As a book reviewer, I share advice and opinions a lot. And as a book lover and lifelong learner, I thought it would be good for me to listen instead. In particular, to listen more closely and more carefully to the voices of people of color.I reached out to Christine Savini, principal consultant at Diversity Directions, who has been doing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work for 30 years, to help identify people of color who would be interested in sharing their experiences as young readers as well as their personal recommendations for readers who want to deepen their understanding of the history and current state of race relations in the United States. The four faculty members with whom we spoke have a wide depth and breadth of independent school experience and shared a variety of perspectives that brought out books beyond the obvious. My deep thanks to all of them for letting me sit in on their conversations.
Marvin Aguilar is an upper school English teacher at Westtown School (PA). Jaleesa Anselm is the director of DEI at Tenacre Country Day School (MA). James Greenwood is the dean of DEI at Western Reserve Academy (OH). And Bridget Tsemo is an English instructor and summer program dean at Phillips Academy (MA).
Tell us about your early education and the books that influenced your awareness of racial issues?
Greenwood: I was educated in Ohio public schools until college. My colleagues often tell me they didn’t have a Black teacher until college or grad school, or perhaps ever, but most of my teachers, from kindergarten on, were Black, in fact Black women. We always celebrated Black History Month. The seminal books of my high school years were Black Boy, a memoir by Richard Wright, which was repeatedly assigned, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which introduced me to issues of gender, poverty, and sexual orientation.Tsemo: I began school in a Black working-class Chicago neighborhood in the post-civil rights era, where we sang the Black National Anthem every day. My high school was mostly Eastern European working-class students with substantial Latinx and Black minorities. The first canonical book we read, Richard Wright’s Native Son, really resonated with me; after all, it was set in Chicago. But my first real engagement came when we were assigned to choose an 18th century writer. So, I looked around and discovered Phillis Wheatley—I actually thought I’d discovered her because I’d never heard of her. What really struck me was that a panel of white men had to endorse her before she could publish.
Anselm: As far as coursework, I first saw myself reflected in the work of Toni Morrison, especially The Bluest Eye. She was among the few writers of color we read. I found it hard to identify with Black characters in Mark Twain because the only characters that looked like me were the slaves. Interestingly, as a student, I also actually enjoyed Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, though I always thought that it was weird to have Atticus Finch held up as a white savior. Now, I understand why I felt that way.
Greenwood: I’m with Jaleesa on that point. I never read To Kill a Mockingbird until years later when I began to teach it. It’s been an important book for many but needs to be taught very carefully.
Aguilar: I attended a large Florida public high school with a predominantly Latin American student body; my English teachers were all white women, and there was a set district curriculum. I read no Latin American voices in high school, and I think it would have made a big difference. Junot Díaz’s short story collection Drown, given to me by a grad school professor, was the first place I ever saw myself. For me, he wrote the Latin American boy’s voice in America. We also read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, which gave accounts of the microaggressions Black people face daily. I’ve taught both since.
What about nonfiction that speaks directly to the work of teachers and others who work with youth?
Greenwood: My watershed was Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, which helped me put language to things I’d already seen and experienced. I had lived it, and now I was learning the academic terms.Anselm: I totally agree about Dr. Tatum’s book. As the only Black student in many of my elementary school classes, I didn’t have that experience, but when I went to high school, I found myself seeking affinity without really knowing why, until I read her.
Greenwood: Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. It’s a classic for a reason and worth revisiting.
What are some of your major recommendations for teachers wanting to educate themselves today?
Tsemo: I would start with Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which I just finished. I love writers like her who can help me teach how to write. Caste is so eye-opening, and it’s a different way of talking about history—a new way of critically thinking about the past. We need to have discussions across cultures.Greenwood: On the pedagogic side, teachers should pick up Ali Michael’s Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education.
Anselm: When I told one of my professors I was thinking of going into teaching, they gave me a copy of Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. Howard C. Stevenson’s Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools: Differences That Make a Difference teaches how to see race, teach to it and about it, and think about it. By the way, he is the brother of Bryan Stevenson, whose Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption has recently been made into a film, which is powerful, but the book is beyond moving.
A related work is Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, which maintains that the legacy of slavery lives in its descendants at a biological level. In the book, she mentions an article that described a group of 10-year-old Black boys who were planning all the details of their funerals because they didn’t believe they had a future beyond their current age.
Greenwood: Among more recent books, I would recommend Julie Lythcott-Haims’ Real American: A Memoir, because like many of our students, she is multiracial and also because she speaks of her time as a dean at Stanford. Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning reminds us not to ignore the experiences of Asian, Latino, and other students while focusing on Black lives.
Aguilar: Yes, we have to expose students to more than one group; there are many intersecting identities that require empathy and understanding. The Black-white binary is central for Americans, but it can’t be the only focus as we try to supplant the dominant voices by introducing trans and other identities. We have to talk about how white culture actually brought other peoples closer to whiteness so they could help reinforce white supremacy. When we study Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, we talk about how the “model minority” myth of a supposed “positive stereotype” for Asian American students diminishes their unique experience by confining them to a single story.
Anselm: But we also have to make clear that, except for Native peoples, no other group has experienced more mass genocide and complete disenfranchisement by white people than African Americans.
Aguilar: I grew up in a Miami community where racist, anti-Black, and colorist language such as mejorar la raza (“improve the race”) was commonly used, and I had to confront anti-Blackness in myself and my community as an adult. I wish we had more such conversations then about the complicated and exclusionary historical narrative of Latinidad.
Are there other types of books we should be looking at?
Anselm: As the only elementary and middle school person here, I’d like to mention a couple of books that may be unfamiliar but raise the multiple perspectives we were just talking about and that are approachable for both students and teachers.Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds’ All American Boys speaks directly to the present moment. It’s about an encounter between a police officer and a boy of color, but it’s seen from different viewpoints and raises questions of loyalty and conscience. Dashka Slater’s The 57 Bus is a true story of a cross-racial juvenile crime and raises issues of gender and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as reminds us that people can go through a traumatic experience and still find a way to forgive.
Aguilar: In talking about literacy, we want to think about forms that dismantle the idea that it’s only about the written word: oral histories; graphic novels, like Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese; or films like Moonlight. We need more books about boys of color coming of age amid masculine images rooted in whiteness. Much of the pushback you get in talking about anti-racism is from boys, and so I think teachers need to read books like
Michael Kimmel’s Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men that show healthy and trusting relationships with young men, balanced with Peggy Orenstein’s Boys and Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity.
What about the more distant past—the ’70s, ’60s, and even before?
Aguilar: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is an important example of intersectionality in both genre and content. Though challenging in many ways, it is a great success with some of my students, either mirroring their experience or making them question their assumptions or their own privilege.Greenwood: If you don’t bring in the voices of the civil rights era, with the documentary Eyes on the Prize; its companion book, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement From the 1950s Through the 1980s, by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer; or Harvard Sitkoff’s The Struggle for Black Equality, you don’t have as rich a picture. I’d also recommend the first book I ever read in a single day, Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, about Southern Black lives in the 1940s and ’50s.
Tsemo: It’s empowering to learn how the world works, and what was going on. That’s why I love Toni Morrison—Beloved is still going to be the book I recommend. We’re in the same space; we need to know what this land went through and where we are psychologically. Within the North American context, I like Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America for the same reason. He’s teaching us how to think of historical moments as racialized events. There are still classics like Cornel West’s Race Matters. We’re developing new language, but we have to remember the core.