The Eric Metaxas Show - Heather Mac Donald (Continued)

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

The first of many conversations in Eric's newest series Socrates in the Studio  

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m.investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show this holiday season. I'll let you in on a little secret. Eric dreads Christmas Eve because he knows he has to put up with those three annoying ghosts. Again, just like every Christmas Eve.

Hey, you think one of these Christmases, he'd finally get the message, right? How well? Say Merry Christmas to Eric, the humbug, Metaxe! Folks, you're listening to a special edition of the show. These are the audio versions of amazing conversations I had. Socrates in the studio. These have not aired yet. The videos are not out yet.

We want to encourage you to go to Socrates in the cityplus.com. Socrates in the city plus.com. sign up. This goes live January 4th. You can see the videos. It's amazing. I also want to encourage you. If you haven't yet, go to metaxisotalkis talk.com and give to CSI. One of the greatest things you could conceivably do around the Christmas season. An amazing gift for anyone you can think of. Go to metaxis talk.com. Click on the CSI banner. Be generous. It's a beautiful thing. Metaxistalk.com. And don't forget, Socrates in the city plus.com. Incidentally, today's conversation is with the great Heather McDonald. Socrates in the studio. Here it is.

When did that idea that we're going to tear down basic standards, that we're going to do away with that? I mean, in the 70s and the 80s, I don't think that that was yet happening. Oh, it was. It was. Oh, yeah. I mean, first of all, in the original iteration of the civil rights laws, you, even then, there was a recognition we're going to have racial preferences. we're going to have affirmative action.

And implicit in Johnson's talk about it was that we're going to have double standards. But it was still sort of soto voce. But the real big change was the Supreme Court decision of Griggs v. Duke Power, which enshrined this idea of disparate impact. 71? No, 76, I think. I'm not sure. In the 70s.

But so it was the Supreme Court decision to do what exactly? This was a challenge to a hiring exam in a power company that had blacks failed the hiring exam at a higher rate than whites. And it was agreed in the litigation that the employer had not implemented this exam to keep blacks out. The employer was not a discriminator. He just wanted to have a basic test of job capabilities. But even though this was a colorblind neutral test, it did disqualify more blacks than whites. So the phrase is it had a disparate impact on blacks. And the court held that even a colorblind, non-discriminatory test that had a negative disparate impact on blacks,

that was a civil rights violation. So that's what opened the floodgates. So it meant from then on that any test of skills that disqualified more blacks than whites should be revised downwards. Didn't we have a ruling on the Supreme Court in this last year where they reversed some aspect of this, with regard to college admissions, that they finally said, enough is enough. We are now, you know, in a new era. That to me was surprising in a way,

but it seems like colleges will just ignore this. Yes, colleges will ignore it because the Chief Justice John Roberts gave a very big loophole. So the opinion said you may no longer have racial preferences. So they didn't unfortunately address disparate impact. So the disparate impact idea is still out there that if a standard has a negative impact on blacks, you can challenge it. But what the court said for colleges that you may not affirmatively prefer black students because of their race. And what this is entailed in every single selective university, and not just the ivies, but state schools as well, is vast admissions disparities. So blacks and Hispanics are admitted to colleges with test scores, objective tests of skills that would be. automatically disqualifying if presented by a white and Asian students. So you're admitting

students on these two tracks, and not surprisingly, the black and Hispanic students who are admitted catapulted cruelly into schools for which they're not competitive. They would be very competitive in many schools if they were admitted on the same grounds as anybody else. But thanks to racial preferences, a student who would be perfectly qualified to attend Boston college is instead plucked into Harvard or MIT with, let's say, 600s on the math SAT, instead of 800s. Well, guess what? That student is going to struggle, just as I would if I was put into MIT for gender equality.

I knew because my working class community of Danbury, Connecticut, where I grew up, was technically in Fairfield County, which, you know, I knew that it would be infinitely more difficult for me to get into Yale. than if I came from Montana. That's just, you know, so that's part of the mix. And I think we all understand that. It's complicated. So in a way, I'm, I guess I want to just switch the channel because there was something you wrote about in your book that so dramatically underscores the craziness of this.

