dead white male

[ded hwahyt meyl, wahyt]

noun

Slang: Disparaging.

1. (sometimes initial capital letters.),  one of a group of white male writers, scientists, or other historical figures whose works have traditionally dominated the field or been a disproportionate part of the school curriculum in the West: DWM

   to expand the literary canon of dead white males to include important works by women.

Word History and Origins

Origin of dead white male¹

First recorded in 1965–70

Example Sentences

The composer Robert Schumann was an inventive and joyous writer, maybe more than any other dead white male composer.

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Shakespeare is by far the most famous author to be squeezed through the social justice cheesecloth, as #DisruptTexts also went after F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Golding and other dead White male writers who long dotted high school syllabi.

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Where that will leave the market for dead white male avant-garde artists is anyone’s guess.

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But, even though Beauchamp recommends reading outside the dead white male canon to understand liberalism, he underplays what I believe is a major, if not the major, objection that conservative thinkers have to liberal democracy: They hate the liberation of women.

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This was a direct hit at her dead father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the Victorian patriarch who had been the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a dead white male heterosexual enterprise.

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