Hard Core: Get It?

Every so often, some furious student group will come along and demand that Columbia's Core curriculum feature more dead minority figures. They argue that the Core is oppressive and exclusive, a who's who of dead white men. This is basically correct. It's also a great argument for keeping the Core exactly as it is. Our required classes reek with the shame of dazzling historical cruelty, and that makes them perfect for teaching us about Western civilization.

Only an idiot would try to argue that the Core is diverse. Having completed every Core class except for Art Hum, I haven't even gotten a representative picture of white people. In Lit Hum, for instance, we studied ten Greek texts and never made it to America, a place many historians would describe as a crucial Western nation. The Core's exclusion goes beyond racism, reaching victims you may never have considered. Portuguese people once divided the world between themselves and Spain. Surely they must have done something with their half, but I don't know what, and Columbia doesn't care to tell me.

The people who make the Core, whoever they are, have made a halfhearted attempt to correct this bias with blatant tokenism. We've basically got the academic equivalent of a bad Saturday morning cartoon here. Sargent DuBois is our comical explosives expert, although sometimes he vaguely makes reference to the difficulty of growing up on the streets. Captain Woolf is our sassy pilot who acts just like one of the guys, except she makes wisecracks about men and beats them in fights. We put them there to represent their groups, and that's all we let them do. From Germans we get a groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. From minorities we get "stop mistreating minorities." The grad students who lead the classes might as well say, "Monday we're discussing a Woman, and Wednesday be sure you're prepared to talk about a Black Guy."

As a further compromise, we also have to take courses in major cultures. This is an equally stupid solution, and once again I am in favor of it, because it aptly sums up Western thinking. For parts of Europe and America, we study literature, philosophy, music, and art. For the entire rest of the world, we take an A course and a B course. I met this requirement with one class about Latin American literature and one about salsa music. I'm now somewhat knowledgeable about two aspects of culture spanning less than a century of an entire hemisphere's history. As far as Columbia is concerned, that's good enough; I basically know everything worth knowing about the rest of the world. Like many others, I will leave Columbia having read no works by anyone from China or India, which, I am told, contain a third of the world's population.

As we all know, this mind-set, which privileges learning all of the Greek playwrights over any of the Asian anythings, accurately represents the West throughout history. Take that time we discovered America. Instead of making cultural exchanges with the natives, we gave them beads and smallpox in exchange for their land and then chuckled about what suckers they were. And it's not like we've outgrown our old ways. Our compromise now is that the natives get casinos, which we like anyway, and we keep their land. In the West, we don't just punch the new kid and take his lunch money; we go to other schools and punch their new kids.

As a result, minorities haven't had much of a chance to do anything canonical in our culture. Quick, name three women painters. I've been told that this is possible, but I can't get past Georgia O'Keefe. The trouble with adding the work of the oppressed to the Core is that we don't have much to add. Even when their work has been good, as it often has, it hasn't usually been influential, which is a big part of this canon thing. It's also not super-useful to me as a citizen of the West, which is the same problem you run into when you try to add in other cultures. I know that Africans have created some great music, but I can't envision a situation in which I could possibly need (or even really want) proficiency on the thumb-piano. We have a hard time adding the oppressed to the Core because we've spent our whole history keeping them out.

The short story here is that the West, in art and philosophy as well as in history, has pretty much always left people out of the good seats. Clearly, the Core accurately reflects this. The only grounds for disliking it are that Western culture isn't worth studying, which is fine, but sort of defeats the purpose of coming to Columbia. The majority of us plan to be citizens of the Western world, and even those who don't will have to contend with it as that thing that keeps crushing people. If you want to know more about Chinese statues, go study Chinese statues, but I don't need to know about them in the same way that all of us need to understand the force behind this Western hegemony, especially if it's as oppressive as we claim. The Core is racist and imperialist, and that's great, because we are too.