Would you talk about, and we can go back to universities at any point, but when you wrote about the Berlin, ballet and their production of Swan Lake, I just thought this is the end. I mean, this is like something someone would make up. Can you talk about that? Well, you can make up,

you can predict that whatever is true is going to be racist. So you start with that conclusion and then you work back and say, okay, what's the evidence and what's the actions that we're going to have to declare racist? So this is like heads,

if heads eye, wing, tails you lose the thing. So there's been a long tradition in classical ballet, which is, you know, ballerinas on toeshoes and these great 19th century ballets with scores by Chikovsky and D'Lebe, that they often have supernatural elements. And they can, you know, the female chord de ballet will be representing forest spirits or silfs, you know, or strange ghosts that are laying in wait to capture wayward princes, you know, and vengeance against the male race. And traditionally, in portraying these ethereal, otherworldly beings,

the ballet corps would use sometimes white powder on their skin in addition to white tights to make themselves look bloodless and inhuman. And you make the case that therefore whiteness in this instance is distinctly portrayed as a negative, as death and as a negative. So the whiteness of these dancers, this imposed whiteness with the powder and so on and so forth, is meant to portray something sinister. Right.

So Swan Lake, another great ballet with the score by Chuck. is another sort of otherworldly story of swan and a prince and a black swan and a white swan. And there, the court of ballet represent swans who then, you know, die and the prince, and they ultimately pull down the prince. And so there, too, they're wearing white body paint in addition to their beautiful, gorgeous tutus, to embody what is ultimately, a symbol of threat. So the Berlin ballet was putting on Swan Lake,

and they had a black ballerina in the court of ballet. And not being racist, they said, you'll put on the white paint like everybody else because that's what we're all trying to look like swans. And she came back and said, that's racist. And, you know, you can't ask me to do that because that's going to violate my ethnic ideal. And if it had been just the opposite, which is, well, you're too black, this is never going to work, don't even bother, that would have been racist too.

And so she creates this big to-do that then the Berlin ballet, of course, fell on its sword. And also, this was, I don't remember it was COVID or not, but there was some layoffs from the ballet. There were about 12 ballerinas who were laid off, 11 of them white, and she was laid off. And she said, I was laid off out of racism. So again, here we have a thesis and a conclusion in search of evidence. But this is happening every day. You look around, if you attune yourself to this, you'll see that institution after institution is capitulating to what is, in essence, a race hustle. Folks, right now in other parts of the world, people's lives are being threatened simply for believing in Jesus.

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that so quickly, as you put it, you know, cop to these charges of racism. And it reminds me of the people in the transgender world who are somehow willing to go along with the craziness. And you think it's really your job to say, no, we're not going along with the craziness. but they seem to have no fundamental values or principles or beliefs. They seem to be ciphers. They don't know anything. And so if somebody with a stronger voice tells them something, they go along with it,

which is pretty astonishing. Good point. And I guess, you know, we've had in the universities for decades now, at least since the 80s, the oppositional impulse, the feminist theory, the race theory, the ethnic studies theory, that preposterously portrays Western civilization as defined and as uniquely defined by oppression. So these CEOs, they are probably a product of this. They have not had faculty professors that have been, that have told them,

these are works that you should revere. You should be down on your knees in gratitude to be the recipient of a tradition that is unparalleled in its beauty and sublimity and depth of thought. You know, there's so many examples of it in the book when you talk about the, it's near the end of the book, but the composer who writes this aria, that ends with Goddamn America. Yeah, yeah. That's another one of these things. It seems made up. Like, it seems made up for a sitcom

or for a comedy film or something like that. Like, how crazy can it get? Yeah. And that's another example of... He's accusing... So, he's accusing a black soprano who didn't want to sing for a celebration, a commemoration of the Tulsa Massacre

who he was given the privilege of writing an aria for Denise Graves, who was a great soprano in her time. She's retired, but she still sings to our good fortune. And she didn't want to sing an aria that he wrote for her whose words were profoundly anti-American. And so he accuses, he actually doesn't really accuse her. He accuses the white director of the Tulsa Opera, which was putting on a program with all black composers, all black singers,

to commemorate a very, very dark moment in Tulsa's history. He accuses the director, Tobias Pickett of, and this is Romaine, Daniel Beard Romaine, is the composer, of racism, for saying, for being the go-between, between Denise, the black soprano Denise Graves, who said, I don't want to sing this. And so Daniel Beard Romaine goes on this big race crusade

and said, I'm the victim of racism. It's just amazing. But this was in my chapter called Abstainers where I say there are a few people who stood up to the race hustle and the Tulsa Opera was one of them. You mentioned that, and obviously the singer Graves

was one of them. this black singer who didn't want to sing. What turns out was not really such a wonderful piece of music anyway. No, it's mediocre, yes. And then you mentioned this composer. John McLaughlin Williams. He is so great. There was a period where after George Floyd,

the whole classical music industry just went nuts and said classical music is racist because it's a European tradition. They cut this out because it's white. Well, guess what? It's a European tradition. By definition, it's going to be white. Just as African Europe, a drum language, is black, and Chinese classical opera is Chinese.

