Washington, D.C
Washington’s Folger Museum should stop making Shakespeare ‘woke’
Shakespeare is the great wordsmith of the English language, creator of “To be or not to be” and “Kiss me, Kate.”
He’s the most performed playwright in American history.
We call him “the Bard.”
But, we are told, we shouldn’t use that term.
“Bard” has racial undertones, Prof. Farah Karim-Cooper explains in her 2022 essay “Shakespeare through Decolonization.”
To raise Shakespeare so highly, she says, is to make him “an icon of white heritage and excellence: the conception of the man as Bard is, I argue, endemic to coloniality.”
If these allegations of supposed white guilt came from a professor of no distinction, we might ignore it.
But Karim-Cooper has been made head of the most renowned Shakespeare center in the world, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
Opened in 1932, the Folger contains 200,000 items from the Renaissance period, including the largest collection of Shakespeare materials in existence.
The Folger’s announcement praises Karim-Cooper as “a field leader in examining Shakespearean plays through the lens of social justice.”
She leads the Antiracist Shakespeare Webinar, too — a set of videos showing scholars finding race matters in every play in the corpus.
She has labored to stop the Renaissance field from suppressing racial topics and ghettoizing scholars of color.
It’s a bizarre situation, but one we see often across academia.
Individuals take the reins of cultural institutions with the intent of denigrating their prized mission.
Karim-Cooper likes Shakespeare, but wants to pull him down a few pegs.
We must “Interrogate the canon and Shakespeare’s primacy within it,” she insists.
She also insists “the Bard has a race problem,” as a Washington Post profile of her put it.
Teach Othello, she says, but set it alongside Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play American Moor.
Stop making Shakespeare so special.
The founder of the Folger Library had other intentions.
Henry Folger idolized Shakespeare and believed America had a marvelous relationship with him.
His wife Emily stated that Henry saw Shakespeare as “one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith and our hope.”
That’s why he located the library just behind the U.S. Capitol.
The Library was not to be an Ivory Tower only. It was to bring Hamlet and Caesar to Americans of all kinds.
The race obsessions of the new director, however, are an elite matter.
People who saw Ralph Fiennes in Macbeth in DC this year aren’t interested in anti-racist catechisms. They want electric acting and eloquence for the ages.
Kids in DC schools who read Romeo and Juliet in 9th Grade and Hamlet in 10th won’t necessarily appreciate those masterpieces more if their teachers apply a “lens of social justice.”
That the stewards of Henry Folger’s creation believe antiracist Shakespeare will excite the public only shows how clueless they are about common tastes.
They want a scholar-activist who will propel the Folger into the multicultural 21st century, but their action illustrates something else: the divorce of elite institutions from the American people.
This withdrawal is especially regrettable at the present time.
In 1970, 1-in-13 bachelor’s degrees were in English.
Today, it’s less than 1-in-60.
The field is marginal, and with good reason.
Will an undergrad who enjoyed Henry IV in high school want to take a class with a teacher who trades in white guilt?
A few years ago, a pack of angry students at Penn pulled down a portrait of Shakespeare in the English department and replaced it with one of contemporary poet Audre Lorde.
Faculty didn’t stop them.
Why select a field that its own practitioners don’t respect?
Leisure habits are declining as well.
Twenty years ago the National Endowment for the Arts reported that 43% of 18-24-year-olds had not read a single poem, play, novel, or short story in the preceding 12 months.
Since then, with every successive iPhone, literary reading has diminished ever more.
This is a terrible loss.
We need the Folger and other institutions to maintain Shakespeare, Whitman etc. in the lives of ordinary Americans.
Make it fun and illuminating, not troubling and culpable.
The director of the Folger regrets that people consider Shakespeare a unique “source of wisdom and humanity,” but that faith is what keeps the legacy going.
People like Karim-Cooper who traffic in identity politics are righteous scolds.
They dislike our laughter at Falstaff’s raillery and fascination with Iago’s deviltry.
These leaders will pass away, just as the Puritans who closed the theaters did in the 17th century.
Unfortunately, the damage they do will outlive them.
