Christopher Schroeder

Category: literacy, literature, and language

  • Once Again

    Once Again

    Yoni Appelbaum, an Atlantic editor, asks in a recent article about American history in terms of its past and future.

    In it, Appelbaum highlights the need for a “coherent national story” as a way of surviving our politically polarized times. He explains that a more mainstream work-in-progress narrative he reports is contested by a “settler-colonial,” and white supremacy account, which appeals to the left, and a timeless American values version, which appeals to the right. He concludes by reporting that some consider this lack of a shared story as the beginning of the end while others hope that such a possibility will motivate Americans to renew its commitment to a more perfect union.

    Appelbaum’s survey of competing narratives might be a useful way of understanding contemporary political conflicts, but its central insight about the need for a shared perspective isn’t news, or new. Similar observations were offered in the middle of the 1980s culture wars by E. D. Hirsch Jr., who used his literacy research to challenge American education.

    Hirsch, who was alarmed by the state of literacy, confirmed conclusions about comprehension and context. These led him to challenge both educational pluralism, or the common belief that locally-relevant content should be taught in schools, and educational formalism, or the widespread belief that reading, writing, and presumably thinking are skills that can be separated from content.

    Schools instead should teach cultural literacy, or a shared cultural context, especially in English and history that like math and science need a canonical curriculum. Such an approach, which would challenge cultural fragmentation, would also increase students’ reading and writing abilities and even potentially their social participation.

    Hirsch’s perspective has problems. He oversimplifies both the politics of cultural literacy for example and differences among ways of reading, writing, and thinking (i.e., his “linguistic literacy”), which are better understood as cultural practices.

    Nonetheless, Hirsch seems genuinely concerned about a more equitable society. He both recognizes the value of cultural diversity and acknowledges the existence dominant culture without defending it. He also argues that a cultural literacy approach is especially useful to ethnic and economic minorities, who are less likely to be exposed to this dominant culture outside of schools and as a result are more likely to be marginalized and excluded if not introduced to it within schools.

    Hirsch in other words argues for a shared perspective, which he calls cultural literacy and what every American needs to know, as the basis for understanding each other and participating in society. In doing so, he suggests that this perspective, which goes beyond a shared historical narrative, is a challenge he was confronting in the 1980s culture wars that we’re still apparently debating today.

    Hirsch’s account also alludes to a bigger issue. Both Appelbaum and he frame their concerns as American, but Hirsch’s account of his and others’ research suggest that these could quite possibly be human concerns, ones that might be more evident in culturally diverse communities and societies but nonetheless are relevant to human comprehension and communication.

    Shared cultural contexts might be necessary for humans to understand each other and collaborate together, in which case these challenges could be much older, and at the same time ones that our ancestors have managed for millennia.

  • Frenemies and Families

    Frenemies and Families

    Among Friends by Hal Ebbott is a flawed yet perhaps fascinating novel ostensibly about college friends Emerson and Amos.

    Emerson, who introduces Amos to his friend Claire, appears when Amos needs someone, which cements their connection. This connection eventually includes Claire, whom Amos marries, and Emerson’s wife Retsy as well as their respective daughters Anna and Sophie.

    The point of view shifts throughout the story, and attempts to establish some sympathy with all of the central characters, but at its center as the title suggests is the connection among the four of them, or at least Emerson, Amos, and Claire. These three are balanced by Retsy, who also counterbalances the pressure added by Claire to the friendship between Amos and Emerson.

    Claire, whose history with Emerson at times makes Amos uneasy, displays competing and confusing loyalties throughout the story. Emerson, who assumes that other discuss and even mock him, has an often hidden cruelty that is more revealed than developed.

    This cruelty becomes clear to Amos at the end, and catalyzes his change, which is the final focus of the plot and seems to make the novel in the end his story. For most of it, Amos exhibits a relatively uninteresting uncertainty and insecurity, which makes his eventual courage either more moving or less plausible.

    This courage comes from nowhere except his empathy for his daughter Anna, and specifically his ability to put her needs ahead of his own. As a result, Amos transforms what until that point had been embarrassing, and has been used against him, which almost redeems his emotional suffering and generates an unexpected strength.

