Two-Dimensional Diversity & Beyond

An author’s presence in a book extends beyond the front cover and back flap biography. Their ideas, biases, values, cultural knowledge, and worldview impact how they write. Regardless of the amount of research an author can conduct when constructing a narrative, their understanding of the world will flavor their descriptions of certain scenarios, relationships, and interactions. 

Pushes for multicultural education in the 1970s and ‘80s after the civil rights and women’s rights movements influenced schools across the country to include texts challenging stereotypes and discussing historical oppression. However, curating diversity is not a simple task. Liz Phipps Soeiro, an elementary school librarian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, describes how, when choosing a multicultural book, “a lot of people will see a brown child on the cover of a book and think that’s enough.”In reality, “we have to look critically at the agency of that child, who wrote the book, the dominant narrative in the book. It takes a lot of work.” 

Currently, diversity in books is lacking. As Jill Anderson, a senior digital content creator at Harvard University School of Education’s publication, points out, “in the past 24 years, multicultural content, according to book publisher Lee & Low, represents only 13% of children’s literature.” In spite of “national movements like We Need Diverse Books and DisruptTexts, and despite a growing number of diverse books, only 7% are written by people of color.” A lack of diversity in literature might be the reason why multicultural education efforts have stalled. As the movement grows, we should consider what diversity ought to look like. I believe that the most valuable way to present multicultural content in English curriculums in schools is by purchasing texts written by and centering around minorities. 

In my sophomore year, I read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing. The intergenerational story follows the descendants of two sisters, one who stays in Africa, and the other who is sold into slavery in America. I read Mudbound, Hillary Jordan’s 2008 debut novel, last year in my American Literature class. The plot follows the relationship between the white landowners and black share tenants on the land. Both novels explore similar themes by including major black characters, but approach storytelling through different methods.

  A major difference in the authors’ approaches to storytelling is their style of narration. In Homegoing, Gyasi chose to have the characters’ thoughts in grammatically correct English whereas in Mudbound, Jordan chose to have the black characters’ thoughts in grammatically incorrect slang. By having the narrations in each chapter presented in strings of long and profound sentences, Gyasi is uniquely able to communicate her analysis about intergenerational suffering from slavery. That is not to say that short sentences with slang cannot be powerful, but Gyasi’s prose adds critical insight into her characters’ personalities and actions in a way that Jordan’s is unable to. Though Gyasi’s characters also use slang in their speech, her usage of prose for narration is an acknowledgment that our identities are not only our voice or dialogue—we’re the culmination of our complex thoughts, emotions, and actions. 

Mudbound’s shallow exploration of black characters results in the book centering white voices. The first time that the reader meets Hap, one of the black share tenants on the plantation, is from Henry, the landowner’s perspective. After his conversation with Hap, Henry concludes that “whatever else the colored man may be, he’s our brother,” and that “for good or ill, he’s been given into our care.” Hap is intelligent; he would have clearly been able to detect Henry’s racist benevolence in their interactions, but Jordan decides to depict it through Henry’s voice and does similarly for the rest of the story. 

The book explores race relations during Jim Crow by focusing on white characters changing their perspectives on black characters. These developments are primarily explored in chapters with white narration, so even if Mudbound did include significant black characters, it inevitably centered white perspectives. In Homegoing, because each narrator is black, the book centers black voices and perspectives. For example, when H, a sharecropper, evaluates his social position, he concludes that “at least when he was a slave, his master had needed to keep him alive if he wanted to get his money’s worth” and that “a mule was worth more than he was.” H is completely capable of understanding his oppression and white prejudice; there is no need to include white racist perspectives on top of actions. H, like the other characters in the book, grapples with his suffering and pain without centering the white perpetrators and thus powerfully develops Homegoing’s discussion of intergenerational pain for black Americans. 

