After reading the egregious article, “Teacher: I Don’t Teach Shakespeare Because He’s White,” I am reminded of William F. Buckley, Jr., writing in The Governor Listeth, in an essay (written in 1969) entitled, “Middle-Class Values”:

I thought I had seen everything–I hoped I had–in the student world of unreason. But the all-time champion effrontery was as yet uncommitted. It was left to a seventeen-year-old Negro boy called Rickey Ivie whose Black Student Union has touched off disorders in a Los Angeles high school in a demonstration against “raciest training.” An example of that training is the inclusion in the curriculum of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He is described by Master Ivie as “that old, dead punk.” “In the world of music,” he explains, “the schools keep imposing middle-class values in teaching us about Bach.”

I sat next to a middle-class French countess the other day who announced to me that she did not like Bach. I felt like asking her, did she like color, or fresh air, or trees–when suddenly I realized that she figured that her dislike of Bach was Bach’s fault–such is the egomania of democratism. If one really doesn’t like Bach, why I suppose one shouldn’t listen to him. But one should then be disturbed about oneself, not about Bach.

The remarkable thing about young Ivie isn’t, one supposes, that he doesn’t like Bach–probably he had never let himself listen to Bach. It is that author of such a remark as he made about Bach, he hasn’t become the laughingstock of his fellow students. Eccentricity is one thing (the late publisher of the New York Times specified that no Mozart should be played at his funeral). To call the greatest genius who ever lived an “old, dead punk,” the least of whose cantatas will do more to elevate the human spirit than all the black student unions born and unborn, is not so much contemptible as pitiable: conducive of that kind of separation one feels from animals, rather than from other human beings.

 

The Best of Charles Burris