Relating to Race

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Headlines reporting the furor of Louisiana’s “Jena 6” trial and other racially motivated incidents around the country drive home the point that race relations continue to be a volatile topic. These new young adult novels featuring teens grappling with racial prejudice will bring an eyewitness narrative approach to discussions in social studies, contemporary issues, sociology, and English classrooms. 

In Sharon M. Draper’s Fire from the Rock (Dutton, 2007), set in 1957 Little Rock, AK, Sylvia Patterson is asked to be one of the first black students to attend white Central High School. She ponders the opportunity, weighing the honor and the chance to make history against the burdens of leaving her friends, exclusion from school activities, and the threats of personal harm. Draper’s characters include African-Americans who oppose integration alongside those calling for militant action, and she works abundant historical detail into her humane narrative. When Little Rock explodes with fiery violence, Sylvia comes to a surprising conclusion, leading readers to ask themselves what they would have done in her situation.

My Mother the Cheerleader by Robert Sharenow (HarperCollins, 2007), for older readers, looks at school integration from the other side. Louise Collins, 13 and white, lives in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward in 1960. Her single mother, Pauline, pulls her out of school in protest when black Ruby Bridges enters the first grade. Louise’s response to integration is simply to shrug and “wonder why the Negro kids wanted to go to such a crummy school.” Pauline is one of the “Cheerleaders,” white mothers who scream racist taunts at Ruby every morning as she enters the school. Louise accepts this seething segregation as normal until intriguing Morgan Miller, an editor from New York, rents a room from Pauline. His anger over the situation raises questions in Louise’s mind about racial inequality. 

Like Draper, Sharenow’s cast of characters includes fleshed-out figures from all sides of the divide, peeling back stereotypes to reveal the humanity of black and white, adult and child, racist and civil rights champion. Louise’s wryly ironic and humorous voice stands in contrast to the violence marking the book’s conclusion. Combine Fire from the Rock and My Mother the Cheerleader with Ruby Bridges’s picture-filled memoir, Through My Eyes (Scholastic, 1999), for a trio of titles sure to elicit thoughtful consideration of school integration.

Franklin Church is a genial, charming country doctor in Tony Johnston’s haunting Bone by Bone by Bone (Roaring Brook, 2007), set in 1950s Tennessee. He is also a vicious racist, and when he realizes he can’t prevent his son David, nine, from playing with his best friend Malcolm, who is black, he lays down the “Nigger Rule.” “‘[P]lay like hell—outside. But he can never set foot in this house. Rule’s real simple: you ever let that nigger in, by God, I’ll shoot him.’ He formed his words with such a calm, I knew he’d planned this, cold as ice. And I had no doubt whatever he’d do just what he said.” Brutal violence and raw racial epithets contrast with nostalgic colloquialisms and gentle bucolic life in this absorbing novel peopled with vivid characters. 

Johnston pulls from her own past, recalling a similar declaration by her father, and citing “the raw language…[as] my father’s language [that] reflects a way of thinking that has troubled me my whole life.” Along with Draper and Sharenow’s titles, Bone by Bone by Bone provides a great springboard for students collecting oral histories in their own communities and families, gathering memories of the early civil rights and school integration years.

Explore how much has changed since the 1950s with Janet McDonald’s lively Off-Color (Farrar, 2007), a story set in current-day Brooklyn. Cameron, a spirited 15-year-old, lives with her single, white mom in a mostly-white working-class neighborhood. She enjoys texting her friends, blasting her music, shopping, and hanging out. When her mother loses her nail salon job and their rent is suddenly prohibitive, they move to the projects, where theirs are the only white faces. As Cameron struggles with overwhelming change in her life, she uncovers a secret about her own origins—her father was black. Sharp humor and quick wit turn this story of transformed identity into a celebration of diversity, hyped up on pop culture and street lingo. Launch into discussions of stereotypes of various kinds and their role in race relations.

Help students balance the emotions in discussions of race relations with Marc Aronson’s newly released nonfiction title, Race: A History Beyond Black and White (S & S/Atheneum, 2007). Aronson places racism within the larger context of human culture, tracing “the urge to hate those who are different” through history from the ancient world to the civil rights era and today. The thoughtful treatment and well-developed bibliography of print resources and Web sites provide a powerful fact-based resource for students confronting societal and personal prejudices.

Hear Marc Aronson read from Race: A History Beyond Black and White

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