That's the way it happened, folks. Europe didn't choose to be white. No, exactly. It's just the way it was. And they weren't excluding black composers at the time. In fact, you know, there was, I've written about this Jean Boulogne Joseph Bologna, who's a mediocrity, but now he's being celebrated as the better than Mozart, which is preposterous. But anyway, McLaughlin Williams, so everybody was saying, well,

you know, maybe we should think about hiring orchestral musicians based on race. And McLaughlin Williams, who's a dissenter and an abstainer, he wrote acidly on Facebook, well, maybe we should just like skip the audition, the musical audition, and people should just send in headshots. And we can hire by headshot for. Now he's black. He's black. Okay, so here we have a black man, a composer. And a violinist and a conductor. Who is a hero. In other words, he sees the race hustle and he not only sees it, but that's when I read that line in the book, how funny that we should, you know, yeah, let's just send in headshots. We don't want to grade you on what kind of a musician you are, but just on what

color you are. And so here you have this heroic black musician standing up and then himself being vilified. He was vilified. He's got the most amazing musical history. He's a man after my own heart because I grew up with classical music. It is the most important thing in my life. But I know the standard canonical repertoire inside out. And frankly, I avoid it because I know it too well and I don't want it to be completely dead to me. So I'm always looking for unusual music from, say, the 18th and 19th century that I don't know already, because there's a million works that we're going to die without having heard that are worthy of hearing. So McLaughlin Williams, as a violinist and as a music student, he started, he first fell in love with his parents, were both pianists. They met each other at

Howard University. His father was the victim of real discrimination in the Coast Guard and in the music industry back in the 40s and 50s, tragic. But his parents played the piano and he said, I grew up listening to Beethoven sonatas and Bach Partitas and William Grant Still and Joplin. And they didn't distinguish. It was all great. So his parents had a musical encyclopedia, and he would read about these unknown composers and say,

why haven't I heard about these people? and he'd looked their music up in the music libraries, and his recording and conducting career was bringing these little known, I never heard of most of these composers, early 20th century, late romantic American composers delight. They're all white. So you have John McLaugh and Williams, his orchestra that he recorded with with Knoxos label,

is the National Ukrainian Orchestra. You have a black guy conducting National Ukrainian Orchestra, playing Hadley and, you know, some other just, I can't even bring them to mind that they're so damn obscure, doing a real service to our musical knowledge. He was then going to record something by Nicholas Rosello, I think the name is, and the family, he'd already recorded something, he was going to do another project. The family got wind of the fact that on Facebook, McLaughlin, Williams had written in favor of Trump. And so a representative of the family member said,

it was bad enough when you supported George W. Bush, but we cannot imagine having anything to do with somebody that has anything good to say about Trump. You are persona non grata from here on out. And McLaughlin Williams wrote the most passionate response saying, I have never made musical judgments on the basis of politics. I believe that as musicians, we are in a universal language and what matters is your musical competence, and I find this deplorable, that you would blacklist me because of my political views. And then, I quote, he's got the most fantastic post from a 4th of July where he says, happy birthday to the greatest nation in history. And I mean, here's a man whose father did suffer the worst and yet is able to overcome that history and forgive us

that. And of course, he's little known, whereas Daniel Beard-Romain is getting commission after commission. It's just, it's a perversion of our history. Well, that changes today. Thank you. Folks, right now in other parts of the world, people's lives are being threatened simply for believing in Jesus. have been enslaved for their faith. So listeners to this show know that I'm passionate about the work of Christian Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their Christian faith. I've got to thank you for your life-changing generosity for years now.

If you've given a CSI through this program, you have played a role in freeing literally thousands of captives. So as we near the end of this year, can I ask you to give once again your gift of just $250 will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years. You can buy a believer's freedom and provide her with food and other supplies necessary to start her new life. Just $250. Maybe you can give more and free more people.

