Literary Resources to Foster Dialogue on Race:

A Living Document, Evolving Based on Suggestions:

In the summer of 2013, social media shattered any pretense that Americans were living in a post-racial era.  George Zimmerman was acquitted of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an injustice that closely followed media attention on the allegations against Paula Deen.  After Zimmerman’s acquittal, in cities across America, protestors dressed in hoodies marched and carried signs, while President Obama called for a national conversation on racial relations.  For a short time it seemed like such a discussion might happen.  Then we blinked.  The media moved on to other stories, other outrages.  It was summer after all, and we went to the beach, to the lake, to our places of rest.  We went on and nothing changed.

Nothing changed except this.  That conversation is still waiting to happen.  It’s not that social media exposed us to any new idea this summer.  All sites like publicshaming.tumbrl.com did was drag the ugliness of racism out into plain sight where we couldn’t ignore it anymore.   If we are honest, we’ve been hearing such racist comments out in public or in the privacy of our homes, from strangers and from our own friends and family.  All social media helped us realize was how tangible and destructive racism continues to be in America in 2013.

Along with so many others, I felt angry and helpless, but then I had an idea I posted on Facebook.

One afternoon I was imagining a literature class in which the only two students were George Zimmerman and Paula Deen, and I started daydreaming about what I would put on the syllabus. I immediately realized that every semester I do have a student or two like Zimmerman or Deen pass through one course or another. I thought about the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, how now more than ever we need open and honest discussions about race.  What better place for this to happen than the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been shown to increase empathy?

I asked this question to my friends, many of whom are teachers: if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what stories, essays, poems, novels, or plays should we put on the syllabus of life? Here now, I would like to share the best responses and suggestions, along with links connecting to the work.  I’m more hopeful, now than ever, that at least through literature we might achieve both dialogue and progress on the subject of race in America.  I’m calling this a “living document” because I plan to keep updating it with new writing and suggestions and links. 

One thing most commenters agreed on is that while such discussions are necessary, they are still going to be difficult.  Professor Aimee Viera noted that:  “the hard part is designing an evaluation regime that encourages bravery and engagement on the part of the students, with honesty of expression being supported (even when those honest expressions are shocking in their ignorance). I struggle with this challenge regularly.”

As this document continues to evolve, I also hope to include questions and writing prompts that will help encourage discussion in the classroom.  For instance, in the note below on Anna Deavere Smith's one woman play, Fires in the Mirror, Professor Diana Joseph included three questions that may be useful as a touchstone for discussion.  (See below)  Here are some literary resources to consider, broken down by genre—Short Story, Short Story Collection, Essay, Discussion or Video Link, Essay Collection, Classic Novel and Young Adult, Graphic Novel, and Play—with links to full texts or video where available.

than ever we need honest, open discussions about race. What better place for this to happen than in the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been to shown to increase empathy? So, if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what essays, stories, poems, novels or plays should we put on the syllabus of life?Short Story:

“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” by ZZ Packer: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2000/06/19/2000_06_19_156_TNY_LIBRY_000021114

"The End of FIRPO in the World" by George Saunders:  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/05/18/1998_05_18_076_TNY_LIBRY_000015572we need honest, open discussions about race. What better place for this to happen than in the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been to shown to increase empathy? So, if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what essays, stories, poems, novels or plays should we put on the syllabus of life?than ever we need honest, open discussions about race. What better place for this to happen than in the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been to shown to increase empathy? So, if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what essays, stories, poems, novels or plays should we put on the syllabus of life? than ever we need honest, open discussions about race. What better place for this to happen than in the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been to shown to increase empathy? So, if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what essays, stories, poems, novels or plays should we put on the syllabus of life? than ever we need honest, open discussions about race. What better place for this to happen than in the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been to shown to increase empathy? So, if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what essays, stories, poems, novels or plays should we put on the syllabus of life? than ever we need honest, open discussions about race. What better place for this to happen than in the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been to shown to increase empathy? So, if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what essays, stories, poems, novels or plays should we put on the syllabus of life? than ever we need honest, open discussions about race. What better place for this to happen than in the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been to shown to increase empathy? So, if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what essays, stories, poems, novels or plays should we put on the syllabus of life? than ever we need honest, open discussions about race. What better place for this to happen than in the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been to shown to increase empathy? So, if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what essays, stories, poems, novels or plays should we put on the syllabus of life? than ever we need honest, open discussions about race. What better place for this to happen than in the classroom, and what better subject, since reading fiction has been to shown to increase empathy? So, if George Zimmerman and Paula Deen are students in our classroom, then what essays, stories, poems, novels or plays should we put on the syllabus of life?

