Letting Go of Literary Whiteness by Carlin Borsheim-Black

Author:Carlin Borsheim-Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Published: 1995-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sketches on Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live (SNL) created a race-based version of its successful Jeopardy! skit with Black Jeopardy! The premise of this newer skit, which began in 2014, is that the host plus two of the three contestants share a common, lower-middle-class, American Black experience through which the contestants successfully respond to the host’s questions. The third, rotating contestant is typically a White person who thinks he or she understands American Blackness but does not. In a post–Black Panther episode, the show positioned Chadwick Boseman as his character T’Challa, responding with Wakanda optimism to the questions offered by host Kenan Thompson. Although an SNL sketch may seem a strange suggestion for a unit on Twain, we could imagine students extending their consideration of how Black artists utilize satire to expose racism. In a typical SNL Black Jeopardy! skit, questions and answers follow a Black gaze or perspective, rendering Whites or non-American Blacks outsiders. How does the skit expose Whiteness? How does it situate a particular kind of Blackness that is typically not the focus of a show like Jeopardy!, which presumes to focus on “common” knowledge worthy of an astute American’s ken?

The American literary curriculum has proven remarkably resistant to significant changes in text selection for over a century. Building a curriculum that features counterstories in relation to canonical, White-authored texts offers teachers one way to begin to break down this White textual monopoly as a means of offering students a robust, antiracist curriculum worthy of careful study.

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