Crashed Courses: Anti-Muslim Bias in John Green's "Crash Course in World History"

Friday, October 1, 2021
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM
CSU 201 or Zoom

John Green’s “Crash Course in World History is a free YouTube pedagogical series of 72 twelve minutes videos. They are some of the most widely used sources in Middle School and High school in the US and are part of a larger platform/YouTube channel launched in 2011. World History was the first series to be launched, and the slate of topics for the channel ranges from Biology to Psychology, including over 32 distinct subjects. According to its YouTube channel page, these videos have accumulated over 1.4 billion views and have 12 million subscribers. For a point of reference, ESPN, the sports mega-giant, has 7 million subscribers on YouTube. The website tracker Social Blade estimates that the Crash Course channel may earn up to $971,000 per year. In the past I have published research on anti-Muslim bias in World History textbooks. I decided to apply a similar pedagogy to the John Green videos. To give a little background, World History emerged from the ashes of the Western Civilization course with little or no immediate revision. Many of the underlying assumptions made in the narrative, which in its inception is a white supremacist narrative, are therefore carried over into World History. Additionally, rather than discarding the core or trunk of the old narrative and its presumption that White, Christian, Northern and Western European men are superior, it is largely kept in place and parts were simply added on to it. Think of a fruit tree with limbs grafted on. I call this process grafting and for the purposes of anti-Muslim bias, it generates problems wherever the Western narrative came into conflict with the Islamic World narrative. The birth of Islam, the Crusades, the Reconquista and the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire proved fertile grounds for Islamophobia. Secondly, the process of adding new content about the Islamic world to the trunk narrative also reproduces the prejudices of our contemporary American society. Mirroring is the process of recreating the sentiments and racist fascinations of our own beliefs. These issues tend to arise around where gender, sexuality, and violence are discussed in the sources. For readers unfamiliar with the CRASH COURSE IN WORLD HISTORY series, Green’s videos are known for their frenetic pace and his rapid speaking style. I did find significant bias in the videos. I will discuss and analyze these issues in my presentation.

 

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