Underrepresentation: School Novels as a Privileged Person
By: M. David Dutton
Tags: Malcom X, High School, Classic Literature, Systemic Racism

A bit of foreword, this is in response to Tricia Ebarvia’s article “Why Diverse Texts Are Not Enough”. It should be known that this was an assignment in a college English class, and I’ve taken pride in how it came out (which is my reasoning for posting. So without further ado…

The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies and The Great Gatsby all have four things in common: they were all written before 1960, they were all written by white authors, all have white protagonists, and I didn’t learn a darn thing from any of them. A fifth commonality amongst them is the fact that nearly everyone who went to high school has read most, if not all, of them.

This is problematic in that anyone who isn’t straight and white, and to a large extent male, do not see themselves reflected in the texts they are assigned to read.

Most would say a common sense solution to this issue is to introduce more texts written by and featuring figures from marginalized groups. But it isn’t such an easy fix.

Tricia Ebarvia, an English teacher and author, calls on upon teachers to do more for their students in her essay “Why Diverse Texts Aren’t Enough.” In the essay Ebarvia implores teachers to have good reasoning for adding these texts, and informed narratives to accompany said texts. Above all else, educators must deeply elaborate on topics covered by the given curriculum’s narrative.

Unfortunately my experience in high school for the most part was overwhelmingly lacking in this essential element. Without this valuable information and teaching style I was stuck in an unenlightened mindset for much longer than need be. The worst it got in was ninth grade English I. It wasn’t very memorable, but if I were to recall one thing from that class it would be the unit on To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee Harper. It did not leave a big impact on me. I would assign some blame to the content of the novel, but primarily to how little the teacher added to the story and its narritive.

What I recall most significantly is the handling of the N-word slur in the book. It is repeated in the book 48 times.

As one might imagine this hasn’t aged well. Imagine a classroom of white middle class 14 year-olds who don’t understand the weight of the subject matter. Most readings were dominated by sick anticipation at the thought of the next N-bomb, with little to no thoughts left for story interpretation.

Now, one could argue that it’s necessary to use this novel as a tool to teach the relationship between society and racism at the time, and that removing it would be erasist. There are flaws in that thinking, for one, the story was written by a Caucasian person, which inherently means a less accurate depiction of any African-American characters. Another flaw is the expectation that all high school English teachers will be able to guide the interpretation of the book and care enough to justify the nuance of blatant racism.

In my experience this is a misguided expectation. An easy alternative would be to provide a novel written by an African-American author that lived during these times because, despite what the patterns within our education system would indicate, there are actually a whole lot of them.

However, let’s not lose hope in the education system yet. Here is a model that I found effective.

Three years after the catastrophe that was To Kill a Mockingbird, I got an English teacher that knew what he was doing. There were quite a few choices he made that I could gush about all day, but I want to focus on his choice and teaching of The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcom X himself.

The fact that Malcom is both the author and the protagonist allows students to see racism from the victims perspective. This means not only significant minority representation, but also an accurate presentation of what racism in the era looked like. The icing on the cake is Malcom’s personal conflict and dynamic perspectives within the Civil Rights Movement, and it is completely white-wash free.

Building up from this beautiful foundation, my teacher was well educated in (and well aware of) his biases and his limited perspective. He uses this knowledge to let Malcom carve a path for us to see, and rather than indoctrinating students with his own views, he simply points out Malcom’s core beliefs of separatism and racism, and then highlights how these views change over time.

This is quite the juxtaposition to my experience of To Kill a Mockingbird. The teaching is actively pushing against or rerouting the narrative of the novel to get kids to learn the thing the teacher wants them to learn. The autobiography is easily taught because the author is addressing the nuances by directly relaying experiences. Overall this style of teaching allowed me to have insights that I never had before due to the monotonous and bland theme of typical high school literature. It gave me not only an unadulterated view of the Black Muslim ideology and how different people reacted to it, but also how the movement contributed to the civil rights movement and beyond.

In summary, the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird is simply problematic and The Autobiography of Malcolm X isn’t. The teaching of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and other books with diverse themes, authors and characters intrinsically educates more effectively. There doesn’t need to be a filter provided by a teacher to have students interpret some elements of a given material differently. On top of that the teacher and, by correlation, the students have more creative freedom with learning from diversely authored texts.

Oftentimes a book with outdated or otherwise misleading perspectives has to be narrowed down and practically spoon fed by the teacher. A bad narrative from the teacher will be more common with books featuring the oppressed experience by majority authors like To Kill a Mockingbird.

At the end of the day the only thing keeping these outdated books in circulation is the antique notion that classic literature is good literature. The relevancy of this is up to reader interpretation but I will leave with this: just because the Model-T pioneered it’s era doesn’t mean it’s comparable to a Prius or a Mustang.