Walter Dean Myers: When Books Mirror Children’s Lives, Reading Validates Identity
Today, St. Patrick’s Day, is a good time to reflect on the ways people can cherish multiple identities—cultural, national, and global. This issue is fraught with controversy in today’s America.
While most of us are perfectly comfortable joining the Irish today to celebrate their heritage, public schools in Tucson, Arizona have banned a Mexican American Studies program designed to celebrate the heritage of many of the students in Tucson’s schools. Tucson’s school district has also removed from classrooms the books that were part of this program. Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program was outlawed in Arizona because it was said to teach what Michael Winerip writing for the NY Times described as, “‘critical race theory,’ a violation under a provision that prohibits lessons ‘promoting racial resentment.’” A year ago, in March of 2013, an appeals court upheld the termination of Tucson’s program to teach Mexican American history and culture.
Knowing about Tucson’s ban on Latino-Latina studies, yet realizing that today many of us will be joining Irish Americans to celebrate their heritage (and imagining that no public school student anywhere in the United States would likely be punished for writing a book report about James Joyce’s Dubliners, for example, or Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes), I was captivated by Walter Dean Myers’ wonderful article in yesterday’s NY Times about the meaning of reading for children and adolescents as they grow and develop: Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?
Myers describes how he loved having his mother read to him and how later, as an eager