This chapter starts to talk about words and meanings in a deep way- Sister, Brother, “brutha,” “sistah,” names, revolve, revolution, change... I think that this presentation is an example of good multicultural literature because it raises questions rather than proposing answers. In some ways, this is all that Historical Fiction can do, as it’s not about “fixing” the present for anywhere from a single character to an entire nation. Showing the past in a way that questions our black and white assumptions (pun unintended but present) about it can help us toward understanding then, and today. But like the methods fetish, there is no one solution.
I’m also starting to wonder if I will be able to determine whether or not this is a good example of African American history or not by the time I get to the end of the book. I think not. However, I can take the author’s background and the accolades too numerous to make out the picture on the cover as valid certifications. All the same, this book is raising questions that I want to talk about and for that reason alone I would like to teach it.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I wonder if it’s actually bad to teach bad books? Of course, it is bad to teach bad books as if they were good books, without questions, but in my experience the bad examples of Native Americans (Ten Little Rabbits, Ann Rinaldi’s books) come up in Children’s Literature classrooms more often than good. It’s as if we can identify the things that are done wrong, but as outsiders, not the things that are done correctly. Perhaps even insiders can’t identify things done correctly as each book is just one story that may or may not match any of their own experiences regardless of having ethnicity in common with the protagonist (Adichie’s “story”). All the same, I think that we can learn from bad examples- they give us something to talk about and capitalize on our instinctive abilities to denote difference better than similarity. They’ve often been condemned by cultural insiders who become our experts. In this case, reading reviews of multicultural books written by people who are likely to be qualified as insiders can be very helpful.
Another thought running through my head, is that what this project is missing is reading the book with a diverse group of people that can share and promote readings from outside my cultural perspective. Most of my colleagues in children’s literature are very similar to me- middle class White women, although they do span across a wider age range than one would typically expect. I always talk with my students about how important the social aspects of reading are and just as I’m getting a lot out of this period of reflection, I could get even more out of social conversation. Unfortunately, as Darling-Hammond laments in her article, our prospective teachers do not come from as wide of an array of cultural backgrounds as we would like to see. All of the students with “other-skin,” non-dominant skin, repressed skin colors have been almost completely weeded out by the time I have 28 out of 30 pink students in front of me. Since we talk about things differently in homogeneous groups than diverse groups, how can we talk about this book in the best, most thorough, most exploratory, most expansive way? Not that any introduction class can really thoroughly explore a subject, thoroughness an exponential curve that possibly never closes in on complete exploration. Regardless, I feel the obligation to prepare my students for their teaching careers with a solid grounding that addresses the most pertinent subjects in as meaningful a way as possible. I think that awareness of multicultural issues within literature is one of these subjects, although I am not alone in this- my other two colleagues also believe in this importance and spend time with these issues.
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