Call 888-2533522, 888-252. 888-253-3522. Or go to metaxis talk.com. Please do it metaxis talk.com. For more than 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless providers standing behind their values. and their exceptional service. They're an example of putting the cause ahead of profits,

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without, oh, just to pick a name out of a hat, the New York Times. The New York Times has sold their souls to the devil, whether literally or figuratively or both. And they are like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, like all these elite institutions, they have drunk the Kool-Aid. They're not even being, I mean, it's kind of funny because it's good to be self-critical. They're not being particularly self-critical at this point. They're being, they're just doing what they think they're supposed to do, which I see at least as a lack of any kind of moral courage or to get back to what we were saying earlier.

Complete lack of belief in anything, really. Like we're just going to go with the crowd. If the crowd says, say, Heil Hitler or al-Aqabar, whatever the crowd says, we just want to be liked. I mean, it's that shallow. They have no civilizational confidence. They seem absolutely to believe nothing except what the crowd believes, which is really sick and scary because we know how that's happened where that's gone in the past. Yeah. I mean, it's parallel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, turning on the Western art tradition, which it's obligation and privilege to curate. You have the New York Times turning on the great

tradition of journalism, of a debate, a forum for different ideas. And what's happening there is you have these young products of the intersectional university now populating the newsrooms and the staff and the editorial desk that are terrifying the elders. And so you had during the George Floyd race riots when ideas were being bad at around, how should Trump respond? You know, you have cities that are going up in flames, you have police precincts being fire bombed, courthouses being firebombed, setting in motion, mayhem and anarchy that we've never moved beyond. And so Tom Cotton, the senator, wrote an op-ed, submitted an op-ed, saying, well, there would be constitutional grounds for Trump calling out

the National Guard to respond. And he'd made a reasoned argument about a particular burning, literally, public policy issue. And the staff revolted and said merely... At the New York Times. The staff the New York Times revolted. These are the most privileged people. They work. You should see their building in the offices of Covington and Burling. Actually, no, the Covington and Burling is in the Times building at 8th Avenue, it is the most fancy office building you've ever seen. It is so hip. It's got these yellow colors and, you know, very modernist. They're working in like the highest level of privilege. So the black employees of the New York Times said, by running this op-ed, you have put us at physical risk of our safety. That this is like psychologically traumatic, and

it endangers all of us that you ran an opinion article making a reasoned argument. And the head of the op-ed desk resigned. Rather than saying, you people are idiots, you should not be in the New York Times, go get another job, you are besmirching the tradition of journalism. He fell on his sword and crawled out like a coward. It's pathetic. And the Times now, they are so blatantly opinionated in their so-called news reporting. You know, they have certain phrases. You know, the subtle science of climate change, the lies of the 2020 election. And most egregiously, all they have to do to discredit any institution or any individual is append the epithet white in front of that individual or institution.

and they have immediately proven their case that it is a racist institution. I mean, I only brought up the New York Times thinking of their arts coverage because a couple of times when you're writing about the Metropolitan Museum and some of these other things, their arts coverage is just, again, Yes, all diversity all the time, all racism all the time. And they don't seem to have, I mean, really, we're talking about moral issues here. They don't seem to have a courage to actually think clearly or for themselves. They're afraid of doing that because they know there's a price, and they've sold their souls for power.

They only want to remain where they are. They don't want to. So that's to me what's interesting, because ultimately we're talking about values. We're talking about, you know, what is right, what is wrong. They don't really seem to ever be willing to risk any. anything in defense of anything. They're just drifting along to the Niagara Falls. But I am haunted, Eric, by this constantly, by the awareness that if they were sitting in, eavesdropping on this conversation, they would reject your terms.

Which terms? The charge that they don't care about the truth or they are cowards or they capitulate, they would say about themselves that you guys are the ones who are. capitulating to, you know, insurrection or the Trump racism and the white supremacy. And so I keep asking myself, how do we convince them? And I think accusing the left on procedural grounds of, well, you're just ignoring the evidence, is not going to work because they have their slate of evidence. I don't say I've got an answer.

But you don't think anybody in the mafia thinks they're doing bad. You don't think Hitler thought that he was evil. Like, just because someone has a different set of values, you know, in other words, I think, if we're honest, they know, many of them know that what they're saying. In other words, they may believe some of it, but they also know that if you say this or this or this, you'll get in trouble. Are you tired of not getting a good night's sleep? Well, my friend, Mike Lundell, has created the perfect solution. He didn't just stop at the pillow. He also created the Giza Dream bed sheets made from the world's best cotton called Giza.

