Eden C. Stein
In recent times the need for diverse books in classrooms has been increasingly recognized. Books read and available in the classroom should reflect the makeup of the student population so that students see themselves in the pages of at least some of the books read in school. Obviously, it is also desirable for students to read about other subcultures that make up their community and their country to decrease ignorance. Over the past year, we have become aware that there is a need for students to study and become aware of systemic racism and Critical Race Theory. In a study of how school commemorate Black History Month, cited in American Educator, it was noted that schools use one of two sanitizing strategies which either “Highlight individual Black American achievement...while minimizing the historical barriers that these individuals faced”2, or discuss multicultural tolerance and diversity at the expense of discussing race or history. When Black Americans view their identity positively, they are more likely to recognize racism. Thus, Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir Brown Girl Dreaming makes an ideal whole class read in our school and others like it. It is a true story, told by the author, about growing up during the Civil Rights era from a renowned and unapologetic Black woman. To be sure, all of Woodson’s work facilitates the important goal of “maintaining an inclusive and complicated view of blackness.”3
Teachers do their students a disservice when they ignore volatile current events which influence their students’ lives. Ibram X. Kendi, among others, have noted that we are now in a third cultural revival of Black Americans. According to Kendi, during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Black Americans learned to see themselves; in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s they learned to love themselves; and now we have a Black Renaissance - where Black Americans are being themselves completely and without regard to white gaze, a term coined by Toni Morrison to describe the concern with white people’s opinions4. Amanda Gorman, the hugely popular youth Poet Laureate of the United States, has noted that “We’re living in an important moment in Black Art because we’re living in an important moment in Black life… [and that] Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change."5 What better time is there for young adolescents to read a memoir written in verse? And Woodson herself wants to be known by the youth who look like her, who grew up like her. The winner of the National Book Award and numerous children’s literature awards, she recently said “I’m tired of explaining to white people.''6 She is an extraordinary role model for the children growing up in these times, and as the core book of the unit is a memoir it will be a natural extension to read other texts by Woodson as well as view interviews with her. Woodson’s formation of her own identity as a writer over the course of the text also provides a forum for students to write about and explore their own identities.