Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare

Literary Hub: In the front of the classroom, the tenured professor teaching this Introduction to Literary Criticism course my sophomore year of college lectures on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I am the student of language; he, the master of language. This is the reason I came to get a higher education, after all, hoping my mastering of language and my becoming expert in a field will secure me a job, a white picket fence, a 401k, financial security. I want to be all-knowing like this white professor and my white peers, like the white teachers in high school and the white children in my kindergarten classroom—because they are so smart, I tell myself, because their language is so pretty.