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Go to MyPillow.com and click on the radio podcast square and use promo code Eric at checkout. Don't wait any longer to get the best sleep of your life. Call 800-978-3057 or go to MyPillow.com now and use promo code Eric. You talked earlier about cancel culture. That's what that is, that I don't want to pay any price. I'm not willing. nothing's worth paying a price for. When do you pay a price?

And they're not willing. That's a good argument. And you've persuaded me that there are people out there who are not totally gone. And that is undoubtedly the case. And I hope that they stick around that there's still people. Because there's a lot of other people who have no, there's no cognitive dissonance there. They fully believe all of this. For sure.

Maybe there's some university presidents, you know, does Peter Salavi of Yale, the president, outgoing president of Yale, or Christopher Ice Gruber, the president of Princeton University, that routinely accuse their own institutions of systemic racism, like, it seems to me preposterous they could not possibly believe that. Every faculty search is one desperate attempt to hire blacks, to admit blacks into graduate school, medical school, law school, undergraduate. It's all they care about, but they say they're racist.

So I don't know what's going on in their heads. So I hope that they do realize they're lying, and it causes them some kind of psychological twinge of pain. But there may be, there's probably a lot of people out there that now no longer have that dissonance whatsoever. Well, again, we can't know. But the cowardice is nauseating. It really is.

Well, I mean, listen, I hate always to go. there but part of my excuse is having a German mother who grew up in Germany at that time and because I wrote a 600-page book on the subject so I can't help go there because when people want to demonize you know like Daniel Goldhagen demonize of the Germans their outliers they're exquisitely evil and I think well excuse me yeah that is a racist view right my view is speaking as a Christian we are all equally guilty we all have the same same amount of original sin. So if you say, well, the Germans are uniquely evil, no, no, no, you have to ask yourself, if I were living there, then, would I have dissented? And everybody

flatters themselves. Oh, of course, I would have. I would have. But I think we're seeing it exactly right now. We're seeing people go along with whatever they need to go. And to be fair, Heather, they don't believe that it will end in the death camps. In other words, they somehow tell themselves that whatever's happening, I'm just going to go along with it, but it'll never go where it's gone in the past. So we're going to ride it out. We're going to see which way the wind blows,

and we just want to be standing. You know, we don't want to risk. But there are people who have actual convictions who are willing to lose their reputation and friends and jobs and these kinds of things, because they're crazy enough to believe that the truth matters, facts matter. I mean, your book is loaded with facts. And the other thing that's going on, though, those of us who do see what's happening,

we don't know what the hell to do about it. Like, we can see the censorship, the unholy alliance between big tech and government. Clearly, I mean, they are overtly saying that we have the authority to decide which are the ideas. You've spoken with Scott Atlas. we may not talk about the Great Barrier. You may not question lockdowns. This is unbelievable. I mean, this is Stalinist, but we don't know what to do about it.

Well, we're doing stuff. We're talking here. Okay. Well, yeah. I mean, this is the thing. What I always say is, you know, whatever you have, money, freedom, a voice, influence. You have to use it now. Right.

Because you're in an existential battle. That's right. battle and that if you don't use it now, if you lose, if you saved, you know, some powder and some bullets and some money and some freedom for next week, next week it will all be taken away from you. So you have to use it now. So we're using our voices now. That's right. And the idea, of course, is that there are people who are persuadable who are hearing, for example, what we're talking about and they're thinking about it. But you referred to it earlier. It's the, idea of understanding that when you speak out, there are people listening and because you spoke

out, somebody else is willing to say, well, Heather said that, so I guess I can say that. And when you don't, there was some sociologists who wrote about the spiral of silence that happened in Germany in the 30s, that when you don't speak out, you encourage others to keep their mouths shut. And so whoever among us is speaking out is encouraging others to say, oh yeah, that is crazy. Oh, yes, I should speak about that. That's true. And people do come up to me and say, you know, thank you for articulating this. You're absolutely right. So anybody who sees what's going on, they do have to speak. They do not let it, do not assume somebody else is going to take care of this problem for you. If you believe in.

in your life and in your civilization. And there's been, I would love to know more about Chinese and Indian civilizations, but there's been nothing like the West. There really hasn't. We do not have to apologize because any sin of the West has been committed 10 times over. Right. And I was going to say when you say there's nothing like the West, whether that's subjective or objective, it's certainly not racist.

it's a value judgment. That's beautiful. And can I not say that there's never been another Shakespeare or another Beethoven? And who cares what color or what sex? It's really not relevant. We're talking about other things. Let me ask you, since it's part of the conversation, what is it about the West that is beautiful and worth fighting for in your mind?

because at the end of the book and someplace within the book, you talk about you know, civilizational suicide. And so maybe that's my long-winded way of saying, why do you care? I love the art and the literature and the music of the West.

