Massa Shakespeare

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Jim Mathias]

Shakespeare has indeed been negrified, as one scholar has troubled himself to dig through and write honestly about it. Foisting Race upon Shakespeare's Plays by Gorman Beauchamp rips the product of one Congoid's ill-conceived ventures regarding the Bard and his works called Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race. Below is a few of the first paragraphs of Beauchamp's sharp critique, the rest can be found at the link given below:

Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race, Ian Smith, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 212, $34.00 hardcover.

Reading Black Shakespeare took longer than reading War and Peace, although the former is only 189 pages, thirty of which are notes: it is so poorly written. A reviewer of a book of one of my professors once described reading it as akin to walking long distances over wet shale—the perfect description for Black Shakespeare. Some examples: “Directed at persons of color, the charge of identity politics is meant to delegitimize an intellectual position, casting it as an essentialist bias based in a reductively vague biological premise that recreates the familiar hierarchy of the mind-body split.” “Fetishizing historical accuracy is to claim the high moral ground of sound scholarship, a position from which to disguise resistance to race work, from which to promote a singular perspective and methodology as acceptable while placing firm restriction on others.” There’s worse: very long stretches of very wet shale. College is probably the place to learn to write that badly. But this explains the length of time it took me to read Black Shakespeare: the attic needed cleaning, Wagner’s Ring Cycle ought to be reheard. I read three other books between bouts with Smith’s, but a Puritan sense of duty, no doubt ill-founded, kept dragging me back to his.

This despite what I encountered on page ten. “Whiteness, because of its obfuscating and evasive maneuvers, struggles to contend with race,” so that most readers will be “hampered by whiteness’ inherent epistemological limitations.” Well, I was born white, most likely will die white, and was white every moment in between, so must have been hampered by my inherent epistemological limitations my whole life without ever noticing. I should feel chagrin, but the fact is that I was blessed with a very active bunkum detector to make up for my “epistemological limitation” and Black Shakespeare set it buzzing: it is bunkum, racist bunkum. Let’s be clear at the beginning: whiteness here is what capitalism is to Marxists, the patriarchy to feminists, original sin to Catholics, the source of all evil (even, we’ll see, cowardice). Smith quotes with approval this condemnation: “it is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.” If this sort of essentialist generalization were made about any other race, black or brown, red or yellow, its racist nature would be apparent and condemned; here it is apparent—and approved, at least by the folks at Cambridge University Press.

Such a farrago of whiteness-bashing occupies the first chapters—we get to the treatment of a Shakespeare play only seventy-nine pages in—that trying to untangle and make sense of it appears unprofitable; but let me give one example of how Smith reasons. Retinal Sarcomas is the medical term for a visual abnormality, or blind spot, in certain instances affecting vision; everyone, however, has a sarcoma at the point where the optic nerve goes through the retina, where the brain fills in the empty spot. But Smith converts a purely physical phenomenon into an ideological one, the term “blind spot” too tempting not to transmogrify. White’s blind spot apparently concerns only race, their brains filling in the blanks with cultural misinformation—or something like that. Nothing about what occupies the “blind spots” of other races or even of such whites who, historically or geographically, have no knowledge of other races. This constitutes probably the most inapt appeal to science since Cultural Darwinism. ......
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https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/ ... ares-plays

Doctor....of what?

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