With Barack Obama becoming U.S. president in barely a week, some college English professors worry it may actually become tougher to engage students in race-based literature.
“Many of my students claim to live in a post-racial society,” says Dr. Joy Myree-Mainor, an assistant professor of English at historically Black Morgan State University in Baltimore. “They don’t want to identify with African-American characters.”
For instance, many of her students deny parallels exist between themselves and the characters in Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of Richard Wright stories exploring oppression in the South in the 1930s. “Students don’t want to see themselves as victims,” Myree-Mainor says.
Dr. Coretta Pittman, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, agrees with that assessment.
The prospect makes harder a task she and other professors already struggle with day to day because many of their students believe race doesn’t matter anymore, Pittman says.
For example, every fall semester Pittman teaches advanced expository writing to students in a variety of academic majors. She assigns them to read several acclaimed 20th-century writers and examine what inspired them artistically at that particular time. By doing this, she hopes they will consider how to effectively engage readers in their own writing. Assigned reading includes Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Garden, in which essay topics range from the civil rights movement to Walker’s partial blindness from an accidental BB gunshot to one eye.
