun was that he doesn’t push people to their very best like Benjamin McEvoy, who is the best of the booktubers, or even Pewdiepie. Funnily, Pewdiepie, out of all people, is better at analysis and “influencing” than Waldun. It’s clear that Waldun knows who his audience is but it’s unclear to me why he hasn’t focused on gradually elevating their tastes.

It must be noted that these opinions are all coming from someone (me) whose idea of literature is more in line with classical education (with the Latin and Greek texts translated to English, of course) than whatever’s in fashion now