"Where Is This Voice Coming From?" by Eudora Welty, which she wrote the night she learned NAACP activist Medgar Evers had been assassinated. She channeled all of her anguish into a timeless work: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2009/03/16/090316on_audio_oates

Short Story Collection:

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans.  You can hear her reading from it here on NPR:  http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/134259250/watch-danielle-evans-short-story-reading-at-npr

Essay:

“A Stranger in the Village” by James Baldwin.  Full essay here:  https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/gjay/www/Whiteness/stranger.htm  The essay is part of a larger collection, the classic Notes of a Native Son.

 “Peculiar Benefits" by Roxane Gay:   http://therumpus.net/2012/05/peculiar-benefits/

"Black Men and Public Spaces” by Brent Staples.  This widely anthologized essay, a staple in composition texts,  was first published in Harpers in 1986 but remains fully relevant and compelling.   http://facstaff.uww.edu/carlberj/Journal3.htm

"What's Inside You, Brother?” by Toure (from his collection Never Drank the Kool Aid.)  Toure is actually a commentator on MSNBC now and his comments on the Paula Deen case were intriguing:   http://www.mediaite.com/tv/toure-if-you-support-paula-deen-youre-saying-racism-doesnt-matter-to-me/

“The Death of a Boy:  Trayvon Martin” by Kao Kalia Yang. 

http://opineseason.com/2013/07/18/the-death-of-a-boy-trayvon-martin/  Along with this essay, Kao Kalia Yang has also written a memoir, The Late Homecomer, about leaving the Hmong refugee camps in Laos behind for life in St. Paul, Minnesota. It’s beautifully written and poignant, so I often return to teaching her memoir in my writing classes.  Sample discussion questions can be found here and I would be happy to share full resources designed by Normandale instructors the year The Late Homecomer was our campus Common Book if you send me an email:  http://international.uiowa.edu/files/international.uiowa.edu/files/file_uploads/hmong_questions_0.pdf

Discussion or Video Link:

"The Pathology of White Privilege" by Tim Wise:  http://vimeo.com/25637392

"The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Adichie:  http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

Essay Collection or Nonfiction Work:

The Women by Hilton Als.  Part memoir and part sociopolitical examination, Hilton Als explores the story of his own mother and the mother of Malcolm X in this book about race and identity. http://us.macmillan.com/thewomen/HiltonAls

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.  A seminal work published shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech when the Civil Rights movement was emerging.  This article discusses the continuing relevancy of the two essays in this work today:  http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/15016429-simmering-with-zimmermanjames-baldwins-the-fire-next-time-revisited

Fresh off the Boat:  a memoir by Eddie Huang:  NPR’s interview is in-depth, but you can also find numerous excerpts online, such as this one about experiencing the American version of Thanksgiving:  http://www.bonappetit.com/blogsandforums/blogs/badaily/2012/11/eddie-huang-book-excerpt.html

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter.   Salon has a great interview here:  http://www.salon.com/2010/03/23/history_of_white_people_nell_irvin_painter/

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot:  I’ve taught this book before as part Normandale’s Common Book program and it’s a student favorite.  For instructors out there, one serious advantage is the extensive resources found on this book:  http://rebeccaskloot.com/the-immortal-life/teaching/

