This one is intriguing. I honestly don't know how I would react, and I'd need to ask for advice, too. My first instinct would be to throw a large portion of my SF/F bookshelf at him, but I'd also know that if he was already spouting this drivel he'd probably look at my SF/F and barf in the most classist of ways, and then I'd need to move on to Actual Literature, and I'd very quickly realize that by engaging in that fight I'd end up with Actual Literature being dead white men because he said so himself in the very first volley now didn't he, and it'd be a fight I'd be preordained to lose.

Complicating matters would be the kid's admiration of the teacher. I don't know if it'd work on my kid, as she's not in high school advanced English yet, but I'd be tempted to try the tack of having the kid - who admires the teacher obviously, so there's a nice buttering up to be done there - to then start questioning his insistence on dead white dudes. This would only work if you'd already laid the groundwork that there was a lot of good literature out there by a wide variety of authors, starting from an early reading age. The kid would have to be pretty skillful, but have her insist on doing an analysis of Erdrich for one unit, or something like that - make sure it's something that she has to do a class presentation about, because getting her classmates in on this is key. I have no illusions that the teacher would come around, but he might be forced to acknowledge that this time, or perhaps in some cases there was some merit to some of these things ("these things" being, of course, works by women and non-white authors) - which of course the rest of the class would see right through (they're teenagers, and teenagers can always see right through this kind of bullshit, especially when it's illuminated by a peer), and, as a result, might actually learn something worthwhile. You'd probably diminish the kid's admiration for the teacher, but that's a small and very worthy price to pay.