How Long Until Students Denounce Shakespeare As a White Imperialist?

For those who suffer from a late 20th century education and are unfamiliar with 'If', by Rudyard Kipling, here it is,

If you can keep your head when all about you       Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,    But make allowance for their doubting too;   If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;       If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster    And treat those two impostors just the same;   If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,And lose, and start again at your beginnings    And never breathe a word about your loss;If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   And so hold on when there is nothing in you    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,       Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,    If all men count with you, but none too much;If you can fill the unforgiving minute    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,       And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

The author refers to Kipling's phrase, 'the white man's burden' as an inspiration to British public school boys, possibly without realising that the poem did not deal with the British Empire at all. Indeed, its full title is, 'The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands', and is an invitation to the US to join Britain in Empire building.

However, I believe he is unduly optimistic when he paraphrases Pastor Niemöller, '"First they came for Kipling…then they came for Shakespeare." It could happen.' It's not a matter of 'could happen', it is a matter of 'will happen'. The only question is, 'When?'

From the Catholic Herald

White male writers are being attacked for who they are rather than what they write

The news that students at Manchester University have painted over Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If” (which, ironically, had been put up in the students’ union to inspire them) and replaced it with Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” does not come as a surprise, following as it does the attempt of Oxford University students to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes removed.

Kipling, like Rhodes, was an imperialist, born at a time when the British Empire stretched around the world, colouring the map a satisfactory pink in the eyes of generations of public schoolboys whose ambition was to take up “the white man’s burden” – as another poem of Kipling so arrestingly put it – and spend their lives working in the then colonial civil service.

But what the Manchester students are unwilling to see is that despite his cultural limitations, entirely understandable in their historical context, Kipling is still a great writer and thus worth reading. One definition of such writers is that they transcend their times and its inherent prejudices and remind us of our deepest and most universal longings and values. “If”, as has been pointed out, is not a racist poem at all. With its rhetorical force, its strong structure and rhythm, its clear syntax and its powerful appeal to the essential virtues of old-fashioned “manliness”, it has long been the country’s favourite poem – at least among the older generation.

Working in the Home Library Service bringing books to housebound people, on occasion I have come across elderly men who had done national service in their youth if they hadn’t fought in the last war, who could quote chunks of If by heart. These were men who had left school early to go to work; they did not have the luxury of student life. Yet they had understood that If is about core virtues and the development of character – self-control, honesty, determination, courage, will-power – and were uplifted by it, as only great poetry can uplift.

It has been noted that Kipling was a phrase-maker of genius. For instance, we sometimes read the words in If: “Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch” harnessed to the obituary of some public figure as a way of showing their essential humility, their lack of pomposity, their refusal to change according to those they mixed with. But the Manchester students are not interested in what Kipling actually wrote. I suspect that behind their criticism that If is “deeply inappropriate” and “upsetting to ethnic minorities” lie other fashionable ideologies: feminism, equality and diversity, a repugnance for seemingly elitist values and the poem’s rejection of any sense of victimhood.

I also suspect Kipling’s worst crime is that he is a dead, white male. Regardless of, for instance, Kim, the Jungle Stories, Rewards and Fairies, Stalky and Co and “My Boy Jack”, his short, lovely lament for his son, John, who was killed in the Great War, he cannot be read today because his writing does not reflect female anger, indignation and protest, as for example, Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise so obviously does.

To paraphrase the oft-quoted lines of the wartime German Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemoller, who was criticising his countrymen for their failure to speak out against Nazism, “First they came for Kipling…then they came for Shakespeare.” It could happen.