Remember when the cancel culture warriors lied that they were just interested in taking down Civil War generals and the symbols of the Confederacy?
As if toppling statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln didn’t give that game away, now they’ve reached back thousands of years and targeted Homer. Not Homer Simpson, but the OG Homer who lived in the 5th century B.C. and wrote “The Odyssey.”
A Massachusetts school canceled him because he’s a dead white guy who lived more than 70 years ago.
Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”
A young-adult novelist should never be empowered to dictate what the rest of us and our kids are allowed to read and study. Her mentality is dangerous and it’s rapidly destroying education and will soon endanger lives.
Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”
Evidently this teacher had time to announce her intent to indoctrinate on a website but hasn’t read these books and knows nothing of what’s in them. Homer wrote long before “US society” even existed. “US society” itself didn’t originate racism, it inherited it, and through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution lit the fuse to destroy it. How can an educator not know this?
The United States after the Civil War was well on its way to doing destroying racism as much as it can be, until racist Democrat President Woodrow Wilson resurrected the Klan, re-segregated the federal workforce, and Democrats enacted Jim Crow laws on his watch. The Democrats set racial progress back decades, deliberately.
For some reason, this history doesn’t come up in any #DisruptTexts conversations. There are no discussions of canceling the Democratic Party over its proven support of slavery and its proven racist past.
Where do we go from here? The WSJ story points out that when one person, author Jessica Cluess, courageously pushed back as a #DisruptTexts ideologue accused Nathaniel Hawthorne (author of The Scarlet Letter) of “slut shaming,” she got mobbed and was forced to do a public online struggle session to denounce herself. The mob went after her book publisher, and got her agent to sever his business relationship with her. The mob won, education lost. Homer got kicked out of school.
“Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!”
“Hahaha…” There’s nothing funny about any of this.
On her LinkedIn page, Levine admits:
I am dedicated to the practices of anti-racist and trauma-informed education, recognizing and working to dismantle the systemic issues that live on in our public education system. (emphasis added)
That’s not education. It’s political indoctrination. When the WSJ questioned her, though, she clammed up calling the questioning “invasive.”
It should be. Levine and her allies have no right to do what they’re doing to kids. None. They should face invasive questions over it, and then strongly encouraged to stop it or find other work.
If we cancel things written back when racism, slavery, etc were commonplace then we eliminate the proof that people use when they want to complain about racism and slavery in the past.
Meanwhile, in our modern, enlightened world pointing out when a progressive makes a racist remark is not allowed.
Reading this story and the associated comments just shows how myopic our vision has become. The mantra appears to be that anything which is not in concert with today’s views and standards must be erased and forgotten which then leads to eliminating the sum total of all of our history, since nothing of our standards even remotely resembles anything in the past.
all these anti-education THINGS need to be cancelled. Take them to a border, take their passports and tell them to come back when they grow up and can act CIVIL to everyone
Thank goodness I don’t have any children in Lawrence, MA being “educated” by Heather Lawrence. What a fool she is.
Looking forward to the day these cancel culture warriors receive the ridicule and scorn they deserve
So what’s being done? Are the parents rising up remove this “teacher” and put history back in their school? Isn’t the city outraged?
I thought you should know that Homer lived in or about the 8th century BC. The Iliad and the Odyssey were already famous in Ancient Greece by the 5th century BC
Well when we repeat history someone can tell this so-called educated teacher that her and those like her can take all the credit for it….
Hosea 8:7 “They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.”