Celebrate diversity through 'disruption'

The Wall Street Journal’s children’s books columnist went on a tear last month.

Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote a piece excoriating Disrupt Texts, an online movement by teachers to introduce more diversity into reading curriculums. Gurdon described a situation where educators are gleefully shredding traditional reading lists, replacing classic authors with contemporary ones with alleged axes to grind about issues like sexism and racism.

The reality is far different, however.

Disrupt Texts is merely the latest in a long series of conversations about what should or should not be considered “canon” in schools. Hang around English educators for any length of time and you’re likely to hear them decry the “dead white guys” (and a select few dead white gals) whose work is often elevated to Olympian — or at least Mount Rushmore-ian — heights.

You can practically rattle off these writers’ names in your sleep: Homer, Shakespeare, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Steinbeck, Hemingway and maybe Harper Lee, if only because “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a sentimental favorite of many teachers and parents, probably because it was read at a formative time in their lives.

A big question about canonical creators in any undertaking — literature, music, interpretive macramé — is, “Who sez?” In other words, who decides these particular movers and shakers are representative? In the case of literature, at least, the answer has traditionally been other now-dead white guys, who selected from among works they knew, based on a culture that for centuries has foregrounded white males.

This being the case, movements like Disrupt Texts, which promote BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) voices, are welcome. Not to displace the “canon,” but to broaden it, to help ensure the reading lists children and young adults encounter mirror the diversity of people and perspectives they see in the world around them.

Of course, traditional authors can still be used to introduce modern social issues. Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” remains a poignant examination of racism, and Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is practically a case study in holier-than-thou hypocrisy.

But shouldn’t the curriculum be flexible enough to include both Homer and something like Tomi Adeyemi’s “Children of Blood and Bone,” which incorporates West African mythology? Or Edgar Allan Poe’s plague-ridden “Masque of the Red Death” and Ling Ma’s “Severance,” which apparently plays with the same tropes? (Both modern authors are on my growing to-read list.)

I’m not saying either Adeyemi or Ma will still be read in fifty or one hundred years (nor am I saying they won’t), which is part of the traditionalist argument for a canon, that it provides a sturdy bedrock of shared literary experiences. Well, this and the more insidious goal of some conservatives to preserve a European-American-centric monopoly on literature. But when I think back to some of the books I read in school, I recall a blend of contemporary and classic, the former used as bait to get us to read the latter.

Which is not to insinuate the role of BIPOC authors is to lure children back to Shakespeare. Reading these contemporary authors is a laudable end in itself and likely will do more to create lifelong readers than any well-intentioned but misguided attempts to keep shoving “To Kill a Mockingbird” down students’ throats.

And while I find the Disrupt Texts website to be a little too chummy with Penguin Random House, which collaborated with the movement to produce reading guides for — surprise! — the publisher’s YA titles, I can’t fault the intent of the founders.

What Disrupt Texts seeks to do, it appears to me, is not to ban older works, but to make the curriculum more responsive to today’s readers. It also attempts to make older educators, like me, aware of the explosion in contemporary voices, the multiplicity of titles available and the need to examine critically our own attitudes and beliefs about certain social issues.

All of which sounds like something the WSJ’s children’s books columnist would want to celebrate, not criticize.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter