“You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity!”

Last year, after reading A Raisin in the Sun, my students chose a social issue from the play (e.g. segregation, expectations based on gender, dream jobs vs. real jobs), thought about how the issue applied to their own lives, interviewed people in their communities, and created podcasts in which they analyzed the interviews. It was an OK project—especially given that it was new and there were a billion tech problems with GarageBand—but I found that some students wanted to generalize the experiences of their interviewees to represent an entire group. In one particularly problematic example, three white students wanted to write about de facto racial segregation in New York neighborhoods. When I suggested they examine their own predominantly white neighborhoods, they resisted.

I’ve been thinking ever since about how I can design a project that will get students to connect themselves—their own identities, their own conflicts—to the play. I keep returning to what Lorraine Hansberry said in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, in response to drama critics arguing over whether it was a play about a black family or a family: “I hadn’t noticed the contradiction because I’d always been under the impression that Negroes are people” (128). It is a universal play, in that all of us have families and all of us have a race. It is not a universal play, in that we come from a diverse array of families and races, and our experiences of family and race differ. It’s both/and. And I want my students to get that their own experiences are like that too: both universal and highly context-specific.

So this year, instead of having them find social issues the play raises, I’d like to have students track conflicts in A Raisin in the Sun. That should be easy. There’s not one relationship in the play that isn’t riddled with conflict, and many basic relationship types are represented: mother/son, mother/daughter, husband/wife, brother/sister, mother-in-law/daughter-in-law, sister-in-law/sister-in-law, boyfriend/girlfriend, father/son, neighbor/neighbor. Each character is also in conflict with himself or herself: Mama over how to spend the money; Walter over whether to occupy the new house; Beneatha over which boyfriend she likes more; Ruth over whether to keep her baby.

I think it’ll be easier for students to relate to conflicts in the play than to see how a “social issue” pertains to them. Even calling it a “social issue” makes it about “society” and not them in particular. But being a brother or sister, son or daughter, grandchild, friend, student, or work partner is something all of them can consider on a personal level. They might, for example, relate to Travis asking his mother for 50 cents, her saying no, and his feeling disappointed. (They might also relate to the fact that Travis’s father then gives him the 50 cents, much to his mother’s chagrin.) Or they might relate to Beneatha and her family having different ideas about how a she should spend her time. Or, they might relate to Walter’s entrusting his money with his “friend” and losing it all. After reading the play and examining some of these conflicts, students will choose one they can relate to and examine how that conflict plays out in their own lives.

But in A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry goes further, making identities and roles central to the conflicts. Identity: Walter is working-class, black, male. Role: He is a father, brother, son, and husband. The conflicts Walter confronts—most notably, whether to take Lindner’s offer and restore the family’s financial security that he destroyed, or maintain his family’s dignity by moving into the new house and facing the racist neighbors—are inextricably bound up in his roles (father, husband, brother, son) and identities (black, male, working-class, Christian). Beneatha, Ruth, Mama, and Travis also find themselves in various conflicts that either flow from their roles and identities, or handle their conflicts in light of those roles and identities, or both.

Are seventh graders, many of whom haven’t quite made the leap to abstract thinking, and many of whom are beginning to question identities and try on new roles, ready to examine how race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity plays into their own conflicts? It might be too easy for a 13-year-old to oversimplify causation (“It’s all because…”) or resist the concept (“It has nothing to do with…”). Still, I want to teach to the kids who are ready to think about the conflicts in their lives this way—and push those who aren’t. I’m wondering how I should go about doing that.