Quality African-American Lit

 

            It's important to teach children and youth about positive race relations. But there are good and bad ways to introduce that topic.

 

Avoid books that cast whites in general, as a race, as the bad guys and blacks in general, as a race, as the good guys - or the other way around.

 

On the other hand, select books with minorities as the heroes, and books with good examples of cooperation and productive relationships between Americans of all ethnic backgrounds.

 

            Save the more critical books about racism for high school, or you will stir up too much emotion among younger readers.

 

Racism is a highly inflammatory, very difficult and complicated problem that generations of adults haven't been able to solve; it ought not to be laid bare for younger kids, who are still forming their identities and ideas about human relations.

 

They don't yet have the rhetorical skills to handle such a controversial and difficult topic, that, obviously, people decades older with advanced college degrees can't seem to solve.

 

Kids live so much in the present. So it's wrong to beat them over the head with example after example of racism throughout history. They'll misunderstand and think it's all still happening right now, in their own back yards.

 

You don't want to give them an exaggerated idea about the problem of racism before they have the cognitive ability to deal with it, and the character formation to be able to resist falling in to that trap.

 

            Also, many books oriented toward race relations spill into political ideology. They often have radical and anti-democratic content, and aren't written very well to boot. They're full of vicious stereotypes and cardboard-cutout characters. So from a literary quality standpoint, they aren't worth kids' time, anyway. There's a huge difference between propaganda and literature, and it's a gap that wise parents, teachers and youth-serving professionals won't want to cross.

 

            Most importantly, most state multicultural education laws, plus school-board policies, direct schools to teach children about the cultures and positive contributions of minority people, not harp on and on about how they've been wronged in the past, although of course that should be taught in an age-appropriate way.

 

The point is, you build respect and admiration for minorities if you teach the good things about what they've accomplished.

 

            So if the goal is to teach children about nonviolent problem-solving, honesty, kindness, respect for authority, tolerance, and refraining from profanity and vulgarity, then most of the "multicultural" books that schools have been teaching to kids should never even be on the list.

 

            If English class is only going to teach 10 books in a school year, they shouldn't bypass all the great classics of the ages and, in the name of multicultural education, select books like Sounder, where a mean, white sheriff shoots and kills a black child's beloved dog . . . drags the dad off tied to the back of his car . . . and the dad returns from prison deformed by an accident, then dies, as does the beloved dog. What's uplifting and encouraging about that story line?

 

            Similarly destructive and negative books that are often taught under the guise of multicultural education are Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

 

            Those books have 'way too much baggage to be worthy teaching material for schoolchildren, especially when there are so many more positive examples of quality multicultural literature available.

 

            Take the black writer, Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1952). He wrote about racism with anger and power . . . and grace and class. He eloquently pitched racial unity. One of his stories features this exchange: "Brown's much nicer than white, isn't it, Daddy?" "Some people think so. But American is better than both, son."

 

            Black female writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston often have adult themes in their books not appropriate for K-12 readers, but you can sure take excerpts out of their books that are acceptable for kids, and teach about the authors and what they stood for.

 

            Some poems by Maya Angelou are great - And Still I Rise is an example - but much of her work has objectionable, sexualized content that would be highly inappropriate for younger readers.

 

            The Autobiography of Malcolm X — about the civil rights legend, ghost-written by Alex Haley of Roots fame. "Speaking like this doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression." "Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression."

 

            Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay, "Self-Reliance," applies perfectly to the challenges of minorities. He said all of us "must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark."

 

            W.E.B. DuBois is said to have done more than any other black American in the first half of this century to gain civil rights. He was a prophet: his controversial book, The Souls of Black Folk, predicted in 1903 that the biggest domestic issue of the century would be race relations.

 

            His way of improving things was not stirring up rebellion or violence: it was to use politics and the laws, legal agitation and education.

 

            He crusaded for more black teachers and college opportunities. He differed strongly with another famous black leader, Booker T. Washington, and said Washington was too equivocal toward the whites. DuBois was more direct: he wanted MORE for blacks.

 

            DuBois' book is now considered the greatest book ever on the plight of black America. He wrote that he wanted a country in which it was "possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face."

 

            He joined with whites to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and edited its influential magazine, The Crisis. Later in life, DuBois became a socialist, then a communist, renounced his American citizenship in 1961 and moved to Ghana.

 

            Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," 1963, was famous for prompting President John F. Kennedy to attack racism in a nationally televised address. It was a big encouragement to civil rights workers nationwide. The Nobel Prize winner wrote many influential works, including the "I Have a Dream" speech, 1963.

 

            James Coleman presented a 737-page bomb in July 1966 to the U.S. Congress — the landmark report that launched racial integration in America's schools.

 

            Coleman helped research the $1.5 million study, Equality of Educational Opportunity, in 4,000 schools and nearly 600,000 students. It plainly showed that the quality of education for blacks and other minorities was inferior.

