“Explain to [students] how central slavery was to American growth, and you can’t emphasize enough that there is real pride to be found in this history, the pride of surviving a horribly unjust system, the pride of knowing their ancestors resisted, the pride of knowing that Black people were right in their insistence that slavery was wrong, and the pride of knowing that the enslaved never gave up hope, they never surrendered their humanity.” -Hasan Kwame Jeffries[1]
Introduction
By 12th grade my students are familiar with the oppression that African Americans have faced in this country for centuries. They have learned about slavery, learned about Jim Crow, learned about Reconstruction. “Why didn't they do anything? Why didn’t they fight back?” is a common statement when students learn about these historical periods of oppression. These are not new sentiments for young people. It was these very conversations in the 1960s that served as an inspiration and motivation for Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the central novel of this unit. She noticed the way her peers chastised their parents’ generation for not doing enough, for not fighting back against discrimination. Butler wrote this text in part to resolve these feelings. [2]
The truth is there has always been resistance. You cannot tell the full story of oppression without resistance. This unit serves to complicate a narrow idea of resistance and challenge what students might think as the “right way” or “only way” to fight back, specifically against slavery. This unit allows students to: 1) explore methods of resistance to slavery; 2) understand the power of the written word and how writing in itself serves as a form of resistance; and 3) engage with multiple genres of texts to evaluate their persuasiveness.
In my classroom I want students to experience success and build their academic confidence while also feeling comfortable making and learning from mistakes. My goal is to spend our 90-minute class periods reading, writing, and speaking. All three of those domains should be occurring every day. It has recently become a national discussion that our students are not reading full books. I see this play out in our classrooms and it is crucial to me that students read texts from beginning to end and develop their reading stamina. When they read, I want students to understand that they are the reader. They are entitled to their own analysis, interpretation, and reactions to the text. I believe in a mix of comprehension questions (to ensure students are understanding what they are reading) as well as analysis questions that get students to think deeply about the issues the author is presenting.
This unit directly follows our dystopian fiction unit. While analyzing dystopian texts, students discuss issues of government control and suppression through a variety of short stories and short films. At first, students often argue that the societies portrayed in the texts are extreme, but later begin to draw parallels between the dystopian societies and our current society. Students often discuss what “they would do” in these situations of oppressive governments and total surveillance. A unit centered on resistance is a natural next step. In my predominantly Black classroom, it is important for students to learn that “Black history has been a history of refusal.”[3]
The central text of this unit is the novel Kindred by Octavia Butler. In this text, a Black woman in the 1970s time travels to a Maryland plantation in the 1800s. This fiction text will be paired with several non-fiction texts. We will pause at specific moments in Kindred to read excerpts of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas by Frederick Douglas. After concluding the novel, we will read David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World by David Walker to explore his messages around resistance and the persuasiveness of his text. As we read, discuss, and write about these texts, students will focus on the central question “What does the author say about resistance?” Students will discuss and write their responses to that question for each text we read.
The unit will culminate in an essay where students select two of the texts we read (they must include Kindred) and answer the question, “What are these two authors saying about resistance to slavery?” They will draw on evidence from both texts to make their argument.
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