Through Whose Eyes?: Exploring Racism: Reader, Text and Context

by Beverley Naidoo

We read what we are" or "we are what we read"? This is the story of a year in an English class where all the literature read by the 13/14-year-old white students was written from perspectives strongly indicting racism. The reader-response work with students, both written and oral, provides fascinating insight into the transaction between reader and text.

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1992

About the author

Beverley Naidoo was born in South Africa on 21 May 1943 and grew up under apartheid. As a student, she began to question the apartheid regime and was later arrested for her actions as part of the resistance movement in South Africa. In 1965 she went into exile, going to England. She married another South African exile; they have two children.

Reviews

[☽ · Rating 3 out of 5]

i only meant to skim this for quotes for my essay on beverley naidoo and robert westall's correspondence with young readers but ended up sitting down for an hour and a half to read it cover to cover... it's a really frightening thing to read about a carefully designed antiracist literature curriculum (though not w/o its faults) served to impressionable young teens (13-14yo) by a didactic, traditional teacher leading conversations with his own ideologies that inevitably prove to be deeply constrained by white liberalism/paternalism. the fear for me comes from how in the US states after states are pulling all books with characters of color from their curricula, so not only do you still have teachers with incontrovertibly racist attitudes, you don't even have texts to jar students to consider their racial positionalities.

3.5* because it is insane to me that during a YEAR of reading literature in a year 9 church school in england they never read anything with indian characters?? not to pick a bone with something i obviously have a personal stake in but imo there could've been a much faster connection for students to their real lives had the curriculum more productively—or at all—engaged directly with british colonialism. also because i am by nature suspicious of adults projecting behaviors onto children to form a narrative, though i think naidoo is doing this much more sensitively here than in some of her delivered papers in the 90s. i wish i could read the whole thesis which is apparently longer than this 160pg book??

i appreciate the vim with which naidoo went after the teacher (alan parsons) though like i very sincerely agree that if the kids had had a better teacher they might've not gotten More Racist On Average after 2 years?? although it was evident that this temporary waystation of Intense Education On Racism treated as an aberration from "normal English class" only hardened some students' existing racist attitudes. again just goes to show how crucial multicultural and critical race texts are to the classroom, Especially in predominantly white and affluent areas