Odysseus so white

English teachers at Oakland's College Preparatory School, one of the most expensive private schools in California, have "let go" of Homer's Odyssey as part of a pledge to "decenter whiteness," writes Corbin K. Barthold in City Journal. It's his alma mater. They dropped Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons for “a contemporary novel by a woman of color, text still to be decided.”

Freshmen read "short stories and essays by authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amy Tan, Ocean Vuong, and Claudia Rankine," he notes. (Baldwin is the only male -- but he was gay.) Sophomores are allowed one reading by a white male, Hamlet.

Juniors and seniors learn what "today’s environmental writers” think about “environmental racism and injustice.” (So, no Thoreau.) Other seminars include “Black Futures & Realities: Intro to Afrofuturism,” “Reframing Native American Literature,” and “Chicanx Literature’s First Wave and Beyond.”

"This is not a 'diverse' curriculum," writes Barthold. "It is a narrow, stunted, parochial one." College Prep is "banishing difference and strangeness, piety and skepticism, nobility and revolt."

The school exists to get students into Ivy+ colleges. I wonder if this curriculum helps or hurts its very, very privileged students.

It's not just the humanities, wrote John D. Sailer in 2021, also in City Journal.

The school’s honors biology course began with a week-long orientation on bias and prejudice in the sciences and included units on “how the concept of the gene has been used to perpetuate racism and eugenics.” In the engineering and design course, “students learned that many professionals create products based on their own demographic, which tilts white.”

Math teachers, "whenever possible, changed the names on theorems from the white European versions," the world languages department required "explicit conversations and content about social justice, colonialism, and inequity" and Drama Tech students “designed a show in the style of a non-theatrical artist focused exclusively on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists.”