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Key to motivating children to read literature that is not junk (see my previous post: Throwing In the Towel with Reading Workshop,) is finding a relevance that connects the child to the book, educational psychology having long-ago established relevance spurs an interest in reading (obviously.)

In this anally racial-attentive US culture, what has been known as “multicultural literature” has commonly been an effort by educators to use racial identity as a source of that elusive relevance.

When educators with a No-Child-Left-Behind fire under them (see my recent post about NCLB,) are searching desperately for some way to improve performance, their knees jerk hack writers to fill the school shelves with exciting books about White/Black/Hispanic kids (as per your school make-up.)  In this way, the focus is wrongly on the book selection offered to the child, with the educators gathering books that are crudely relevant to the child rather than focusing on the child’s concept of relevance–that is, the child’s ability to find the relevance that more advanced thinkers find in great works of art that are not focused on their own cultural identity.

The reason a rich White guy who writes for the New York Times Book Review appreciates Gabriel Garcia Marquez is not that Marquez is a rich White American guy—he isn’t.  He appreciates him for the myriad talents and innovations Marquez brings to the art of writing.  This is relevant to the Times reviewer because the Times reviewer is an appreciator of literature.

This pedagogical avoidance of the child by gathering racially-focused books instead of engendering an appreciation of literature the child is unfamiliar with, is the result of the fact that in the US it is taboo to dare encourage the child to imagine any notion of identity that undermines what has been assigned them by their parents or the culture.  I am not complaining that teaching Hemingway and Salinger and Dickens to a Black child may cause his parents to object that the curriculum is not balanced racially.  I am saying that requiring the child to change into the type of person that has a natural interest in all these materials is a violation of some dysfunctional social strictures we have set up in the modern USA.

I propose this has dire consequences for the child.  I offer the following theory with regards to the mysterious character strength that educational psychologists refer to as a “Need for Achievement,” which is essentially a drive and confidence for success in school.  This Need for Achievement is well known to mysteriously drop off in African American youth at about the 4^th grade—not in other racial identities.  This means that Black kids of the same socioeconomic status and neighborhood as White or Latino kids will, on average, fail in comparison to their classmates after the 4^th grade for a reason that is unknown.

You would think such a problem would be too crucial to leave at that, but the problem has been known for many years (Cooper, H., & Dorr, N., 1995; Review of Educational Research, 65(4), 438-508,) with little effort to diagnose or solve it.  Maybe it is that educational research along racial lines is a little too easily confused with Nazi eugenics for the comfort of the institutions that provide such funding.

I offer this interpretation: The Black minority is unlike other minorities, including African émigrés, in that Blacks do not identify as outsiders at all.  Other minority children–even Native Americans, (coming from reservations,)–may be expected to see themselves as separate outsiders to our culture, so they may understand their low socioeconomic status as a result of that disadvantage.  Non-Black-minority kids may be expected to aim for overturning their situational disadvantage now that their family has arrived here.  They may see doing so to be just what their father or mother or sister or brother or aunt or uncle would have done had they had the same advantages.

A Black child cannot have the same outlook, knowing full well Black people have been here longer than most Whites.

It is a whole different identity, an identity that, held up to a success-obsessed US culture, (which I’d say most Black people endorse to the eyeballs,) reeks of failure and incompetence no matter how much “Pride” is enthusiastically encouraged.  It is the scar that lives at the heart of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son, and which is overcome (by an elevating transmutation of identity) in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

It goes beyond self-esteem.  Self-esteem can be strong in children who fail.  It is identity—who they think they are, who they hope to be.  Being wealthy and successful is not identity but aspiration.  You can want to be rich like Bill Gates, but, at the same time you don’t want to be Bill Gates—you have no real interest in or drive towards the study of computer programming.

Every urban teacher knows this.

And kids want to grow to be like their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles… who they see as their own.

To expand a child’s potential, we must expand that same child’s sense of identity, so that they still identify with their “own,” but that they can truly identify with others beyond their family, too.

But it is a very hard argument to make to racially-obsessed Americans that racial identity should take a back seat to education.  And this defensiveness is logical, considering our nation’s historical efforts to annihilate minority identity.

Telling ourselves we were making up for this history, we brought “multicultural literature” to the schools, and immediately thereafter we lost track of what we were doing, passing the Black books out to the Black kids and the Latino books out to the Latino kids.

