Providence College English professor Anthony Esolen describes in the latest issue of Intercollegiate Review the negative impact of an undue emphasis on an individual’s race, class, and/or gender.

Whenever we meet a human being, then, we meet that extraordinary creature who can think of time past and time to come, and times that never were. We meet one whose next thought rarely has to do with food or the act of sex but with shaking a bough of wet leaves to see the drops spatter and splash, or with a jest to cap the jest of a friend as they sit on a shady porch, or with one who walks down to the quiet graveyard to place a vase of flowers at her mother’s headstone, to stand awhile there, and say a prayer, and think of her while the cardinals whistle their love calls from the trees.

If we are to know that human being, we should not begin with race or class or “gender,” that category invented by social critics who avert their eyes, prim and prying at once, from the frank and plain reality of sex. We certainly cannot end there. If I say, “Who is John?” you cannot answer me correctly by saying that he is six feet tall, 150 pounds, with Italian and Irish ancestry on his mother’s side and African American and Latino ancestry on his father’s side, with a family income of such and such a year, voting in such a pattern, living on Maple Street and selling insurance. These are all things about John, but they are not John, the man. It does violence to the man to reduce him to such categories. It is an act of contempt for his humanity. It reduces him, not so that we may get to know him, but so that we can manipulate facts about him while not getting to know him at all. It is a study in subhumanity.

That is exactly what schoolteachers, professors, and critics do to John’s art when they cram it into the pigeonholes of race, class, and gender. It is an act of violence. …

… [T]he reduction is not only violent. It is stupid. It misses the point. It’s as if someone were present when a woman broke an alabaster jar of perfume over the feet of the Lord, and anointed them, and wept, and dried them with her hair; and were to say, “How much did that perfume cost? The proceeds could have been given to a political action campaign for the poor!” Or as if someone were to read of a sinful man’s falling to his knees to beg forgiveness of the girl he had attempted to murder when she was an infant, and instead of noticing the resurrection of a human soul, were to declare that Shakespeare’s Tempest is really about colonies (there are no colonies in the play) in the New World (it’s in the Mediterranean), established by men of adventure (the protagonist was shipwrecked and is trying to get back home) to make their fortune (he will bring back nothing). A world full of election days, and never an Easter. …