https://doi.org/10.21061/UnpackingRacialTraumaInChildrensFiction
Rachelle Kuehl
Introduction
Children’s literature has the power to address complex and sensitive topics, including racial trauma. Building upon the existential lenses through which the previous essay examined the enduring impacts of racism and discrimination, the attention now shifts to the realm of fiction, particularly middle-grade literature, to explore how stories can serve as both mirrors and windows for young readers. This essay delves into Varian Johnson’s The Parker Inheritance, a middle-grade novel that skillfully unpacks complex themes of racial trauma and historical injustice to illuminate the importance of addressing these themes in educational settings. By analyzing the literary elements and pedagogical potential of the book, this chapter provides educators with strategies to incorporate discussions of racial trauma into their classrooms, making these critical conversations accessible and age-appropriate for younger audiences.
In The Parker Inheritance, Johnson weaves together a masterful story that teaches children about historical anti-Black racism, shows its continued damaging effects today, and demonstrates Black people’s resistance and agency to effect change. With an eye toward guiding teachers in using the novel to teach middle-grade students about the effects of racism across time, I explore how Johnson’s characters are affected by racial trauma and what agentic steps they take toward healing.
Understanding the Context
Education scholars (e.g., Love, 2019; Picower, 2021) have described how the U.S. system of public schooling was built by and for white people, and recent prohibitions against teaching “divisive concepts” and related book bans are manifestations of institutions prioritizing the perceived needs of white students and inflicting trauma on students of color. Such laws are designed to reinscribe whiteness in that their purposes are ostensibly to prevent white children from feeling guilt upon learning about the racist behavior of white people in the past, with no regard for the feelings of students of color (Pollock et al., 2022). Labeling teaching about race and racism as “divisive” discourages teachers from broaching such topics (Lopez & Sleeter, 2023; Toldson, 2022) and, I argue, traumatizes students of color by (a) denying them the opportunity to learn true history from a vantage point that does not consistently position someone else (i.e., white people) as heroes; and (b) by implying that there is something wrong or shameful about their racial identity. By contrast, discussions of “hard history” (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.) that employ literature as a point of access validate students’ experiences and may move toward healing racial wounds, or the emotional and bodily damage to people of color caused during encounters with racism that fester and then re-open upon subsequent encounters (Grinage, 2019b).
Fiction can help students learn about historical truths in a deeper, more meaningful way than simply studying “facts” as interpreted by the writers of textbooks. When readers engage with historical characters on a personal level, they can better empathize with real people who endured similar experiences (Kidd & Castano, 2013; Kuehl, 2021a, 2021b) and can make connections between past events and present-day circumstances (Barker, 2013; Cueto & Brooks, 2022; Damico & Apol, 2007; Kuehl, 2022). In particular, “using books written by and about African Americans offers increased opportunities to raise students’ social consciousness and engage them in discussions of equity and fairness in regard to issues surrounding race, class, and gender” (McNair, 2008, p. 21).
In his 2018 novel for middle grade readers, The Parker Inheritance, Varian Johnson makes these connections explicit by framing the story as a puzzle mystery inspired by Ellen Raskin’s (1978) Newbery Medal-winning The Westing Game. Johnson employs a dual narrative, interspersing the primary, present-day narrative with historical scenes depicting various racial traumas related to the mystery, leading the reader to contemplate evidence of racism across time. The Parker Inheritance was a Coretta Scott King Honor Award recipient (thus accepted by the field as a high-quality contribution to the body of children’s literature representing Black experiences); yet, it has been banned in multiple school systems, leading the author to speculate whether efforts to hide facts from students are intended to “keep a certain population of our country down” (Johnson, quoted in Tolin, 2022, para. 12).
Experiencing Racial Empathy Through Literature
As an educator committed to antiracist pedagogy, I recognize the need for all students to understand the systemic effects of centuries of racism people of color experience every day. In addition to compelling evidence from a vast body of scholarly research, my own personal transactions with text (Rosenblatt, 1978) convince me of the power of literature to build empathy and chip away at the us-versus-them mentality (McGhee, 2021) that divides us as a nation and causes serious harm. To borrow from Rudine Sims Bishop’s (1990) ubiquitous mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors metaphor, books depicting salient incidences of racial trauma have, for me, served as “sliding glass doors” through which I could “walk through in imagination” (p. ix) to experience what life is like for someone who is racialized differently. Books like The Parker Inheritance not only validate the lived experiences of Black youth but also provide an avenue for all readers to engage with the realities of racial history in the United States. By presenting narratives that illuminate racial trauma and resilience, such texts encourage meaningful discussions about injustice while fostering a collective responsibility for equity. Literature, in this way, serves as both a historical record and a catalyst for deeper empathy and social awareness.
