Saturday, June 16, 2018

For Shame!

The Harvard Medical School, obviously at the forefront of, well, every good thing, has just admitted to a long-standing bias: Harvard Medical School ashamed of white male department heads.
The Harvard University Medical School has removed portraits of former department chairs from a lecture hall because the individuals pictured are not sufficiently diverse.
School officials confirmed Friday afternoon that the portraits of 31 medical school deans—which formerly hung in the school’s Bornstein Family Amphitheater—have been “dispersed” to various lobbies and conference rooms. 
All 31 individuals depicted in the portraits are men, and while one is Chinese, the other 30 are also white.
Good god! Now, grammatical errors aside, individuals cannot be "diverse" or "not sufficiently diverse" only groups, they obviously caught this just in time. This particular group of individuals certainly seems to lean male and white. Obviously, since this is 2018, this has to be an error. Now the solution for Harvard was relatively simple: just take them down, or rather "disperse" them (probably a prelude to immolation).

Alas, for we in the classical music community, the solution won't be so easy. After all, it is 2018 for us as well and just look at this representation of the top ten composers, according to the New York Times:


Again, good god! Not only no women, but not even an Asian! People of color? Hah! Obviously we have to take this down immediately. But then what? Do we replace it with something? What? And who?

Well, I'm stumped. All I can think of is more White Males: Haydn, Shostakovich...

Help me out in the comments, would you?

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