“It kind of has this origin in anti-immigrant sentiments, right, all the way to January 6th, when we think about that white exceptionalism, and this notion of a kind of white ownership of Shakespeare,” claimed a supposed professor of English at Arizona State University, in a truly bizarre syllogism.
The average person doesn’t equate William Shakespeare, the world’s greatest playwright and author in the English language, with January 6th for obvious reasons, but academia in our postmodern age is anything but average. To them, the specter of white supremacy is everywhere, connecting everything like some malign, unseen force, the dark side straight out of Star Wars. Shakespeare, of course, is the epitome of a dead white man, a cultural force so powerful that he’s referenced and quoted millions if not billions of times per day across the entire world, even if people aren’t fully aware of it at the time. Therefore, it’s no surprise that there are periodic attempts to either denigrate him or cancel him entirely, even as, thankfully, he appears to have too large an influence and remains too important to too many people, the literary equivalent of a Charles Darwin, his works revered by all backgrounds and ethnicities. This, unfortunately, will not stop them from trying, developing more and more bizarre arguments to connect the Bard, who lived almost two hundred years before the founding of the United States, and wrote a generation before the English came to America, with what they consider the modern white nationalist movement. Last week, two professors from Arizona State University stepped – or perhaps we should stay stumbled, badly – into this breach with some of the strangest claims yet at a panel known as the “Appropriation Series,” where they called for more “diverse” voices in literature studies. This wouldn’t be unusual on its own, save for how Rubin Espinosa, supposedly an English professor, framed his arguments. First, he insisted that Shakespeare’s legacy has been intentionally manipulated in service of exclusion and “white supremacy.” “Shakespeare sits atop of that racial hierarchy. He is the epitome of what they consider white exceptionalism…and this is why he’s valuable,” he said. As proof of this position, he singled out Joseph Quincy Adams, the founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and a relative of two American Founders, John and John Quincy Adams. Adams, who was born in 1880 and became director of the Shakespeare library in 1931, was a proponent of a more strict immigration policy at the time. In a 1932 inaugural speech at the the Folger, he called immigration “a menace to the preservation of our long-established English civilization” and to some extent, believed preserving Shakespeare’s work was vital to conserving English civilization itself. As Mr. Espinosa put it, “the first director of the library, Joseph Quincy Adams” saw the institution as “a preservation of the language of the American people at a time when immigrants are coming in like locusts to steal our culture, to steal our language.” “This is the way he imagined immigration,” he added.
Of course, immigration in the 1920s wasn’t immigration today. The largest immigrant groups at the time were from Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Canada, meaning they were mostly European and they were all white, especially on the East Coast. At issue were the staggering number compared to previous waves – in the 15 years between 1900 and 1915, as many immigrants arrived as had in the previous four decades, some 15 million people, causing overcrowding and unsanitary conditions in cities that were not equipped to handle this kind of explosion. In 1910 for example, about three quarters of the population of New York City was either first generation or a direct immigrant. They were also unable to speak English, unlike their predecessors from England, Ireland, and Scotland that had been more common settlers in the 19th century. Whether you agree or disagree with Quincy Adams, it’s clear his goal wasn’t “white supremacy,” unless you believe white supremacists back then were biased against primarily other white people (since may progressives today believe white supremacy has gone multi-racial, perhaps that is not much of stretch), but rather the preservation of the language and culture he loved. This is undoubtedly why he referred to “English civilization,” rather than European, Western, or even White civilization, and likely why he chose Shakespeare in particular, who gave more to the English language than perhaps any human in history. Moreover, the phrases “English civilization” and “English speaking peoples” have largely faded from usage as progressives have taken broader aim at Western civilization and Western culture in general, embracing a notion of white supremacy that stretches across all majority white cultures as the privileged oppressor and an opposite notion of intersectionality that includes all minorities, but in the late 18th and early 19th century, white people weren’t seen as a uniform group. Those descended primarily from the English had a unique pride in the English way of life, prioritizing that heritage over others whether they were white, black, brown, or whatever. Teddy Roosevelt, for example, saw the rise of the United States as a “perfectly continuous history” dating back to the ancient King Alfred the Great. To him, English itself and the values that came with it were what united this history together, not some random white dude or generalized European heritage. In Queen Elizabeth’s time, which was also Shakespeare’s, what was spoken in “a relatively unimportant insular kingdom…now holds sway over worlds whose endless coasts are washed by the waves of three oceans.” American expansion across the continent, which had been completed around the time Quincy Adams was born, was, in his mind, the “crowning and greatest achievement” of this magnificent sweep, but Roosevelt didn’t believe it would end there, nor did he think the world would be controlled by white, proper English speaking elites ensconced in Washington, DC. Joseph Quincy Adams clearly followed in this mold, wanting to preserve what he felt was important to his English heritage against what at the time was an onslaught of non-English speaking white people.
