The Happy Tutor asks, via email:

Why not ask what it is that we all have in common that might enable us to unite under a common banner for common decency? That used to be called "Universalism," "Glassy Essence," "Human Right," "Nature," "Natural Law." What say you?

In a perfect world, we would all be perceived and treated as equal beings. That equal status would in turn produce a more homogeneous voice of humankind, and at that point it wouldn't matter what race/gender/miscellaneous identity we studied.

This world that exists right now doesn't provide these conditions. We all come from different spaces in society, and therefore have different experiences and different ideas. Perhaps the reason there's not been much uniting under many common banners so far is that people don't understand how alike we really are. If one lives within an insular area or social strata, then opportunities to get to know people who are different from oneself may be limited. College provides the first chance many people have to begin to see outside of themselves. For instance, I was educated primarily in private, religious schools in the South*. From fourth grade until I hit college, I encountered a grand total of one student who was not Caucasian. That's why I think it's so important that disparate voices are represented at all educational levels, but particularly at the university level. Until I got there, my understanding of how other people thought and acted and the issues they faced was minimal, and I had no tools to look outside my own worldview. Reading across widely mixed demographics for the past ten years (as well as mixing in signficantly wider social circles) has given me those tools.

Don't get me wrong: I have no problem with dead white guys. Hell, I have degrees in Dead White Guys, only the University put "Literature" and "Rhetoric" on them instead. I enjoyed getting those, both of which were largely based on knowledge of traditional canons. And I've written before on my feelings about men and exclusionary feminism. I don't think we should toss out the old guard, not by any means. Rather, we should seek to incorporate different voices with theirs. To paraphrase Alice Walker, I had to read Shakespeare and Zora Neale Hurston, Donne and Tsao Hsueh-Chin, Byron and Jim Carroll, Faulkner and Ferlinghetti, before I could begin to feel anything approaching well read at all. Reading all of this taught me that skin and class and country and sexual preference mean so little, that we are essentially all the same**.

Eudora Welty said something about this in a 1973 interview:

I shall always keep my belief that good literature is always about one subject - mankind. We in the South may portray the South, Northern writers may portray the North; indeed, Chinese writers may portray China. But if their works are good, they are really about mankind, everybody everywhere.

Time will not diminish such works. Things like love and hate, justice and injustice, good and bad, truth and lies, they endure, they are still the same, no matter the skin they wear, no matter the year they were written about.***

Studying topic-specific theory accomplishes much the same thing for me that literature does. It teaches me to think critically about the issues that specific groups are facing instead of just buying into the party line about these issues. Studying Queer Theory totally changed my ideas about what queerness is and how it functions within the larger societal structures. Reading Feminist Theory has also changed how I think about feminism, and taught me that there's no way I can align myself with most feminist theorists currently out there. Had I not studied these things, I would never have really known.

My point is this: If we continue to read and teach the same things we always have, then we'll continue to be the same people we've always been. A continuation of the traditional canon doesn't leave enough room for advancement toward something greater than we already are. We do need a common banner and a common decency, and reading each other is one of the things that might help get us there.

*Lordy, I don't think it gets much more insular than a Southern Baptist school in 1988. But you know, I don't think this insularity is by any means limited to the South.
**Incidentally, reading blogs does much the same thing for me. It opens up daily lives in worlds I would never have had access to otherwise. Every day, I get to learn more about what it's like to be a professor-priest-dad in Chicago, a gay expat in Sweden, a British mom living in Belgium, or a married coding queen in Wisconsin.
***Conversations with Eudora Welty, 153.
****Foucault (heh!) might suggest that women's, queer and ethnic studies are absolutely essential because anything less provides a lopsided picture of power relations. I think that anything less provides a lopsided picture of human relations.