Jordan’s book is interesting and well-written; it is clear why the book received the 2006 Bellwether Prize amongst other accolades. Nonetheless, I do not believe that Jordan’s depiction of Jim Crow era racism is revolutionary. Her story does not add insight into the black experience in the way that Gyasi’s does. And part of that is inevitable. Jordan, as a white woman, will never be able to understand the subtleties of racial oppression in America. No person is truly able to understand another group’s experiences. Authors are limited by what they already know and experience; they will inevitably center their stories to fit with their understanding of the world, which unfortunately means their depictions will not be as true as those coming from authors of the depicted group. Gyasi herself is not African-American; she is Afro-American. Her family immigrated from Ghana in 1991 when she was two years old. She is not a descendant of the Middle Passage; she does not experience the same intergenerational pain and structural racism from slavery that African-Americans do. However, part of the reason that she writes her African-American characters so well is that in America, she is still treated as “black.” In a New York Times opinion piece, she speaks about a time where her group of friends was approached by two white boys. One called them the n-word, and the other said Gyasi herself was not one, that she was different somehow. Even if her immigrant family considered themselves superior, she reflects that when she was eight, “I was a n一 well before I had a chance to prove myself otherwise, that the retraction of the word did not make up for the fact that it was uttered in the first place. It did not make up for the fact that when those boys looked at me, a n一 is what they saw.” Her ability to relate to the African-American experience meant the feelings of her black characters were more detailed and powerful. 

The inevitable failure of white authors to depict nuanced minority characters brings up the question of whether privileged authors should write about minorities at all. I do think that privileged individuals should heavily involve minority perspectives in their novels; otherwise, literature will not evolve. Brooklyn-based author Kaitlyn Greenidge concurs in a New York Times Op-Ed that fiction could be much better if writers took the time “to afford the same depth of humanity and interest and nuance to characters who look like them as characters who don’t, to take those stories seriously and actually think about power when writing.” Homegoing explores the legacy of slavery in a phenomenal, engaging, and revolutionary way; Mudbound does not. 

However, the books meriting new grants and special investments from English departments across the country must be revolutionary. It is a conscious decision to choose to purchase and teach one book over another; the LHS English Department could have purchased any number of other books on the topic written by black authors, but they did not. They chose to purchase Mudbound over Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, among many others. Given the history of white people profiting off of black pain and suffering, departments must choose which authors and books they support with an understanding of who they want their money supporting. 

Further, the extra characterization and subtlety present in stories written by minority writers have a profound impact on readers. Last year, in my American Literature class, we read Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories by Bengali-American author Jhumpa Lahiri that discusses the Indian-American experience in both countries. One of the short stories, titled “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” is written from the perspective of a young Indian-American girl named Lilia living in Boston. As a young Indian-American woman living in Boston now, it is unsurprising that I felt a visceral connection to the book. Seeing descriptions like her family eating “rice every night for supper with their hands” with “pickled mangoes” and chewing “fennel seeds after meals as a digestive” treated without fanfare or emphasis was heartening (25). Knowing that fennel seeds are eaten as digestives and that pickled mango is regularly paired with rice for dinner in Indian households is a level of cultural knowledge that people who do not share the culture would be unfamiliar with. Seeing the food I eat for dinner portrayed as the default narrative reminded me that my culture is just as American as anyone else’s.

White students are exceedingly represented in American Literature. Their cultural habits, whether it be food, dress, etc., are the ones that we see and read. Even ideas like someone wearing their “Sunday best” that can normally be seen as universal experiences presuppose a white Christian norm that does not include my experience. For special events, my family wears Indian clothes—and Saturday is our religious day, not Sunday. While there are aspects of mainstream experiences I do relate to because I have grown up in America, the more Indian aspects of my identity are not represented. The vast majority of narratives found in English classes center white perspectives, so seeing the same cultural norms that alienated me from other people in school—like wearing bindis on religious holidays—represented in this book reminded me that my experience is still profoundly American. Representation in literature classes allows minority students to take pride in their cultural norms knowing that their niche experience is valuable enough to be represented in curriculums. In a country that proclaims itself a ‘melting pot’ while perpetuating such discrimination and xenophobia, it becomes increasingly important to showcase literary perspectives operating outside of a white lens. 

Increasing multicultural literature in English classes is valuable. As the minority and immigrant demographics increase in America, there has been an increasing need and value to including minority voices in traditionally whitewashed curriculums. When authors are part of a certain group, they intrinsically add a nuance to their storytelling that cannot be replicated. This nuance is not trivial; when people see themselves in literature, they are reminded that their experiences are as valid and valuable. Thus, when deciding which stories and by extension, which authors merit investment, English departments across the country should direct their diversity initiatives to pay for books by and about minorities.

by PRANATHI SRIRANGAM