And By a Sleep We Say End the Ideology of White European Supremacy Where Shakespeare Laid His Weary Head – HotAir

Welp. Right off the bat, let me note that this controversy is about a year old, and I did a post on it last March, in fact.

But it’s just caught people’s eyes again, making the rounds.

There’s not a lot to say about this one, exceptin’ let it speak for itself.

The more I read this, the more I realize how it is utterly illiterate.

How exactly do you decolonize someone’s birthplace? He lived there. No one came in and conquered his house. It’s just a house of a man that exists.

These people are exhausting

🙄 pic.twitter.com/EpW9oay8ke

— Joshua D Phillips (@JoshPhillipsPhD) March 19, 2026

Yup.

His house is what they’re referring to. The Bard’s crib in Stratford-upon-Avon has finally proven problematic for the fragile flowers of the field, who are in charge there now.

His museum must be ‘decolonised’ of all the ‘benefits’ of the ‘ideology of White European supremacy’ because that makes it not fair for him to be ‘the GOAT (greatest of all time) playwright’ as a white guy. Can’t have that.

These educated twits find it problematic that a 16th-century playwright might have a different worldview than what is acceptable to virtue-signaling social justice warriors now.

HOW DARE HE!

William Shakespeare’s birthplace will be de-colonised over fears that portraying his success as the ‘greatest’ playwright ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’.

…It wants to ‘create a more inclusive museum experience’ and announced it will move away from Western perspectives after concerns were raised that Shakespeare’s ideas were used to advance ‘white supremacy’ ideas.

The trust also said that some of its items could contain language or depictions that are racist, sexist, or homophobic.

It comes amid an ongoing backlash against the writer. Some productions of his works have been slapped with trigger warnings for misogyny, racism and ‘problematic radicalised dynamics’ that link whiteness to beauty.

How do they intend to do this to a fellow who was writing at a time when Britain ruled the waves and fought other EUROPEAN (read: white) colonial powers for supremacy of the same?

Well, lucky for the shrinking violets determined to ruin everything at the home of that very genius in England, there’s an entire cottage industry of grievance studies experts that has sprung up to deal with these thorny issues of rewriting history to suit triggered-happy snowflakes.

This was all new to me, so I’m glad I had a chance to revisit how the academic side of the house twists itself into knots trying to justify its continued existence.

Now, I tried to spare you the stolen land acknowledgement, but it’s woven all through the argle-bargle. Grivances like an ‘Anglocentric curriculum’ in a Texas university are one more symptom of ‘Latinxs intertwined racial and linguistic oppression.’

Like, sorry you have to speak English in conquered frickin’ territory called the United States of America, bishes.

Anyway, this is how they’re addressing Shakespeare’s inherent white supremacy in the English department at Texas A&M in San Antonio (Don’t send your kid there).

Decolonizing Shakespeare? Toward an Antiracist, Culturally Sustaining Praxis

…At Texas A&M University—San Antonio, where we teach, the colonial roots of the academy are readily apparent, as our campus sits on land historically belonging to the Coahuiltecan people and later occupied by the Mission Espada. An Anglocentric curriculum adds another layer to this colonial palimpsest, in a region where Latinxs have faced intertwined racial and linguistic oppression. As English faculty, we are working to craft a curriculum that can better serve our students, 82% of whom identify as Latinx. This imperative, we believe, applies to instructors throughout the United States and in other settler colonial nations, but it is all the more urgent for those of us serving students from colonized, marginalized, and otherwise oppressed groups.

But what should we do with Shakespeare, that centerpiece of the English curriculum (and our bread and butter as early modernists)? Shakespeare occupies a privileged place both in the white male canon and in the history of colonialism. His works were marshaled in the interests of empire, often celebrated as evidence of Anglo cultural supremacy, and used as part of “civilizing” colonial projects. Nonetheless, Shakespeare has repeatedly been mobilized for anti-colonial and anti-racist purposes, as in acclaimed works such as Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, which disrupt the colonial imaginaries that continue to inflict political and epistemological violence on colonized subjects. Is it then possible to decolonize the Shakespeare classroom? What would this look like? And how might we as Shakespeare professors contribute to this decolonial effort? Or, at the very least, not reinscribe colonial violence?

Below, we list pedagogical strategies we’ve developed for teaching Shakespeare in more inclusive, anti-racist, and decolonial ways. While our experience is rooted in our institutional context, these practices — many of them drawn from women of color feminisms, critical race and decolonial studies, and culturally sustaining pedagogy — may be productively adapted elsewhere. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, “Decolonization is not a metaphor” and must involve deep structural change. It is in this spirit, and in collaboration with anti-racist activists, students, artists, and scholars, that we share these moves toward decolonizing Shakespeare.