 

            He pushed for integration because it would help disadvantaged kids feel more a part of America if they experienced the middle-class American environment. Congress allocated $1.5 billion for 1971 and '72 to begin the process of eliminating segregation in public schools.

 

            Arna Bontemps wrote God Sends Sunday, considered one of the finest works of the Black Renaissance in Harlem in the 1920s and early '30s. His book, Black Thunder, 1936, depicted slave revolts, and he wrote a lot of nonfiction works for younger readers.

 

            Slavedancer, by Paula Fox: a 13-year-old white boy from New Orleans is kidnapped by pirates and forced to play his fife on a slave ship. That way, black slaves will dance and get exercise to survive the trip. The boy makes a black friend. Everybody but them dies in a big storm. They are befriended by a runaway slave and eventually make it home. The white boy ends up fighting for black freedom in the Civil War.

 

            Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton, 1948: a black South African has murdered a white man. The book is about the man's guilt as well as the nation's guilt, for apartheid and the disparity of living conditions. Best of all, the white father of the murder victim forgives the black murderer. Good depiction of racial reconciliation under tough circumstances.

 

            Heart of Darkness, novella, Joseph Conrad, 1902; ivory trader witnesses the brutalization of African natives by white traders and feels physical and psychological shock. The author worked in the Belgian Congo. Absolutely gripping expose of human depravity — which stresses that the depravity is WRONG.

 

            A Raisin in the Sun, a three-act play by Lorraine Hansberry, 1959; psychological study of a working-class black family on the south side of Chicago that undergoes lots of discrimination and is victimized by crime, but refuses to knuckle under to racism and retains pride and dignity.

 

            "Harlem" and other poems by Langston Hughes. Note title of play, above: "Harlem" has those famous lines, "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun/

. . . Or does it explode?"

 

Hughes is so lyrical:

            "Night coming tenderly / Black like me."

            "Ain't you heard the boogie-woogie rumble of a dream deferred?"

            "I am the American heartbreak — the rock on which Freedom stubbed its toe."

 

            Native Son, Richard Wright, 1940, perhaps the most influential black novel of the century; all the black anger, white arrogance and repression of blacks by whites . . . with relatively little profanity or vulgarity. Also see his short story, "Fire and Cloud," that ends triumphantly with blacks and whites marching together for racial justice in the South.

 

            Nobody beats Nobel Prize-winning William Faulkner for mixing great writing and a stark look at the reality of racism. He was white, but his writing was an honest and empathetic presentation of the plight of black Americans in the past.

 

The ideas are immensely powerful without objectionable language, gratituitous sex or violence, or vulgarity. Two of the best: Absalom, Absalom! (slave-driver's racism makes him lose his empire) and Light in August (white woman helps black wanderer who'd been severely beaten as a child, but she comes to remind him of his white tormentor so he kills her, is betrayed, hunted down, killed and castrated).

 

            The Fire Next Time, nonfiction essays, 1963, James Baldwin; he exhorted the country to improve race relations or face a violent conflagration. He eloquently attacked the idea that blacks are inferior in any way to whites. He emphasized the intrinsic dignity of black people. He described the Black Muslim movement for the first time.

 

            For biography, try Gifted Hands, by Ben Carson, M.D. (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1990), the story of how a disadvantaged black boy from Detroit gets a world-class education and becomes a world-famous neurosurgeon, separating Siamese twins. He did it thanks to a single mom with a third-grade education who instilled in him values of achievement and perseverance, and an inspiring dedication to overcoming racism rather than focusing on it.

 

            Other examples:

 

            James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones (1927), black dialect sermons in verse.

            Frederick Douglass, America's leading antislavery advocate, published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845, identifying himself as a former slave and a fugitive. Abolitionist friends feared for his life, but the brave publication just enhanced his reputation. It was a powerful example of nonviolent political action.

 

            Equally important in the nation's history was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852. It was melodramatic more than literary, but was the most popular and influential book of the 19th Century, and directly caused the Civil War. The author was white but slavery sickened her; she based her story on court records, newspaper accounts and other factual material. By 1857, there were 1.5 million copies in print.

 

            Several cities in America had a race riot, usually in the 1910s or '20s, often involving charges that a black man raped a white woman, and ending in mob lynchings. Newspaper clippings and oral histories make great teaching tools about this factual evidence of racism.

 

            For a global perspective, students should study the life of William Wilberforce, a British statesman, philanthropist and writer in the 1800s, who made it his life's work to stop the British slaveship trade out of Africa. He was successful. Because he drastically reduced the supply of slaves to America, helping empower the North and trigger the Civil War, he might have done more to help blacks than the entire Union Army or the 1 million Americans who were killed or wounded in freeing the slaves.