We're in a moment in which more and more teachers are incorporating the texts of people of color into their classrooms, and my hope is that teachers present these writers not merely as sociological or anthropological tour guides, but also as composers of beautiful literature.
Frederick Douglass, for example, should be read as much for the shape of his sentences as he is for what his life tells us about slavery and the historical moment he lived in. His work should sit alongside Melville and Whitman and Dickinson as central to the American Renaissance.
When teaching Zora Neale Hurston, are educators teaching students to find value in the way Hurston captures and employs language, or *only* to show students what Black life was like during a certain period of time in a certain region in our country's history?
Writing work that might teach people something they didn't know, and writing work that is beautiful on the level of craft are obviously not mutually exclusive. But it's important to consider how writers of color's work is presented & what parts of their work we name as valuable.
And I’ve used two well-known Black writers as examples, but this extends to Indigenous writers, Latinx writers, Asian writers and others who are too often valued only for what they can teach people & not often enough for the literary aesthetics & innovations of what they create.
