SACRAMENTO, Calif. – A high school English teacher in Sacramento wrote in to The Washington Post to explain why she doesn’t think her inner-city minority students can relate to “a long-dead, British guy.”

In her op-ed in the Post, Luther Burbank High School English teacher Dana Dusbiber writes that she personally doesn’t like Shakespeare because his early form of the English language can be difficult to understand, but she avoids assigning his works to her students for a different reason entirely.

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“What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important,” Dusbiber wrote.

“I do not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach my students about the human condition. I do not believe that not viewing ‘Romeo and Juliet’ or any other modern adaptation of a Shakespeare play will make my students less able to go out into the world and understand language or human behavior. Mostly, I do not believe I should do something in the classroom just because it has ‘always been done that way.’”

Dusbiber argues that her mostly minority students would benefit more from oral traditions from Africa or Latin America or Asia than reading the most famous author in the world.

“Why do our students not deserve to study these ‘other’ literatures with equal time and value? And if time is the issue in our classrooms, perhaps we no longer have the time to study the Western canon that so many of us know and hold dear,” she wrote.

In essence, Dusbiber concludes that because Shakespeare is white, and lived in Europe, so he doesn’t have a lot to offer students of color. Instead, urban English teachers would be better off finding authors that look like their students, and whose works reflect their life conditions.

“IF we only teach students of color, as I have been fortunate to do my entire career, then it is far past the time for us to dispense with our Eurocentric presentation of the literary world,” Dusbiber wrote. “Conversely, if we only teach white students, it is our imperative duty to open them up to a world of diversity through literature that they may never encounter anywhere else in their lives. …

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“Let’s let Shakespeare rest in peace, and start a new discussion about middle and high school right-of-passage reading and literature study.”

The teacher’s apparently racist take on high school English didn’t sit well with Matthew Truesdale, an English teacher at Wren High School in Piedmont, South Carolina. Truesdale penned his own editorial for the Post about why Dusbiber is off-base, and why he thinks Shakespeare’s race is irrelevant.

Dusbiber “argues that her students shouldn’t have to read Shakespeare because other literature ‘better speaks to the needs of my ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.’ She then goes on to write that it might be ‘appropriate to acknowledge him as a chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.’

“So what Shakespeare wrote 450 years ago is not applicable to her teaching today? Ethnically diverse students don’t foolishly fall in love and over-dramatize every facet of that experience? Or feel jealousy or rage? Or fall victim to discrimination? Or act desperately out of passion?” Truesdale questioned.

“To dismiss Shakespeare on the grounds that life 450 years ago has no relation to life today is to dismiss every religious text, every piece of ancient mythology (Greek, African, Native American, etc.), and for that matter, everything that wasn’t written in whatever time defined as ‘NOW.’”

Shakespeare’s race is also less relevant than the plots, characters and lessons in his works, Truesdale said.

“And yes – Shakespeare was in fact a white male. But look at the characters of Othello and Emila (among others), and you’ll see a humane, progressive, and even diverse portrayal of the complexities of race and gender,” he wrote in the Post.

Truesdale concluded by explaining why he believes Dusbiber’s perspective on Shakespeare is short-sighted, and why reading his works is about more than whether his skin color matches students in Sacramento.

From Truesdale’s Post op-ed:

Also–where does it say that we can’t teach Shakespeare AND oral African tradition? In fact, why not work to draw links between the two? And should we only read authors that look like us and have experiences like us? Or for that matter, does a commonality in skin color mean a commonality in experience? I teach at a rural South Carolina school with a mostly white population—should I only teach white authors? Will all of my white students feel an immediate kinship to Faulkner or Hemingway to Twain? Will all of my female students see themselves perfectly in the characters of Flannery O’Connor? Will all of my black students read A Raisin in the Sun and immediately connect to the desperation and inner turmoil of Walter Younger? Obviously not.

Ms. Dusbiber’s argument is largely reductive, and it turns the English classroom into a place where no one should be challenged or asked to step out of their comfort zone, where we should not look beyond ourselves.

I, however, think English class is the perfect place to push and prod and even piss off students sometimes, and I can’t do that if I’m only ever holding up a mirror. Windows are good, too.