I think it is reading literature and not just Western literature, but all literature, but the British tradition, the French, German. It has given me, the ability to experience human lives that I would never have known about before to experience wit and sorrow and irony

in ways that I have no capacity to create myself. Music, again, Brahms expresses an eros and a longing that is terrifying. This sensual vulnerability of late Brahms piano works is unbearable. Beethoven's late piano sonatas and piano quartets take you into a different galaxy universe entirely. They are so eerie. I wasn't going to go there, but I realize you're not a person of faith, but where you're talking about sounds like the ineffable.

In other words, there's something beyond. We don't need to name it. but it pierces the heart. That's ultimately what we're talking about, and those are universal things. Yes. I would say, I mean, leaving a Cydar, and I love Esculis, I think the Oristai is one of the most chilling experiences

of human vengeance and cathonic forces and just the way those Greek tragedies were set up with the choruses and the masks on stage. It must have been absolutely earth-shattering to see. But leaving aside art and aesthetics, I'm amazed at ice. I'm amazed at fresh water. I'm amazed at this table. I'm amazed at this microphone. It is all incredible. Like every material in our world has been created by some materials engineer. We take all of it for granted. Rugs, light, you can flip on a light and get electricity and get light. Human beings have lived in darkness for most of their lives. This is why. fairy tales and myths are all about the forest because you're in the forest and there is no light. It's terrifying. Then there's witches there and and hermits and and and and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, we have conquered what has been the

situation of human beings for all of their history of early death, terrible disease, suffering, maternal childbirth mortality, child mortality, it's incredible. We both studied English or took courses in English at Yale. And you talk about the class on the eight poets. Yes, English 25. I don't remember the details. But talk a little bit about that because that's, again, beautiful, sad and funny.

Well, I was an English major, so yes, I majored in English. I was too. I didn't realize you were also in a major. Yeah, yeah. And I started in 74, like decades before you were, there. Not quite, but thank you. Well, it was, I was actually probably luckier than you were because when I was there, it was the height, it was the absolute apogee of this theory known as deconstruction. Right before, you got there right before the horror of the...

No, it was well underway. I took my sophomore year, I think, lit why, which was all theory, and we were reading post-structuralism and post-modernism. I studied, you know, with Paul DeMond. No, no, Jacques Derrida was coming every year to Yale. He came when I was there, yeah. And the graduate students, he'd trail graduate students, you know. But here was the good thing. Deconstruction was a Mandarin science, and it was not identity besotted.

So my freshman year, in my English 25 class, major English poets. And we started with Chaucer. We went to Spencer, the Fairy Queen. We did Milton, Paradise Lost, and Comos and Comus and some of the other poems, and went into the Augustin period, Alexander Pope, and then the Romantics. I wrote my senior thesis on Wordsworth Prelude and ultimately ended on 20th century poet, American poet Wallace Stevens. They were all white males. And it never would have occurred to me to complain about that, that as a female, I was oppressed by reading a male and a white male to boot. It was heaven retrospectively. I didn't know how much it was heaven, but it was. Well, in the 90s, when was there maybe 2000, I don't know,

and recently, the Yale students, they all put together a petition saying that particularly for students of color, to have to sit in what was the current version of English 25, it was called something else by then, was injurious to their mental health because a person of color, an English major, should not be expected to read dead white males. And so, of course, Yale used to be the preeminent English department in the country. It gave birth to new criticism and eventually to deconstruction, but it caved. It made it an optional course, and it gave all sorts of multicultural options. And because of that, I didn't take it when I was there in the early 80s.

And I missed out on all that. It's a lot of fun to talk to you about these things because they're very, very important, but it's important to my mind that we enjoy talking about them because we have enough hope to think that by talking about them, we can move others to care about these things and maybe just to have a little bit of courage. because if you don't have courage, you're a coward, and then you get cast into the lake of fire.