    The problem with such an interpretation is the ending, which is too ambiguous and perhaps too rushed. Amos acts independently at the risk of his marriage, and also agrees to Claire’s proposed remedy, which is a family vacation for the three of them that he believes might salvage their marriage.

    Amos and Claire however consult Retsy and Emerson for a recommendation even as they intend once there to follow Anna’s direction. That could refer to her preferences for excursions, which is plausible, but doesn’t rule out an invitation to Emerson, Retsy, and Sophie to join them.

    This second possibility could portend reconciliation and forgiveness, which seems unrealistic or at the very least an awful possibility. I cannot comment on the proper protocol for such situation — I’m being deliberately vague to avoid revealing too much — and yet am horrified by the prospect of returning to regular interactions among them.

    Such an outcome only seems possible, and given the rest of the plot somewhat implausible. If intentional, the novel asks questions about whether we should judge others by their worst moments and if some actions permanently destroy long relationships, in which case the conclusion needs more care, and craft, if only to convince readers that they’re deliberately agitated.

    This more generous interpretation would suggest that this story starts as a slow burn only to burst however briefly into a flame, which would be reason enough to read it.

  • Mixed At Most

    I hoped for more from The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, which is the most recent book from Dorothy Roberts.

    In it, Roberts, who is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, offers an account of the summer she spent in a rented apartment near her Chicago childhood home where she sifted through boxes of her father’s research data, which she was bequeathed after the deaths of both her parents. She reads her father’s interviews of mixed-race married couples and reflects upon discovers about her parents, her younger twin sisters, and herself.

    Roberts’s father, who had been a Roosevelt University anthropology professor, began researching black-and-white marriages as a graduate student, and had seemingly been interested in such relationships even longer. For decades, he interviewed such couples, and was regularly assisted by his Jamaican wife Iris, whom he met when she was a Roosevelt student, and later graduate students.

    Roberts recalls that family discussions often involved her father’s research, and the book he was continually writing. She learns while reviewing these documents that he had two different contracts for this book for example but had to return both advances because he never completed a manuscript.

    Other discoveries seem more significant. For example she hadn’t realized the role that her mother had played in this project or the extent to which her parents’ marriage and even their family could have been part of her father’s research.

    These and others motivate Roberts to reconsider her college choice to identify as a black woman, and deny her white father, which could explain her reluctance to acknowledge her personal experience in her lectures and books. She also realizes that her father’s and her lifelong disagreement about race and relationships has been a persistent them in her own speaking and writing.

    Her father, who she claims never imposed his belief upon her, maintained that interracial intimacy could overcome racism, and consistently tried to convince her of that. She in contrast maintained that racism would end only when people recognize others of different races as equals, which is a prerequisite she believes for love.

    Roberts ultimately reconsiders her perspective, and admits to tempering her resistance to her father’s by the end of the summer. Nonetheless, she is still less hopeful than he, and still convinced of her own account.

    Roberts is right I think insofar that this book demonstrates the damage that race as a social construct can do to relationships and families even across generations. Her father for example waited until his mother had died to marry her mother, which then motivated his brother to disown him, and prevented her from meeting her Chicago cousins.

    I also admire her candor throughout this book, and appreciate the appeal of confronting her past and understanding its impact upon her present. I additionally can understand the way that this book could be considered the completion of the task her father started but never finished.

    Nonetheless, I wonder if Roberts not unlike her father hasn’t quite done so, if she like him still has unfinished business to complete. The reason is that this book seems more like a series of notes about and reflections upon these data and her experiences and less an interpretation and synthesis of these, which are expected of memoirs.

    This book clearly has a narrative frame — the summer Roberts spends near her Chicago childhood him reviewing her father’s research data — and an overarching insight — the complication of her race-and-relationships opinion — but needs more perspective if she intends to offer an account of her intellectual and emotional transformation. Perhaps a different organizing principle, or an additional draft, would enable her to complete the task she gave herself.

    I’m convinced having been married to a Filipina for thirty years that Roberts like her father has a book here and yet needs more sifting, sorting, and synthesizing to complete it.