Timely NYT article can connect students with A Raisin in the Sun and present-day inequality

Are you teaching A Raisin in the Sun this year? Are you looking for a new substantive hook to help your students understand what’s at stake in Hansberry’s play? Do your students need help thinking about why the Younger family was willing to risk so much (humiliation, violence) to move to Clybourne Park? The New York Times has a great article that can help.

Clyde Haberman begins his important piece by asking: “Should your ZIP code determine your future?” It’s a catchy but moot question. Our ZIP code does play a huge role in determining our futures. This is what Hansberry and the Younger family understood and what underscores the continuing importance of Hansberry’s brilliant A Raisin in the Sun. (If you have been using our volume Using Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun, you will immediately see how this new article fits in with the units on housing discrimination past and present and socioeconomic mobility and inequality featured in the book.)

Haberman’s “Housing Bias and the Roots of Segregation” is a companion to a 15-minute video, part of the Retro Report, a video documentary series examining major news stories of the past. (The video, or a short part of it, can be a great way to hook your students into thinking about this weighty topic before reading the article.) In particular, The Times’ article and video focus on Dorothy Gautreaux and her lawsuit, some fifty years ago, against the Chicago Housing Authority. The lawsuit resulted in the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, giving a small number of families vouchers to resettle in white, affluent suburbs. The children in these families thrived, despite racism and setbacks. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration created a similar program, Moving to Opportunity. Read the article to see the complex analysis of the results of the Clinton administration’s attempt to address housing segregation and social inequality.

The story of the Younger family and Mama’s attempt to give her grandson Travis a better future by moving him to a white, more prosperous neighborhood is no crusty, irrelevant tale from our distant past. As Haberman reports, from 2000 to 2013, the number of Americans living in “concentrated poverty rose to 13.8 million from 7.2 million, with African-Americans and Latinos disproportionately represented.” These young people, like Travis, may not be entirely trapped by their zip codes, but they are significantly, tragically disadvantaged. Hansberry’s play, sadly, reflects an enduring reality that the Obama administration, as the article details, is now making its own attempt to address. In our own way as educators, by exposing our students to such complex, important texts, we can help them develop the powerful knowledge and critical thinking skills they will need to address these issues themselves.

A new school year, a new Mockingbird

EdWeek currently features an inspiring piece by David B. Cohen about teaching Mockingbird. Cohen talks about the ways in which his views and teaching of Harper Lee’s seminal and influential text have changed, particularly in light of his current reading about institutional racism and economic oppression in the historical period of the novel.

Indeed, as Cohen writes, “even if the book stays the same, the reader changes over time.” So his current reading of Mockingbird is different from what it was some twenty years ago, based on who he now is but also what he now knows about the broader context of the novel.

We might amplify Cohen’s important comments with a reminder that the readers of Mockingbird today are not just us, the teachers, but also our students. What broader context and particular reading do students today bring to the table in order to make sense out of Harper Lee’s text? What do we as teachers hope they will take away? How can we help them see the connections between this very historically specific story of Maycombe and today’s American universe, replete with tensions about race, economic inequality, social justice, etc.?

Cohen writes that a text like Mockingbird is never at risk of feeling “stale and overused” because it contains such “rich material.” But he also emphasizes, so rightly, that by “adding relevant new learning,” we “keep the experience fresh.” Indeed, that is the difficult but exciting task of the skilled English teacher.

When we select innovative and engaging informational or nonfiction texts in order to provide a potent context for both us and for those many students for whom Mockingbird can seem an alien text describing a foreign world, we do our jobs well. There is no one Mockingbird; which version of Harper Lee’s novel will you offer your students this year? What texts will you curate for them in order to shape their first or second encounter with what Oprah Winfrey calls “our national novel”?