I don’t often write directly about my own teaching. But it just so happens that the author of A Suicide Bomber Sits in a Library - a book pulled by the publisher Abrams after the Asian Author Alliance’s open letter - will be coming to my school. When I first learned about this book on Twitter, I knew there was no way to welcome Jack Gantos without having a critical discussion of his forthcoming book. Before the book was pulled, he provided us with a pdf proof.
One way to approach deeply problematic texts is to simply keep them out of the classroom. Using the language of Rudine Sims Bishop’s Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors, we need to think about what kind of mirror problematic texts hold up to the lives of students. If some of our students only ever see mirrors in which they are reduced to harmful stereotypes, then there’s no need to put them through those experiences by bringing those books into our classrooms. Our time is precious and there is lots of literature that deserves our attention.
In this case however, I am going to confront the text with my students so they can form their own critical questions for the author. I want to avoid the situation where all we have is the author’s explanation of his intentions. Moreover, I feel like my students have the critical tools in place: We learn about the ‘toxic cultural environment’ that advertising creates from Jean Kilbourne, we introduce the concept of The Other in a Future Fiction unit, follow up with a unit centered on Chimamanda Adichie’s Dangers of a Single Story, and have memoir unit specifically designed to avoid narrow representations of who ‘we’ might be with books from Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jeanette Winterson, Maya Angelou, and Marjane Satrapi (to name a few). Incidentally, we also have Gantos’ memoir, which is a favorite for students.
As I critically teach this text, I think first of students who for whom this book would be a mirror. My strategy is to be completely upfront about the book I am going to put in their hands. Our relationship is built on trust. In her essential dissection of the issues with talking about race and racism, Ijeoma Oluo (27:00) argues that when people complain that a person of color is somehow making an issue about race, “often times people of colour are trying to get it back to a place where it’s not” about race. Something similar applies to Islamaphobia: it would be wonderful to read books that have main characters who are Muslims where we don’t need to stop and talk about harmful stereotypes but can instead just talk about character development. As I run this discussion, my first aim is to carefully consider those “who this discussion will always take a little bit more out of” (00:45). I have had a few student talk about how their parents, despite economic privilege, always get searched at airports because of how they look.
It is perhaps most important for me to critically confront this text because just like in education about bullying, we need to talk to the bystanders. Later in life, will non-Muslim students who know that a text has harmful stereotypes speak out instead of waiting for those who are directly harmed to have to speak up? In an interview with Grace Lin, Samira Ahmed explains the difficulty that some people might have in not seeing the harm of this book: “they never grew up in the position of being forced to see themselves as The Other. They will never have to consume that much media that says they’re bad, they’re not enough …”
Before they read the text, I will first show students Riz Ahmed speaking to the British House of Commons.
Riz Ahmed argues that ‘diversity’ is pitched as “a frill, a luxury” or added extra as if “there’s a core or a benchmark against which everything is measured, and then there’s a little bit of something you can sprinkle on top.” Diversity is simply the wrong concept. Instead, Ahmed says, “We’re talking about representation… It’s not a frill, it is absolutely fundamental to what people expect from culture and politics.” I have a strong sense of how representation matters - I never saw living, breathing Native people in any texts until I got to university - though, I am not stereotyped in my daily life, so the harm for me is quite different.
I keep coming back to this: the representation that we bring to the front of the classroom matters.
Further Reading
Cathy Davidson - How Do You Teach (Responsibly) a Racist Text in an Era of Rampant Racism?
Jessica Lifshitz - Empathy Is Not Political: NCTE Presentation on Creating Inclusive Classrooms