Opinion: Potomac's "Diverse" Required Reading
As a part of my required reading for English 11 this summer, I was given a choice between 4 different books, all of which seemed particularly bland to me except one. On the list was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah. Having listened to her TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story” multiple times throughout my life, I decided to pick Americanah for my summer reading, only realizing afterwards that of all the books on my list that it was by far the longest.
While I was slightly irritated at myself for picking the most time-consuming book, I read the 600 page novel in just three days. I’d surprised myself: I loved the book. It was, as I told my friends, the best book I’d ever read for school. And in reflecting on it, I’ve realized that it wasn’t because the writing was the best writing I’ve ever seen, or that the plot was particularly outstanding (even though both were very good). It was because in my 12 years at Potomac, this was the first time I’d been required to read a book where someone was actually like me.
Required reading at Potomac is like a thin, sprawling fracture in a mirror: from far away, it looks fine, until you get up close and realize there are quite a few issues. While I feel somewhat obligated to say that the book options have gotten more diverse over the years (despite the very obvious fact that we can do better), the only aspect of our required reading that is somewhat (barely) diverse is the skin tones of the characters. Beyond this, the plot lines surrounding characters of color remain the same: quite tragic, and to be frank, quite repetitive. Up until Americanah, every book I’d read at Potomac involving someone who looked like me revolved around two subjects: slavery and segregation (and in the case of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, another required reading book, both!). And while I understand that these are important subjects to learn, discuss, and reflect on, there are two heavy implications when schools such as Potomac continue to use only these same tragic plotlines in the classroom.
First, it implies that the purpose of these books are to fill in holes that aren’t being taught in history lessons, rather than to focus on the pure literature of the books. Typically when I’m given a historical context lesson in English class, it involves a book about a person of color. In my opinion, this isn’t something that should be applauded, but criticized. It represents a fatal flaw within our history curriculum not only at Potomac, but in the US as a whole: that enough is not taught about people of color in history class to provide the context needed to get through a book about something as important as slavery or segregation.
Second, it implies that people of color are only their oppression. One of the reasons Americanah was so refreshing to me as a black reader was that the main character, Ifemelu, was more complex and faced more problems than things just simply related to her race. It seems that in every required reading book involving a person of color, the main character is little more than their struggle. Often, these books reduce the character to a simple victim of the problem. In class, anecdotes in a person of color’s story are often used as symbols of a larger societal problem, while anecdotes in a white character’s story are used to further their ever-growing list of character traits.
I’m not saying that we should get rid of these books, nor am I trying in any way to diminish their importance. But Potomac did something right with giving Americanah as a required reading choice: it showed the simple logic that people of color are just that: people. For people of color throughout all of history, balancing systemic oppression, a complicated love life, confidence issues, and a billion other things are everyday life. They still carry struggles, but their race isn’t all who they are. It’s time that our required reading properly reflects the students who are forced to read it.