) that have been performed around the world. His output also includes a roster of other compositions that get appreciative hearings in many concert halls, along with other honours and awards that could make accomplished people very envious.
As the reporting on the recent fracas at the University of Michigan described it, in our current age of social media, as smartphones are used during classes as well as in the time between them, the electronic rumbling over Sheng’s choice of the cinematic scene-setter began building almost from the moment Olivier’s Othello strode on to the set of the film. In blackface.
“Within hours, Professor Sheng had sent a terse email issuing the first of what would be two apologies. Then, after weeks of emails, open letters and cancelled classes, it was announced on Oct. 1 that Professor Sheng — a two-time Pulitzer finalist and winner of a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant — was voluntarily stepping back from the class entirely, in order to allow for a ‘positive learning environment’.
But the awkward question of “blackface” remains, especially as it has been a part of the national texture for a long time. Back in the early 1960s, the traditional Philadelphia New Year’s Parade had always featured competitive bands, the Mummers, who spent the year creating elaborate costumes and practising intricate marching routines.
As CNN reported it at the time, “Democratic Virginia Gov Ralph Northam confirmed Friday he was in a racist yearbook photo showing one person dressed in blackface and another in the KKK’s signature white hood and robes, and apologised for ‘the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now’.
All very well, but the point is that the whole university experience has been inverted. Woke students now demand that lecturers and professors get taught what the super-fragile, unsafe, afraid students already know. That a actual holocast survivor is pilloried is just obscene.