As a book lover my entire life, I have devoured hundreds of books that I have loved, but I have never been able to finish a classic.
Hand me a poetry book by Yung Pueblo, and I’ll read it in a day. Hand me a copy of “Little Women,” and it’ll take me six months before I give up halfway. Classics are boring, riddled with racist and sexist content and written in the most painful version of the English language possible. So why are we still expected to read them?
Almost all ‘classic’ authors are white men and women, excluding the experiences of anyone with a different racial, ethnic or cultural identity. There is a complete lack of diversity within the classics, so why should we choose them over modern books that provide us with different perspectives?
I’m tired of reading Shakespearean poetry year after year. Why can’t we read Rupi Kaur instead of another boring sonnet? And don’t even get me started on the plays. Every Shakespeare work is riddled with problematic tropes, characters and themes.
“The Taming of the Shrew?” Making light of sexual assault and abuse for a cheap joke. “The Merchant of Venice?” I’ve never read something more antisemitic. “Measure for Measure?” It’s just another play about a man attempting to pressure a woman into sex, and somehow, it’s her moral duty to “preserve her chastity.”
Classics are outdated, offensive, objectionable and obstructive to our society’s progress. Continuing to laugh at the same jokes about sexual assault nearly half a century later is doing nothing but preventing us from transforming into a more aware, informed and safe society.
It’s not just Shakespeare, either, as even classic children’s authors have been proven to be problematic. Dr. Seuss was caught using racist imagery in his works, Roald Dahl made many anti-semitic remarks and used racist tropes in his works and Dickens used harmful Jewish stereotypes in his depiction of Fagin in “Oliver Twist.”
Even books that were groundbreaking at the time seem grossly outdated now. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is heralded as a great classic that tackles racial discrimination head-on, but Harper Lee told the story through a lens of white saviorism. I believe it would be far more appropriate for us to gain an understanding of white supremacy at the time through the lens of a Black author, such as William Melvin Kelley’s “A Different Drummer.”
Stop heralding classics as the epitome of literature. Investigate diverse authors with books that aren’t riddled with problematic themes and content instead.
Classic books should be left in the past with the authors who wrote them.
The Dr. Seuss collection in Kraemer Family Library. Photo by Josiah Dolan.