“Straight talk on race”
Mitali Perkins has written an interesting article on race in YA literature in today’s SLJ. I wonder if teachers are being taught how to address race while they’re at Teacher’s College. Perhaps they are today, but what about teachers who earned their degrees a few decades ago? Because race is socially constructed, everything we know about race, WE LEARNED. And can subsequently unlearn or relearn. But you first have to admit that you learned *something* and that something informs how and what you teach. One student at Brooklyn College asked me how I became aware of my own invisibility when I grew up reading and loving Victorian literature. I told her that I didn’t have a framework for my own marginalization until I took a course on Politics and Literature in my last semester at college; then I studied imperialism, and postcolonialism, and only THEN did I begin to recognize the ways I had been wiped off the page by the authors I so deeply loved. In my paper I quote Jamaica Kincaid, whom I adore, and was introduced to in that course:
Although Kincaid has brilliantly critiqued the lasting effects of colonialism caused by ‘the bad-minded English’, she is less severe in her evaluation of British novelists. Speaking of her fidelity to novels like Jane Eyre, Kincaid explains: ‘You can’t begin to understand me until you read certain things. I didn’t begin to understand myself until I read certain things. The things that were most important to me were written by people who didn’t look like me’. Though I disagree with Kincaid’s assertion that ‘injustice is not in literature’, I must admit that I, too, share this strange literary inheritance and/or debt.
At first I was wracked with guilt–how could I have CHOSEN to read these novels when there were so many writers of color out there in the world? But then I forgave myself, and today I have no shame about my literary origins. When I teach BIRD, I use West African adinkra symbols to explain the importance of understanding and honoring your past. The sankofa bird looks over its shoulder, often with a gem in its mouth; this symoblizes the idea that “there is no shame in going back to retrieve something of value you left behind.” At first, I thought I’d left *myself* behind by choosing to read books that never featured any people of color. But now I see that there’s value in those Victorian narratives, and I can draw from them meaning and material for the stories I write today. I wasn’t “radicalized” until my last year of college when Prof. Tucker introduced me to Kincaid’s work. It would be unbelievably transformative if teachers radicalized our youth before they even GOT to college…but unfortunately, the school system and its curriculum aren’t designed for that.
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