Post by Dim WitteOn Thu, 28 Oct 2021 14:53:02 -0700 (PDT), gggg gggg
Post by gggg gggghttps://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/10/10/u-of-michigan-prof-ousted-from-shakespeare-class-after-showing-sir-laurence-oliviers-othello/
To bring into focus the concepts of racism and discrimination, I
suppose that the cast of Othello be reversed, going from black face to
white face, so that only Othello is white and all the rest black.
Possibly Shakespeare would have considered doing this himself, as in
Hamlet he brings up the current practice of using boys for women and
companies of child actors.
"In Hamlet we see Shakespeare as an accomplished dramatist, skilfully
wielding this power and playing with the concepts of ‘acting' and
‘reality' with which his audience were so familiar."
University of Michigan is famous for its racist programs, such as
affirmative action with student applications, confirmed by SCOTUS in
2003, and now similar discrimination in favor of selection of tenured
teaching staff that suits their agenda.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/u-m-to-launch-several-new-anti-racism-initiatives/
1. Creating a task force on policing and public safety for the Ann
Arbor campus.
2. Hiring at least 20 new full-time faculty members in the next three
years with scholarly expertise in racial inequality and structural
racism.
3. Expanding resources and infrastructure to support new and current
U-M scholars working in the area of anti-racism.
4. Re-evaluating race and ethnicity curriculum requirements across the
university’s 19 schools and colleges.
5. Strengthening faculty and staff professional development
opportunities related to anti-racism.
6. Incorporating ways to address structural racism in the university’s
Democracy & Debate Theme Semester.
7. Creating a task force to develop a community-engaged process for
diversifying the names considered for campus spaces, facilities, and
streets.
Haven't heard the latest buzz-word definitions of "racism" and
"discrimination," but assume they are "code words" by now, so that
they only fit into Darwinism in some reversed manner. My guess is
that Darwin's Rules are that racism is a propaganda device used by
political agendas, and discrimination is absolutely neccessary for
survival.
There has already been a reverse-casting Othello starring Patrick Stewart - no need for anyone to paint their face like an idiot https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/othello-twist-on-timeless-tragedy/2013/04/09/19856f18-a159-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_story.html
The play was not written about racism, rather racism is the context for a play about murderous jealousy. In which someone who is an outsider is more vulnerable to suspicion about those who love him, both his wife and friends.
The racism of Shakespeare's own time was of a very different order from our own time. All the Black Londoners Shakespeare saw in his audiences were free men and women - no slaves were held on any British territory in his lifetime.
The Hispanic concept of a lower race based on skin colour that was used to justify the economic crutch of slavery for colonial societies who could not enslave indigenous peoples (or had already exterminated them) was not elevated to official policy until a few years after his death in the British colonies and, debatably, in England itself.
Indeed, the final establishment of the principle that no person could be actively enslaved in England itself was based on the ruling in 1772 that slavery "is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law". (Followed by many such positive laws in colonies that separated from England in 1776 as well as in the Caribbean.)
Shakespeare's society and our own are thus separated by two hundred and fifty years of the odious racist mind-set that justified slavery with the same false narrative of "race" that is still used to discriminate against people of colour today, 150 years after it was officially ended, even in the United States.
In fact, of course, there is no difference whatsoever between humans, apart from what is instrinsic to themselves, as Shakespeare explored in all humanity's wide variety. Skin colour is not a flag that denoted any quality of character and there is, arguably, no clearer example of the judgement of people "not by the colour of their skin but the content of their character" in a world before slavery than Shakespeare himself and the characters he wrote into being.
Shakespeare's black characters - the villain Aaron, tragic Cleopatra, jealous Othello, witty Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost - are not racial stereotypes (though they may be played that way in a racist society - indeed Rosaline is still usually performed in "white face" even though described as "black as ebony" on the grounds that she is bright, beautiful, and adored by Berowne so must be white). Shakespeare's only portrayal of a slave, Caliban, is a literal semi-human: half -witch and half-devil. And he has been placed in penal servitude, with tortures, not for that face but for his own actions. But even then he is freed, as is Ariel and the other spirits, by a Prospero who faces up to the corrupting power of being a "master" and finally rejects its temptations.
Hopefully, the efforts being made on campuses to tackle the ingrained racism legacy of centuries of justifying slavery will eventually succeed and future audiences may be able appreciate Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them without inner prejudice based on skin colour.
As for Darwin, he never had anything to say about divisions within the human race, as opposed to other hominids. You're talking about Social Darwinism which, again, only emerged after his death and was used to justify eugenics and Nazism.