Even if that weren’t true and Adams was a rabid white supremacist, it would have no bearing on Mr. Espinosa’s subsequent point, where he bizarrely connected Shakespeare and immigration to January 6. “It kind of has this origin in anti-immigrant sentiments, right, all the way to January 6th, when we think about that white exceptionalism, and this notion of a kind of white ownership of Shakespeare,” he said. As a logical argument, Mr. Espinosa doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. He appears to be suggesting that white people like Shakespeare and have sought to control his legacy, protecting it for themselves and themselves alone, even though there were famous black Shakespearean actors in the early 1800s and no leading scholar since has advocated barring minorities from appreciating Shakespeare, at least that I am aware of. White people also dislike immigrants in Mr. Espinosa’s view, and have sought to demonize them throughout history. Since the protestors and rioters on January 6 were primarily white, they must both love Shakespeare and hate immigrants, making the two intrinsically connected somehow. I’m reminded of the late comedian Richard Jeni, who used to do a bit on syllogisms, the logical construct where if two things are true, a third must be as well. As he put it, “God is love and love is blind. Therefore, Ray Charles is God” and “Men are from the planet Earth. Men lose their hair. Therefore, women aren’t from Earth.” Mr. Espinosa applies about the same rigor: White people like Shakespeare and hate immigrants. Therefore, January 7 was about Shakespeare. Further, he makes this claim even though the proximate cause of the riot was neither a fanatical devotion to Shakespeare specifically or more general anti-immigrant cause. While there were undoubtedly those in attendance who might harbor anti-immigrant sentiment, the protest that led to the riot was focused on the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from their preferred candidate, then-President Donald Trump. Congress wasn’t debating either an English-language bill enshrining Shakespeare as a white author or an immigration bill. They were debating the certification of election results, but politically and ideologically speaking, such niceties as logic and actual causes don’t matter. The objective is not to educate or illuminate, simply to connect everything to the specter of white supremacy. Hence, an English professor, who should clearly know better, attempts to undermine the legacy of Shakespeare by insisting he is somehow exclusively white and tying him to what progressives believe was an insurrection, among the most traumatic events in United States history.
The result is some truly bizarre claims such as when he also seemed to insist that Shakespeare didn’t have a black experience for some unspecified reason. “Shakespeare would not have come across as a black person or a non-white person in the entirety of his life,” he said. Factually, of course, this is correct. Shakespeare was white and English. His knowledge of what we now call people of color would necessarily have been very limited, living and working in late 16th century Britain, before the impact of the slave trade and the globalization of commerce (to be sure, Holland, Spain, and Portugal were already much further along than England even at that point). He was aware of other races and cultures out there, somewhere, but pre-Enlightenment, actual hands on, accurate knowledge would have been scarce; so scarce in fact, that he has Denmark, Norway, and Poland next to each other in Hamlet, as in you need to cross Denmark to get from Norway to Poland and vice versa. If anything, this only makes his achievements all the more remarkable and worth preserving. Shakespeare’s unique ability to connect with people of all cultures, ethnicities, and languages over 400 years later is what defines his greatness more so than anything else. Perhaps, no one put it better than legendary black poet Maya Angelou in remarks at Randolph College in 2013. “Shakespeare must be a black girl,” she claimed to have thought to herself upon encountering Sonnet 29 at only eight years old. While most believe Shakespeare was writing about his adoration for a richer and more popular man, Ms. Angelou found something radically different, a little piece of the black experience of being an outcast in your own country, lonely and lost. We can imagine how these immortal opening lines resonated with her own life, “When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate.” We can also imagine how Shakespeare’s optimism in the face of being alone, how he chose to end an otherwise depressing effort by focusing on the connections that the speaker has and can build upon filled her with hope even at such a young age, when it appears she had no control over her own life. “Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
This is the magic of Shakespeare. White supremacy and January 6th have nothing to do it.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 