Whenever I am presented with narratives, I always look for a relationship to my own. I never find a true connection, but I find some similarities, some window through which I may look as a fascinated outsider. Eventually, the amusing becomes mundane. Is there anything else? Is this all the academy has, or is this merely all it is willing to offer? I posit that the academy perpetuates stereotypes by limiting the "minority" experience to what it wants our experiences to be. The "other" is not three-dimensional as the majority is. The "other" is exclusively viewed as a one-dimensional monolith. What about the rest of us? What about black people who don't speak "black English" or minorities who don't code-switch as a means of survival, like Rodriguez? What about women who don't feel disenfranchised by men, women who (gasp) actually like men and who celebrate masculinity? In some ways, I'm more concerned about teachers who encounter the classroom with a skewered perspective of the narrative du jour than I am the ones who are openly naive. "You're not like the rest of 'them'" is not a compliment to me.
Years ago, my father, an educated black man who comfortably speaks the 70s street jive of his South Bronx hometown as well as standard English, presented the best case yet against modifying the curriculum to teach AAE. He reminded me that every black American (and I'd add every American) had watched enough television to know what standard English sounded like, to acquire its patterns and voice. In fact, when prompted, most black people can speak in what is dubbed a "white voice." Black English is a choice, a matter of defiance then, so it should come as no amazing shock that, after watching countless hours of "Friends" and "Seinfeld" among other shows in rotation, standard English is quite standard for most black Americans as well. When someone presumes that I'm a code-switcher simply because of what he/she perceives as my identity, the burn of that spanking I received for saying the word "ain't" when I was eight-years-old increases. A speech and language pathologist, my mother beat the "ain't" out of me. There was no way that I would defy her teachings and standards by speaking like "one of them" in her household. And I'm even more weary of people thinking that I do speak like "one of them." It comes along with a host of other presumptions. Are you poor? Did you just escape the ghetto? Meanwhile, my mother's family has been middle class for generations. On my father's side, all but one of my grandmother's six children earned college degrees and work as professionals.
I have this deep-seated desire to take all of these labels and hand them back to the powers that be. They can start by taking back their books, filled with so-called multicultural readings that refuse to present any view other than the accepted narrative.
Excellently argued! I completely understand your point about presumptions. (I too come from college-educated, black parents; they were first-generation college students who met at UCLA and, voila! -- here I am...) Because I was a black male student/athlete in a majority-white university setting, I was exposed to all the presumptions you cite above and more. But now, as a black teacher, I refute presumptions my teaching colleagues make, I revise assumptions that both my black and my non-black students make, and I disabuse notions that certain multicultural anthologies convey to readers. While I am grateful that black authors are regularly included in the literary canon these days, we must be careful to communicate to students that the black experience is not a monolithic experience. What students get nowadays in literary texts is but a thin slice of pie. While that is far better than when there were no offerings at all, think how grand it could be if students could sample from the entire dessert tray!
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