What Does it Mean for a Book List to Reflect Students?

My seventh grade classes read the following books:

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, or Cannery Row (students choose one of the three), all by John Steinbeck

I Am the Darker Brother, an anthology of poems by African Americans

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

One by a Latina, two by black men and women, and three by white men.

One question I’ve asked is, where are the Asians and Native Americans? If my students reflect those groups, shouldn’t my curriculum? But a deeper question I’ve been thinking about lately is, what does it mean for an English curriculum to “reflect” the kids? A book by an author with the same color skin as mine, or whose ancestors come from the same continent as mine, or whose sex chromosomes look roughly like mine—does a book by that author reflect me? Why should Alicia feel reflected in the curriculum simply because she and Esperanza from The House on Mango Street are both Latina? A book about a white Jewish female writer with man trouble and self-esteem issues isn’t about me. In fact, I might rebel against identifying with that girl precisely because her outer characteristics are so much like mine. My experiences are as unique to me as everyone else’s are to them; I don’t want to be reduced to categories. (That individualistic stance is itself rooted in white culture, but I’ll save that discussion for another post.)

Some students do prefer characters who resemble them. In general, students do seem to get more into books with kid characters; I've had my students tell me as much. But some students don’t need the characters to share their own traits. In Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie are middle aged male migrant workers in 1930s rural California, yet Grace, a young female from a Manhattan family in the 2000s, felt their pain and longing and frustration because these are human emotions. It’s not that age and socioeconomic class and gender don’t affect Grace’s experiences, but it would oversimplify and insult her human capacities to assume that she’d only be able to identify with those whose gender and socioeconomic class and age are the same as hers.

Maybe what it really means for an English curriculum to reflect student diversity is for the books to present a diverse array of human emotions, struggles, triumphs, failures, and experiences—including race-, gender-, ethnic-, and class-based experiences. That means a white girl like Grace should read Walter Lee Younger’s story, because he reflects her somehow, and she won’t know how until she reads A Raisin in the Sun. It means Adam, a black boy, should read A Raisin in the Sun too, because something of himself is reflected in Walter, though no one can assume what. Making the curriculum reflect my students is not only about finding characters who look like them. It can be about finding the ways a character’s encounters, decisions, and feelings look like their own.

To complicate the question, in our class discussions of The House on Mango Street, the Latina girls were the ones who spoke the least. Later, when we read A Raisin in the Sun, the black boys were the most silent. What messages the kids of color are getting—from me, from the curriculum, from each other, from the school—that they clam up when characters look like them? Are they protecting the uniqueness of their own identities by dissociating themselves from characters who resemble them outwardly? Or is the message that they’re being asked to represent their race? As a white girl, I never faced that. When my classes discussed Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, or Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, or Taylor in The Bean Trees, no one asked, explicitly or implicitly, “As a white girl, what do you think?” At the same time, I was allowed to claim an understanding of The Woman Warrior and The Invisible Man.

Perhaps Alicia did nod in recognition when she read The House on Mango Street. Perhaps not. Perhaps she saw herself more in Beneatha Younger, or in Holden Caulfield. But even if that’s true for Alicia, the fact remains that it matters, for Alicia and for all students, whether there is a Latina voice in the books we read. And it matters that there are no Native American or Asian voices. If I leave Native American and Asian authors out of the curriculum, I send a message that Native Americans and Asians are unimportant. That’s not the message I want to send, not to Olivia, an Asian student, and not to Alicia, and not to anyone. Reading an Asian author’s story would not mean that Olivia, who was quiet all year, would suddenly have lots to say, but omitting Asian authors sends a negative message, not only to Asian students, but to all students.

As a white girl in middle school myself, I didn’t have to worry about representation. Throughout my school years, the curriculum was replete with white female characters. On the outside, and occasionally on the inside, the curriculum did reflect me. I want my students to say the opposite. I want them to look back on seventh grade English and say, on the inside, and occasionally on the outside, the curriculum did reflect me. If ALL of them can say that, I’ve begun to create an inclusive curriculum. At this point, not all of them can say that.