“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.

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.