Criticism of Term
Critics of the term have alleged that it aims to reject people or ideas on the grounds of race or sex, and that the term may encourage academics to exclude the valuable ideas of those who are white, male, and dead from college curricula. The term is often used in a pejorative manner, in the context of specific regret that the contributions of those who are contemporary, non-white, or female rarely receive an equal amount of notice in academic references.
Classicist Bernard Knox made direct reference to this term when he delivered his 1992 Jefferson Lecture (the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities). Knox used the intentionally "provocative" title "The Oldest Dead White European Males", as the title of his lecture and his subsequent book of the same name, in both of which Knox defended the continuing relevance of classical Greek culture to modern society.
Read more about this topic: Dead White Males
Famous quotes containing the words criticism and/or term:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)