Dead white males or Dead White European Males (DWEM) is a derogatory term that refers to a purportedly disproportionate academic focus on contributions to historical and contemporary Western civilization made by European males.
This paradigm is closely associated with a critical view of the Great Man theory of history and the Great Books focus of educational essentialism and educational perennialism.
Read more about Dead White Males: History, Criticism of Term, Sculpture
Famous quotes containing the words dead, white and/or males:
“I am dead against art’s being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author—detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower’s pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl’s lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Three times a year all your males shall appear before the LORD your God at the place that he will choose: at the festival of unleavened bread, at the festival of weeks, and at the festival of booths. They shall not appear before the LORD empty-handed; all shall give as they are able, according to the blessing of the LORD your God that he has given you.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 16:16,17.