Multicultural literature is a fallacy.  There is nothing multicultural about Black or Latino literature, any more than there is anything multicultural about Western White literature.  Together, they add up to US literature, still very, very narrowly focused.

But just imagine if literature was chosen on its literary merit, without a cultural selectivity.

International literature, translated literature, literature from unexpected sources or sources we are oblivious to—sources we search to the ends of the Earth for, then, should be what we call multicultural—not what teachers are passing to kids nowadays, glossy teen lit with the same themes you can find by clicking any TV on–about typical US kids who are trying to navigate the concerns of US teenagedom, whether they be defined as White or that category that sets White culture as the benchmark: “non-White.”

The purpose of multicultural lit should not be to enforce the definition of me, but to help me understand somebody else I don’t know about.  Those choices that tell me about me are entertainment or emotional exertion, or maybe they belong in a history or civics class (ie: a book about people experiencing the Birmingham Bus Boycotts or about a child who is picked on for being different.)  They do not contribute to a literary education.

When I (47-year-old White guy that I am,) listen to a Springsteen song, I rant out the words along with the Boss because the art is a careful erudition of my emotional expression. This is not educating me.  It is giving me something fun and emotive to do with emotions that already belong to me.

Now, sit me down at the opera, and the fun ends.  I need to pay attention.  The people around me have to shut up and not crinkle any gum wrappers.  My brain has to focus very carefully on what is coming in to capture and appreciate its beauty.

Real multicultural education reaches into the unknown and investigates. A Language Arts teacher must inspire and actively promote.  Passing out reading that is unimportant to the study of literature is not teaching.

I propose the stake in the heart of racially unequal education in the US will be true multicultural education built on a historical foundation of the great building blocks of all the literature that led to it.  In this way, we don’t level the great accomplishments of the curriculum, but, rather, we equalize our presumptions toward the identity of our students.

Many fear this idea to the point that they do not want it heard.  Racial identity, culture, forms of expression must be preserved.

But, why?  People should be respected, and so should the things they say and the ways they say it, but, we should not be purposely perpetuating cultural identity.  Yes, yes, we should keep it from being maliciously destroyed—but we have no business keeping it from being neglected. Educators should see it as their business to expose a student to the whole spectrum of possibilities outside of their own familiarity and it is a crime against that child to restrict those possibilities in order to respect identity.

Barack Obama’s election was a great stride forward for multiculturalism, President Obama having grown up in Indonesia and having an African father and White, Middle American mother.  A Black kid looking to identify with his president will take the example of a person who invents himself.  It would help if that child’s parents and teachers stopped telling him he is Black, but that he is a member of humanity, and that one day it will be up to him to decide his own identity.

Any identity (ie: racial, national, religious, gang, gender, professional…,) is simply a social construct that saves insecure or intellectually lazy people from defining themselves.  It is only necessary if a person is incapable of finding a worthwhile self-definition on their own, and I do not believe Black kids are so incapable (as I believe many of their teachers and parents assume they are.)

As our age of unsustainable, reckless consumption comes to an end, we will eventually reach a point where we will have no choice but to see ourselves as world citizens, rather than US or Western citizens, and, just as we are learning now to see beyond our national confines of racial separation, that day, multiculturalism will blossom naturally.

The key to the future development of our students as readers is a carefully, intelligently chosen collection of literary works from a truly remarkable pool, rich in choices that are foreign to what currently fills our students’ conception of identity.  The relevance of these works will be found by the student, inspired by a good teacher, because, despite our national racial hang-ups, the fact is: the narrower the reader’s ability to see the relevance of anything, the more limited is the reader’s potential for growth.

And it is the teacher’s job to open the child’s mind.

I offer this list of multicultural reads that are accessible in the Young Adult sections of most US libraries, not as examples of great or even necessarily important literature, but as well-written books that effort successfully to connect our kids with the struggles of kids in cultures they are foreign to:

Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet, by Kashmira Sheth

Sold, by Patricia McCormick, ,

Bog Child, by Sidbhan Dowd,

The Song of Kahunsha, by Anosh Irani,

A Step from Heaven, by An Na,

Perseopolis, by Marjane Satrapi, (graphic novel,)

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie.