Day 2: Letting Go of Literary Whiteness.

When working with white students, we have to racialize white students as white students. How do their perspective, the world they live in, and the way society sees BIPOC people impact their understanding of the text (1)

There is whiteness as default when reading a text if there's no indication that the character is other than white. Further, when stories do not focus on race and racism, there is an assumption that all characters must be white (2)

If there is no tragedy or trauma in literature, then we assume that this cannot be a BIPOC story. While it is true that BIPOC folk experience a disproportionate amount of trauma, there are stories of love, hope, and compassion that must be explored (3)

A good example is If Beale Street Could Talk by Baldwin. Some educators focus only on the injustice the family faces but forget to consider the importance of family and love, which dominates the entire story. We must humanize and consider all experiences of Blackness (4)

Conducting "Racialized Reader Response" journals is a good hack from the book. The central question proposed, "How do my racial identity and the racial discourse that dominates for me, together with the text and context that I am reading, affect my literary interpretations?" (5)

The HF conversation I had last month comes up again in this book. " When teachers' text choices for addressing racism rely on the satiric mode that challenges readers to follow twist and turns of meaning... we risk students missing the impact of the social critique" (6)

I hate HF. And the fact that so many educators want to focus on how the N-word is used is not enough to teach that text. We know the N-word, its impact, and how it has devastated communities for a long time. We don't need HF in classrooms.

Canonical text like HF, create Black characters that are often flat, passive, and have absolutely no agency. These assertions do not reflect the reality that despite bondage, our ancestors were not PASSIVE. They had agency within their condition of enslavement (7)

As educators are going through the text, especially from the canon, we must expose whiteness immediately. We must talk about what it is, how it works to decenter other voices, and the other counterstories to give a more accurate picture (8)