Who Cares What Those Dead White European Males Said?

In my first week of my senior year at Rutgers, an odd pattern has occurred. Since I am studying philosophy, classics, and political science, most of my course work consists of reading old books by people that have long since been passed. Since I am studying in the West almost all of the authors are white males. This should not stun any of us.

However, almost every opening lecture I have heard this week starts with a perfunctory speech I like to call the “Apologetic Professor”. It goes something like this “I am sorry that all of the people we are reading are dead white European males. If I had a lesbian Latino author that I could assign in this class I would. Honest I would! I guess those would-be authors were too busy being oppressed by the white man. Oh well, they managed to say important things in spite of themselves so we have to read them.” Okay, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is depressingly similar to what is actually said. It is tragic that these great men are not taken to be valuable authors and worthy of study without some preface that pays homage to the multicultural mantra.

This type of treatment stands Martin Luther King’s injunction to “judge by the content of character not by the color of skin” on its head. If you have the wrong color of skin or gender than you will can be subjected to denigration at every point even if do end up being remembered. Thankfully this type of thinking does not prevail everywhere, but on the average college campus it is all too common. But then again, I am just a western white male… what do I know?