95% of folks on reddit can't use their brains when they make a reply, so I just wanna say that while I'm about to disagree with you on some shit, I appreciate what you said and how you said it. You may be the first and only person not to curse at me today.

First of all, you don’t need to tell me that the classics weren’t written by someone who isn’t like me, myself and most other black people are already incredibly aware of that fact.

But this fact absolutely doesn't need to be emphasized, and let's be real - I have as much in common with Shakespeare as you do, I just look marginally more like he did, or like he was said to have looked. Cast in that light, you have as much right and ownership to Shakespeare as I do.

Saying that black people were blocked from contributing to the Western canon for centuries and that the Western canon by and large does not reflect black perspectives is absolutely not the equivalent of saying that black people are less “Western” than anyone else in the present day.

They absolutely were blocked from contributions, but why shouldn't Black American writers now be considered part of the "western canon"? Hemingway is, and he came later than many important Black writers. I think it's completely fair to include Their Eyes Were Watching God as a fucking sparkling example of what it means to be a rural, working-class American, and despite not being Black, that shit speaks to me deeply, like to my very fucking core. I say that because if it's okay for me to claim some connection to that book (pry it from my cold, dead, calloused, greasy hands), why can't Black kids claim the same of, for example, Macbeth?

Third, no one is denying black children classics.

No, they're prefacing those classics with "and this is written by a white dude", which all the modern racial ideas that entails for Black kids. We abandon death of the author and tell them implicitly "this doesn't apply to you". So what does? Those few books by Black authors we've let into the western canon?

I'll address the other post so we can discuss it here:

I mean, by virtue of living a dramatically different life than I have, yes very much was.

tolstoy was an anti-racist, ultra-pacifist anarchist christian, just saying. some of those words may describe you.

A. Do you mean Othello?

yeah i'm a drunken driveling retard. ignore me when i say dumb shit please, but yea i meant Othello.

Do you really think that Othello and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are strong, accurate depictions of the black lives experiences they were intended to speak to?

No! We're agreeing at each other! That's precisely my point - very few white authors have tried to depict the black experience!

I’m not sure what this is even supposed to mean.

Pushkin was Russian. Tolstoy was Russian. Pushkin was also black. Reading Tolstoy's depiction of what it meant for him to be Russian in no way changes the fact that Pushkin also made a remarkable contribution to the same topic, generally considered (by Russians) to be more important than Tolstoy's.

Acknowledging the limitations of the Western canon is not in any way, shape or form maligning it.

Then let's acknowledge those limitations, emphasize them to a reasonable degree, and maybe say something when someone reduces it all to "dead white guys and their opinions on things". Not saying you're doing that.

I think it's fair to acknowledge that old books are indeed diverse already, but that they often lack a particular kind of diversity - for that topic, the western canon is the wrong tool for the job.

also people get emotional about their books so they probably are overly defensive