WASHINGTON – A deadly shooting case with ties to the National Guard and the White House is heading back to court, and prosecutors have now expanded the charges.
FOX 5’s Maureen Umeh reports this is one of the District’s highest profile cases, and the man accused in the ambush is expected to appear before a judge on Thursday.
What we know:
Prosecutors have added two new counts, and the hearing could help shape the direction of the case as it moves forward in federal court.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal is accused of opening fire on two West Virginia National Guard members near the White House the day before Thanksgiving. Prosecutors have now added two counts of assault with intent to kill, tied to the National Guard member who tackled and subdued him after the shooting.
READ MORE: Who is Rahmanullah Lakanwal? Afghan national accused of shooting 2 National Guard in DC
Specialist Sarah Beckstrom was killed. Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe was critically injured and continues to recover.
Lakanwal now faces first degree murder while armed, multiple assault charges, and several weapons offenses. Federal prosecutors say they are aggressively pursuing the case and note that nothing is off the table, including whether to seek the death penalty, one reason the case is now being handled at the federal level.
The indictment includes nine criminal counts. Lakanwal has pleaded not guilty to the initial charges.
READ MORE: Two new charges for alleged gunman in National Guard shooting
The Source: Information in this article comes from the Associated Press and previous FOX 5 reporting.
The House and Senate appropriations committees included almost $200 million in the first draft of an upcoming appropriations bill, which, if approved by Congress, would fund D.C. programs including school choice, college tuition, HIV prevention, clean rivers and police overtime.
If approved, $90 million would reimburse the District government for the cost of providing police and other support at events like large protests, state funerals and the upcoming 250 birthday celebration of the country.
While the Bowser administration is happy with the funding, the mayor sent a letter to Congress asking for an additional $10 million to offset the added costs to D.C. taxpayers for the federal surge, writing, “This higher funding level is also essential to support the ongoing federal law enforcement surge and the associated increased costs to the Metropolitan Police Department, including MPD’s work to coordinate with federal agencies, facilitate National Guard deployments, and sustain police overtime required to support the surge.”
There is also $40 million to fund D.C. tuition assistance grants, which help offset the cost of college tuition for D.C. high school grads. If approved, the funds would allow D.C. to increase the amount students could qualify for each year from $10,000 to $15,000 and boost the lifetime cap from $50,000 to $75,000.
“Which is a huge amount of money for families, and that’s going to help us help more of our residents on their pathway to getting degrees,” said Mayor Muriel Bowser’s chief of staff, Tomas Talamante.
Schools would benefit, too.
“We were able to get 17.5 for D.C. Public Schools and 17.5 million for D.C. public charter schools, as well as the 17.5 million that goes to the voucher program,” Talamante said. “We also were able to get money for HIV/AIDS prevention, about $4 million that we were able to secure for HIV/AIDS prevention. We were also able to secure $8 million for DC Water, which their clean rivers project is the huge tunnel-boring system that helps keep the Anacostia and our waterways clean.”
The legislation includes riders placing restrictions on recreational cannabis, and Congress could add other riders, including changes like doing away with cashless bail or photo traffic enforcement in the District.
The legislation still must go through the House Rules Committee before a full House vote.
WASHINGTON – A mild Tuesday is ahead for the Washington, D.C. region, with a brief chance of a wintry mix or even a few snow showers arriving late Wednesday into early Thursday.
What we know:
Tuesday starts cold, with temperatures in the 30s, but the day stays dry and warms into the low 50s with some afternoon sunshine.
Isolated showers move in Wednesday morning and linger at times throughout the day. FOX 5’s Taylor Grenda says colder air rushing into the region Wednesday into early Thursday could briefly flip that rain to a wintry mix or some light snow showers.
Any mix is expected to be brief and minimal. Snow chances should clear by early Thursday, leaving behind cold, blustery and dry conditions for the rest of the day.
What’s next:
Friday turns sunny but very cold, with highs only in the mid 30s. Saturday stays dry, and there’s a slight chance of snow showers returning on Sunday.
The Source: Information in this article comes from the FOX 5 Weather Team and the National Weather Service.
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