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 of, criticism and/or term:
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knolwedge, Grammatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)