"Looking at Emmitt Till" by John Edgar Wideman. A portion of this essay collection, “The Killing of Black Boys,” first published in Essence magainze, is also available online: http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/Wideman.htm

Black Boy by Richard Wright.  Autobiographical account of race relations in the South.  There’s a great teaching series that features a documentary which can be found here:  http://www.newsreel.org/guides/richardw.htm

Novel:

Little Bee by Chris Cleave .  This novel is described as “well-crafted popular literature that asks difficult questions and gives a privileged woman a character to empathize with while trying to connect to someone else not at all like her.”  http://www.chriscleave.com/books/little-bee/reading-group-guide/

The Round House by Louise Erdrich.  This novel is Normandale’s Common Book for the academic year of 2013-2014 and I look forward to teaching it.  The Roundhouse, which deals with issues of violence against women and tribal justice, has been compared to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and won the National Book Award in 2012.  PBS has a solid interview with the author up, and here’s a guide that includes discussion questions:  http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/13-fiction/8956-round-house-erdrich-?start=1

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James.  Marlon James teaches at Macalester in the Twin Cities.  His second novel is written in the patois of a Jamaican slave and it was a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.  Here on his blog, he debates whether or not to get rid of his Flannery O’Connor books after discovering she was a racist:  http://marlon-james.blogspot.com/

Pym by Mat Johnson.  Here is a deeply American novel, about what it means white or black in this country, a wildly inventive story that features an out of work professor on a “crazy adventure to find Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.  Satiric and inventive, the novel also features fascinating discussions about race in America.  At the author’s website you can find links to the Poe novel, along with other works it inspired:  http://matjohnson.info/sequels/

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd -- What better way to reach someone than by giving them a vulnerable child character as in this coming of age story set in the South?  http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/secret_life_bees.html

Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach.  Set in the mid eighties, the hip-hop loving narrator of this satiric novel explores issues of white privilege and race in America.  http://www.alternet.org/story/21943/whiteness_visible

Martin and John by Dale Peck.  A novel that braids together two stories about love in the time of the AIDS crisis.  Professor Ed Madden at the University of Southern Carolina has put together an entire pedagogical series on teaching the of literature AIDS that also mentions this book:  http://www.ars-rhetorica.net/Queen/VolumeSpecialIssue/Articles/EdMadden.pdf

The Healing by Jonathan O’Dell.   Twin Cities writer Jonathan O’Dell grew up in Mississippi, where he was involved in the Civil Rights movement.  He consults on issues of diversity for corporations and has published a guide called Work Skills for Teams and Courageous Conversations.  I hope to find out more about how he engages in such conversations.  His website can be found here:  http://jon-odell.com/blog/about-jon-2/

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.  A novel about memory and loss, which tells the story of a Jew who immigrates to England as part of the Kindertransporte program in 1939. Here the New Yorker makes the case for why all of us should be reading W.G. Sebald:  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/12/why-you-should-read-w-g-sebald.html

The Color Purple by Alice Walker.  In this epistolary novel, a poor black woman living in the south writes letters to God.  CSI-CUNY has gathered together a collection of resources here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/purple.html

Salvage the Bones by Jesymn Ward.  Winner of the 2011 National Book Award, Salvage features a teenage narrator named Esch trying to hold her family together and survive in the wake Hurricane Katrina’s passage through Mississippi.  Interview with the author here:  http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/08/30/jesmyn-ward-on-salvage-the-bones/

Classic Novel and Young Adult*:

*These are novels are sometimes taught in high school, but many people may not have read them and they deserve a space on every shelf.

Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.  When I teach young adult literature, my students rave about Alexie’s novel and it’s one of my favorites.  Both humorous and poignant, the story of Junior’s life on the reservation also remains deeply controversial and was recently banned in one district:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/02/sherman-alexie-part-time-indian-masturbation_n_3696555.html

As a side note, I also love Sherman Alexie’s article, “Why the Best Books are Written in Blood” about controversial issues in literature:  http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/06/09/why-the-best-kids-books-are-written-in-blood/

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.  I was fascinated to recently discover that Ralph Ellison spent four decades working on a sequel that he never published.  Slate has more here:  http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/06/ralph_ellison_s_invisible_man_follow_up_why_did_he_never_publish_it.html

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.  Some go as far as crediting this novel with helping to spark the Civil Rights movement by telling the truth about racial injustice in the South. More about the link between the two can be found here:  http://resources.mhs.vic.edu.au/mockingbird/civil.htm

Cry the Beloved Country by Alex Paton.  Stacie Michelle Williams pointed out that it may help students to see racial relations and troubling histories in other countries and she remembered this classic novel set in Apartheid South Africa as being “mind-opening.”  Many unit plans for teaching this novel exist online:  http://www.careerhighschool.org/uploads/1/5/9/7/15971030/cry_beloved_.pdf

Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor.  Newberry award winning novel about life for the Land family in the Jim-Crow era South.  High quality unit plans such as this one abound on the web:  http://www.ogdenmuseum.org/education/pdf/rollOfThunder.pdf

Night by Elie Wiesel.  This memoir of the Holocaust was reportedly rejected by fifteen publishers, but went on to sell more than ten million copies.  The NYT has more on the story here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Donadio-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Graphic Novel:

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang.  Complex, multi-layered story of growing up Chinese in America in the 1980’s.  Resources for teaching this and other graphic novels can be found here:  http://teachingwithgraphicnovels.com/2011/08/09/american-born-chinese/

Incognegro by Mat Johnson.  Fascinating story of a light-skinned black man who passes as white to investigate lynchings in the 1930’s. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/books/03gust.html

Arab in America by Toufic El Rassi.  Published in 2008, this autobiographical graphic novel shows what life during the War on Terror was like from the perspective of an Arab-immigrant. http://bookdragon.si.edu/2010/04/13/arab-in-america-by-toufic-el-rassi/

The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, Nate Powell.  Set in 1967, Houston, this autobiographical graphic novel covers the Civil Rights struggle from the alternating perspectives of a white and a black family.  http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/content/long-journey-story-behind-silence-our-friends-interview

The Arrival by Shaun Tan.  The immigrant experience captured in pictures only.  http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/booktalk-arrival-shaun-tan

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.  Graphic memoir about growing up in Iran during the revolution.  Satrapi’s story is taught in classes nationwide, though it is sometimes censored:  http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/03/18/1735481/chicago-public-schools-take-marjane-satrapis-persepolis-out-of-seventh-grade-classrooms/

Play:

Fires in the Mirror by Anna Deveare Smith. Professor Diana Joseph relates her reading experience here and I love the three questions she includes: “I read it in one of Melanie Rae Thon's classes when I was in grad school and it blew my mind. It's about the riots that happened in Crown Heights, Brooklyn back in the early 90's after a Hasidic rabbi was acquitted for the death of a black child--the rabbi and his driver killed the kid in a hit and run. Anna Deveare Smith interviewed many people from both communities--everyone from a Hasidic Jewish housewife to Al Sharpton--and turned those interviews into the dramatic monologues that make up her play. What I think is especially amazing is that Smith plays all the parts. The stuff she says about writing in her introduction is good, too. (One thing has always stayed with me. She says there are three questions that will you can ask anyone and their answers will be poetry: 1. have you ever been close to death; 2. what were the circumstances of your birth; and 3. have you ever been accused of something you did not do?)

Youtube performance of the play:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkrUJny0CE

More about Anna Deveare Smith here:  http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/smith_anna.php

"Other People's Holocausts: Trauma, Empathy and Justice in Anna Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror" https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/gjay/www/annadeaveresmith.pdf

"Fences" by August Wilson.  Race conscious play set in a pre-Civil Rights 1950’s.  A full teaching guide designed by a Minneapolis theater can be found here:  http://penumbratheatre.org/downloads/studyguides/FencesParts/Fences-Part12-ToolsforTeaching.pdf