For years, the books assigned in junior high and high school literature classes were pretty standard. Most kids read A Tale of Two Cities and Macbeth and maybe, as a bow to American content, The House of Seven Gables. And few asked how these books got their status as "classics" or why they kept it. All that has changed. The literature curriculum is currently undergoing some serious scrutiny-- and that's a good thing. Kids should read more books of quality that are also representative of our history and our multi-ethnic society and culture. But what do we mean by "representative"? If we are dropping Silas Marner, how do we decide what takes its place?
The answer some multiculturalists are giving would get rid of one set of stereotypes only to replace them with another. Instead of a distorted picture of non-European groups, kids will get a distorted picture of white Americans. This is a change but it's no improvement, and there is a good chance it will intensify the hostility that already exists among some groups.
Sandra Stotsky, who is a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, raises some important questions about the new multicultural criteria for literature in "The Changing Literature Curriculum in K-12" (Academic Questions, Winter, 1993-94).
Stotsky agrees that the traditional curriculum is too narrow: ... all students should be able to see the multi-ethnic nature of the country they inhabit. .. in the literature they are asked to read. They should also be able to see different ethnic and racial groups in major roles in this literature.
However, she has seen enough to be worried about an increasing tendency to pick works that engage in reverse stereotyping. Multiculturally "correct" books of this kind take up the cause of suffering racial and ethnic minorities by depicting white characters only in terms of the injustices committed by whites. White Americans are always and only shown as the greedy, mean and racist rulers of a rotten society. Ugly caricatures like these allow no room for individuals who do not conform to the stereotype or for the ongoing struggle to get rid of prejudice and injustice.
It's not that good books offering a balanced treatment of African- American or Asian relations with the white majority don't exist, Stotsky says. However, negative portrayals are far more welcome. Moreover, the range of ethnic groups portrayed is likely to be very narrow-- African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans only. And there is no room for stories of immigrants who found their experiences here "liberating, and personally fulfilling, despite prejudice, discrimination and exploitation." The story of an individual who is able to persevere through adversity and take advantage of some of the good things our society offers is likely to be ignored because it conflicts with the stereotype of minorities as helpless victims.
In the multicultural curriculum Stotsky describes, books that find no redeeming good in American society are often accompanied by writing assignments that invite students to make their own contributions to the nasty picture. Minority students are encouraged to feel victimized-- and morally superior-- by describing incidents in which they "felt discriminated against" or "injustices perpetrated against their ancestors." And students who can't recount any such experience? Presumably, they feel morally inferior because of their privilege.
Selecting works of literature that present the American experience and American society in the worst possible light could have a number of bad consequences. Do we really want to encourage minority youngsters to focus only on the wrongs done to their group? Is it useful for them to see their identity primarily in terms of victim hood? And what of non-minority students? A steady diet of books that inevitably portray their group as the villain could, Stotsky says, create self-loathing, as well as shame about their group and its heritage. It could also lead to the opposite-- and this would be even worse. "How much shame and guilt," Stotsky wonders, "[can] white students ... absorb before becoming hostile to the groups depicted in 'white-guilt' literature?" Whatever the response of students, a curriculum of the kind Stotsky describes would exacerbate hatreds and tensions among groups.
Is Stotsky saying that students should never read books that portray white Americans as bigoted and greedy? Not at all, provided there are also texts that present "positive interaction between peoples of different racial or ethnic groups in this country" and that acknowledge the existence of "greed, racism, religious bigotry [and] the existence of slavery or forced labor in non-Western countries or among 'people of color."' If American kids learn in literature class that members of minority groups can never be anything but noble victims, whereas whites are always and only oppressors, we will not have widened our literature curriculum. We will have tragically narrowed it.