Fictions of Integration: American School Stories and the Promise of Utopia After Brown V

Fictions of Integration: American School Stories and the Promise of Utopia After Brown v. Board of Education by Naomi Lesley B.A. in Independent Concentration, May 1999, Brown University M.M. in Violin Performance, May 2004, Peabody Institute M.A. in English, May 2009, San Diego State University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 31, 2014 Dissertation directed by Gayle Wald Professor of English The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Naomi Lesley has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of April 10, 2014. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Fictions of Integration: American School Stories and the Promise of Utopia After Brown v. Board of Education Naomi Lesley Dissertation Research Committee: Gayle Wald, Professor of English, Dissertation Director Marjorie Ann Romines, Professor of English, Committee Member James A. Miller, Professor of English and American Studies, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2014 by Naomi Lesley All rights reserved iii Acknowledgments I wish to thank my dissertation director, Gayle Wald, for her support, guidance, and well-directed feedback during the writing process. I also want to acknowledge the members of my dissertation writing group, in particular Elizabeth Pittman and Peyton Joyce, for their helpful critical advice in reading drafts, and Monica Kisura Wells for her research suggestions and general support. I am grateful to Cynthia Voigt, Sharon Draper, and Jacqueline Woodson for generously responding to my queries, and am especially appreciative of the encouragement and the thoughtful conversations that Mildred Pitts Walters took the time to offer me. Finally, I wish to thank my mother, Audrey Bernstein, and my husband, Daniel Lesley, for being fantastic editors and reminding me to be paranoid about clarity and precision. iv Abstract of Dissertation Fictions of Integration: American School Stories and the Promise of Utopia After Brown v. Board of Education The Brown v. Board of Education decision marks a crucial moment, not only in United States civil rights history, but also in educational reform, as it presumed that national reform would follow the success of changes in the educational system. Surprisingly, within the vast body of Brown scholarship, little attention has been paid to the narratives that are taught to contemporary schoolchildren about desegregation, which presumably would help them to develop a framework for understanding their own racially fraught classroom experiences. Conversely, within children’s literature scholarship, narratives of desegregation have not received attention as stories that are also about school. This dissertation examines the archive of children’s novels about desegregation and makes the case that they can provide insights both for scholars of desegregation and for scholars of the school story genre. I argue that the often-discussed failures to realize the Brown decision’s utopian vision can be traced to the underlying assumptions about individual success, failure, and ability that are built into the institution of the school, assumptions which come into focus when these novels are read as generic school stories. Nevertheless, I also suggest that children’s novels highlight the potential agency of children, and suggest utopian methods of education, racial integration, and citizenship, in ways that policy discourse cannot do. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments............................................................................................................. iv Abstract of Dissertation …............................................................................................... v Introduction: Mirrors, Windows, and Unspeakable Conversations.................................... 1 Chapter 1: Scripting History and the Genre of Desegregation Stories………………......49 Chapter 2: Counternarratives and the Persistence of White Privilege.............................115 Chapter 3:Pedagogies of Desegregation: Narratives of Disability and Giftedness .......... 180 Chapter 4: Desegregating Literacy, Enriching the State ..................................................... 244 Conclusion: Schooling and Resistance ......................................................................... 308 Works Cited.....................................................................................................................328 vi Introduction: Mirrors, Windows, and Unspeakable Conversations Preface: On (Not) Talking About Race in the Classroom I can remember standing in front of a classroom full of ninth grade students and consciously choosing not to ask a fraught question about race. I was a young, white, middle-class, female teacher (the demographic most often found in the front of the classroom 1), and all of the students in ninth grade English at the Cesar Chavez Charter School for Public Policy were African-American and Latino. We were having a heated discussion about everyday racism; as I recall, we were in the middle of reading Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and we were discussing the legacies of slavery and the persistence of institutionalized racism. Students recounted their ire and shame at being followed in stores, or at seeing people in downtown D.C. eye them and cross to the other side of the street, or at riding crowded buses to their neighborhoods while more affluent white neighborhoods had Metro service. I wondered, as I frantically took down the names of students waiting to speak, whether anyone would mention the fact that nearly all of their teachers were white, while only three white students attended the school. None did. Moreover, a recent school-wide reading test (administered because the school was under threat of being sanctioned for under-performance under George Bush’s No Child Left Behind law) had revealed that most of our students in grades nine through twelve were testing at reading levels of third to sixth grade. No student mentioned these scores in our discussion, either. No one expressed anger at the quality of education he or she had been given. I wondered if I ought to bring up these factors, which, to me, were salient 1 See Gloria Ladson-Billings and Lisa Delpit. 1 aspects of everyday racism. Shy of introducing awkwardness into a seemingly open and rolling discussion, I kept silent. Later that day, grading papers after school, I brought up my dilemma with my classroom-mate, a teacher of ninth grade American history who taught the same students and who, like me, was a white middle-class woman who had previously taught in predominantly white schools. She laughed. “How exactly would you start that up? Do you just say, ‘Hey, you guys, have you ever noticed that all of your teachers are white and none of you are?’ Do you tell them their scores say they can’t read? You should totally try that out tomorrow. Let me know how it goes.” Needless to say, I did not “try that out” the next day. The subject was dropped. The following year, my husband was transferred to Arizona, and I left Chavez for a rural public school district that was decidedly not progressive in its philosophy. Nostalgic for the idealistic intensity of Chavez, I returned for a visit before the winter break. A former ninth grade student of mine was passing the front desk just as I walked in, and greeted me with a hug. “You should come back, Ms. Lesley,” he said. “We miss you. Everything is still the same here. Adrian is still driving all the teachers crazy. Angela is still calling all the teachers racist. When are you coming back?” 2 “That’s funny,” I said, “I don’t recall Angela telling any of us we were racist when I was here.” 2 I have changed students’ names to protect their identities. 2 “No, not to your faces, she didn’t,” he replied with a broad grin. From Classroom to Dissertation In the years since, memories of these exchanges, and others like them, have come to summarize for me some of the contradictions and elisions that characterize how issues of race are handled in the classroom with students, many of whom identify as racial minorities. On the one hand, racial conflict is an open and approved topic, increasingly prescribed as a subject in multicultural curricula and state standards; 3 my room-mate taught the histories of slavery and the colonization of the American Southwest, and students in my class read works by Douglass, James McBride, Sandra Cisneros, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others. Discussions of this literature, as I have already described, could not avoid raising the issue of racism. On the other hand, racial conflict in the classroom as it directly affects the students and teachers—for example, in continuing racial segregation, in teacher hiring, and in school funding—is a buried subject, relegated to silent undercurrents of anxiety. This remained true even at Chavez, which is a school that explicitly encourages, even requires, teachers and students to connect curricular learning to everyday public policy concerns. My room-mate and I, talking in the after- hours privacy of the empty classroom, could only wonder whether the students noticed the same facets of classroom racism we did; in the meantime, the students, evidently, not only did notice, but likely wondered the same about us. More importantly from the students’ perspective, the power differential between teacher

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