OMG that last line just cracks me up, as if the world was waiting with bated breath for these words of wisdom. What ego-driven drivel.

Now, you are more than welcome to click on through to the other side. Revel in the racist grievance lunacy if you’re one or two cocktails down, or in need of a brain worm.

I spared you that, figuring the few introductory paragraphs would be heartburn-inducing enough.

And the Tuck/Yang reference paper they quote from? Here’s a tangle of that word salad profundity:

This article aims to remind readers how distressing decolonization is. Decolonization brings with it the repatriation of Indigenous life and land. It is not a metaphor of other things we want to do to advance our societies. An easy adoption of the decolonizing discourse –which is made evident in the increasing number of calls to «decolonizing our schools», using “decolonizing methods” or “decolonizing thinking”– turns decolonization into a metaphor. No matter how significant its goals, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches, decentralizing the settler’s perspective has a set of goals that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Since settler colonialism is built upon a tangled triadic settler-native-slave structure, white, non-white, migrant, post-colonial, and oppressed people’s decolonial desires may get similarly entangled throughout resettlement, re-occupation, and reinsertion, which are indeed promoting settler’s colonialism.…

Now I do need a drink.

There was one fellow who put it all beautifully on X in his response to Elon Musk, who also had recently noticed this year-old article. This is part of what he said:

The logical problem — as you immediately recognized — is that “decolonizing” a birthplace is incoherent on its face. Nobody colonized Shakespeare’s house. He was born there. In England. In the 16th century. The English people have lived in Stratford-upon-Avon continuously since before written records. There is no colonial relationship to unwind. There is no oppressor to name. There is just a house where a man was born who happened to be the greatest writer in the history of the English language.

That last part is apparently the problem. The academics behind this project argue that calling Shakespeare “universal” or “the greatest” implies that European literary culture is the standard for high art — and that claiming a standard is itself an act of supremacy. The solution, they say, is to stop describing Shakespeare as greatest and instead present him as part of a community of “equal and different” writers globally.

There is a word for deciding that all artistic achievement across all cultures and all centuries must be declared equal regardless of evidence, influence, or endurance. That word is not scholarship. It is not inclusivity. It is the deliberate flattening of excellence because excellence, if acknowledged, creates hierarchy — and hierarchy, in this worldview, is always suspect.

Shakespeare wrote about jealousy, ambition, love, betrayal, grief, power, and mortality. He wrote about being human. That is why he has been translated into every major language on earth. That is why audiences in Japan, Nigeria, Brazil, and India have performed his plays for centuries. His universality is not a colonial imposition — it is the evidence against the accusation.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁, 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆, 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺.

THE DELIBERATE FLATTENING OF EXCELLENCE

Shakespeare’s universal appeal is the greatest testament to his lack of colonial intent. he told stories.

As this author said, across the globe, in so many languages, Shakespeare’s words make a connection with other humans, and no one has thought to deconstruct them out of umbrage.

They heard the words.

As I related last year (and many years ago on our family blog), Shakespeare spoke to a young Ebola*. It’s one of our little family’s most precious memories.

…We took an eight-year-old Ebola to see a matinee of Branaugh’s Henry V when it was released, and that has become a cherished memory in our family.

…In all of Orange County, it was only playing at a little art house theatre in Laguna Beach. I was desperate to see it and major dad thought we could hit their Saturday matinee with Ebola and be pretty safe. Getting there just as the theatre opened, we found seats we could isolate ourselves in and still see. We warned everyone who went to sit near us that “we’ve got a third-grader with us.” Almost to a one they all said “thanks for letting us know” and would move a row or two away. Except for one guy who, bless his heart, said “Really? That’s okay ~ I’d be curious to know what he thinks of it.” And he plopped down right in front of us.

This is no exaggeration ~ through the whole long thing, the one and ONLY time Ebola opened his mouth was as the French nobles were staging on the hill above the field. The English were done with “St. Crispin’s Day” speeches and scurrying through the cold and damp to their positions behind the barricades. 

As they stared at each other, Ebola whispered, “Mommy?”
“What honey?” I whispered back.
“Who are the bad guys?” he asked.
“The clean ones.”
“Okay.”
And that was it.
Magical.

And where are those equals to Shakespeare?

In this day and age, and the ease with which one can access ancient texts translated from any culture on Earth, back before there were printing presses and mass market paperbacks…where are his different ‘equals’?

And would they receive an equally thorough scrubbing of their cultural background and rewriting of history if they came from, say, any of the Muslim conquests?

…But that the dread of something after death,