Book Review: Letting Go of Literary Whiteness

When I was a senior in high school, in 1995 or 1996, I read Richard Wright’s Native Son. That was, as far as I can recall, the first and only text by an author of color that I read in a high school English class. It wasn’t even assigned reading; it was one of many books from which we could choose in my college-prep composition class (the other two I chose were Pride and Prejudice and Crime and Punishment). There was, therefore, no class discussion about the novel and no guidance from a teacher to help me understand what Wright may have been trying to achieve through his portrayal of Bigger Thomas. I distinctly remember my feeling of shock and horror when I read about Bigger smothering Mary Dalton, dismembering her body, and burning the pieces in the Dalton’s fireplace. Since my only prior exposure to African-American people, real or fictional, was The Cosby Show (I grew up in White, small-town Minnesota), I had no understanding of the historic and systemic injustices underlying Bigger’s rage, and it would be fair to say that I missed the point of the book and graduated high school without a clue about the marginalization of people of color in America, the problems of White privilege and supremacy, or the notion Tanner (2019) explores that these problems might have anything to do with a White person like me. That is the kind of situation the authors of Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students (Borsheim-Black & Tatiana Sarigianides, 2019), aim to address.