Required Reading for Required Change
Harvard University Press recently published Race in America: A Reader, with a foreword and introduction by Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and a professor of history at Harvard University. This collection of essays by a number of esteemed writers and academics is an important sociological examination of American culture past and present through the lens of race. Given the urgency of this topic now, the press is offering the electronic version of the book for free, hoping to spark as much conversation as possible — conversation, that is, that will lead to way overdue change in America culture, politics, education, law enforcement, and more.
There are, thankfully, many excellent options when it comes to contemporary books on race and racism in America — from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow to Isabelle Wilkerson’s Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns to Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. Directly related to education is the 2018 edition of Beverly Daniel Tatum’s groundbreaking book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? There are also a wide array of books on White identity and privilege. I encourage our readers to read any or all of these books and find ways to connect them to the work they do in schools.
In reading Race in America recently, I was struck by the ways this range of scholarship and race-related themes intersect with school culture and curricula. From the first paragraph in the first piece — Toni Morrison’s “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992) — it’s clear that education, though not addressed directly, is deeply woven into the race fabric of America. How deep?
“For some time now,” Morrison writes, “I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as ‘knowledge.’ This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States.”
Morrison makes it clear that American literary scholars have not only long favored the perspectives and writing of White males and that we have continued to promote such a perspective in the majority of our schools, but also that “the very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists” because of race and racism. “It may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary ‘blackness,’ the nature — even the cause — of literary ‘whiteness,’ ” writes Morrison.
This is a complex essay primarily aimed at literary critics and scholars. But for precollegiate educators, it helps to know we are caught up in this story — and that we can do our own investigation into how we think about what matters in literature — about how and what we teach. Why, Morrison asks, have we been evading race in our conversations about important American literature? She goes on to note how race plays a central role in the works of Henry James, Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and more. But the topic gets very little attention in literary criticism or in schools today. Is “the habit of ignoring race… understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture?” Morrison asks.
Ultimately, Morrison wants an honest, open scholarship that looks not only into the life and minds of the enslaved but also to “see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.” Just as literary scholarship has revealed the ways our culture has been deeply sexist, it’s time, Morrison says, to reveal the ways in which we’ve ignored race in the works of so-called major American writers (mostly white and male) and in the way we don’t elevate much of the work by African-American writers to the level of “literature of importance.” Morrison wants us to see the ways an “Africanist presence” pervades all of American literature — even as writers have tried to downplay or hide the fact. No doubt scholarship has improved since Morrison’s essay was first published, but her essential criticism still holds. If more of us who teach literature started examining the “great” books with this thought in mind, we’ll start to see how we can teach American literature with greater clarity and truth.
In Race in America, we are also brought into an Antebellum Slave Market in New Orleans. We are shown the struggles of Black Americans during World War I. We witness the condemnation of Blackness following the 1890 U.S. Census. We experience our nation’s abuse of the indigenous Utes through violence and broken treaties during the westward expansion. We watch as the U.S. government’s war on poverty morphs into the U.S. government’s war on crime — leading to the mass incarceration. Through Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity” (2018), we gain a deeper understanding of the complex challenge of forming an American identity as a person of color in a racist society.
Perhaps most instructive for educators is Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s essay that examines the racism that emerged from 1890 Census, the first to gather statistics about free Black people in America. While that statistics were likely accurate, the explanation for the statistics regarding Black Americans was guided by pure bias, leading to the notion among dominant Whites that Black people were a dangerous race with a penchant toward crime — a mindset that is still embedded in the White power structure of our society today. In this research lies the cautionary tale about how we tend to take our statistical truths and bend them toward self-serving story — in this case, proof of White superiority.
As educators, part of our job is to carefully examine all aspects of school life to see where the remnants of this mindset remain embodied — be it the literature we choose, the expectations we hold for students, our interactions with families, or our understanding of what it means to be a well-functioning, diverse school community — and then to excise them.
Race in America can help with this process. This book is also a flat-out great one to use with older students — as a way to help them better understand American history and culture and as a window through which they can see and discuss race in their own lives and engage in the process of cultural change.
Another important read today is Ibram X. Kendi’s September 2020 article for The Atlantic, “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?” In it, Kendi reminds us that amid all the fear and trepidation associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s good news: “[W]e are living in the midst of an antiracist revolution.”
Kendi believes this could, in fact, mark the beginning of the end of American racism, but in order for that to happen, we need to face up to the depth of racism is American history and culture. We can’t just aim to dismantle monuments, he writes; we need to embrace the “awesome task of reshaping the country with antiracist policies.” He wants us to see this moment as a point of no return in which we demand equitable results and demand that our representatives use their power “to radically reduce inequity and injustice, or be voted out.”
For those of us in education, this nationwide movement for racial justice offers an opportunity for us to both join the larger push for antiracist policies in every major American institution while also looking more closely at how racially equitable schools can and should be organized and operated.
Michael Brosnan is the Senior Editor at Teaching While White.