Depictions of Historical Racism in Middle-Grade Literature
In this section, I share findings from scholars who have studied the depiction of anti-Black racial trauma in middle-grade fiction. I center this discussion around Bishop’s (2007) powerful words about the body of children’s literature written by and about Black people, which:
celebrates the strengths of the Black family as a cultural institution and vehicle for survival; bears witness to Black people’s determined struggle for freedom, equality, and dignity; nurtures the souls of Black children by reflecting back to them . . . the beauty and competencies that we as adults see in them; situates itself through its language and its content, within African American literary and cultural contexts; and honors the tradition of story as a way of teaching and as a way of knowing. (p. 273)
In her 2013 article, Barker discusses three celebrated novels written by Christopher Paul Curtis and set in different time periods in U.S. history. In Elijah of Buxton (2007), Elijah is the first free Black person born among a group of formerly enslaved people who escaped to Canada; Bud, Not Buddy (1995) takes place in Michigan during the Great Depression and touches on the danger to Black people in Midwestern “Sundown Towns” (Loewen, 2005); and The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 (1999) depicts a Black family’s journey to visit relatives in Alabama, where they witness a church bombing modeled after the real historical event. Barker explains the way Curtis’s narrators each have a naïve perspective that works as a filter to shield young readers from the full view of racial violence while not denying the atrocities that did occur. In Elijah of Buxton, for example, Elijah is aware that his grandmother beat his mother when, as a young girl, she managed to escape from slavery but returned to the plantation because she missed her mother too much. The grandmother knew “them d-a-m things Massa got in store” for her when she was older and was willing to hurt her daughter and threaten her with further violence to prevent her from passing up the chance to escape from slavery again. Like Elijah as narrator, the young reader is likely not to understand that the grandmother is referring to the high likelihood that enslaved females would be subjected to rape by the white men who considered them property, but “the narrative leaves traces of their presence for discovery by the experienced reader open to learning more” (Barker, 2013, p. 191).
Similarly, in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, Kenny, the protagonist, doesn’t experience the church bombing firsthand (that is, he doesn’t witness or relay the bloody aftermath on its young victims’ bodies), but he’s close to the experience in that his sister’s whereabouts are unknown for a frightening few hours following the explosion. We experience the worry and fear alongside Kenny and his family as they await news, and while young readers will gratefully welcome relief upon discovering that Joetta is alive and unharmed, those who are ready will also be made aware, in a personal way, of the horrifically unfair truth that four real-life girls present at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on September 15, 1963 never returned to the families who loved them. Barker considers Curtis’s relatively “soft”—yet still honest—approach to the treatment of racial violence as a fulfillment of his ethical responsibility toward his young readers. Furthermore, Barker argues, staying within the bounds of what adult gatekeepers deem appropriate for children makes Curtis’s books more apt to be published, marketed, and placed into the hands of readers.
High-quality children’s literature addressing anti-Black racism avoids presenting Black characters as mere victims of an oppressive society, instead demonstrating their agency and resilience (Bishop, 2007; Brooks, 2009; Henderson, 2019; Yoo, 2018). According to Brooks (2009), children “need books that depict how to perceive and resist oppression, and how to act for social justice” (p. 435). Such books serve the needed role of counter-storytelling in that counter-stories act as “a strategy of survival and a means of resistance” (Solóranzo & Yosso, 2002. p. 36). Yoo (2018) pointed to Mildred D. Taylor’s Newbery Medal-winning novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), as containing powerful examples of Black characters exerting agency in the face of oppression. In a memorable scene, a Black teacher in rural Mississippi continues her lesson about the true history of U.S. slavery when white school board members drop by to observe her, knowing that doing so will result in the loss of her job. In her afterword to Roll of Thunder’s prequel, The Land (2001), Taylor responded to criticism of her books as too painful for children to read. She rejected the call to “whitewash” history by softening the language in her stories, writing, “The language was painful and life was painful for many African Americans, including my family. I remember the pain” (quoted in Brooks, 2009).
Finally, both Henderson (2019) and Cueto and Brooks (2022) described the way Rita Williams-Garcia (2011, 2013, 2015) sprinkled references to female political activists and leaders such as Angela Davis, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Shirley Chisholm throughout her trilogy about three Black sisters in the late 1960s. In bringing attention to important figures often left out of Civil Rights history instruction, Henderson argues, Williams-Garcia enacts a more subtle form of counter-storytelling, one that may inspire young readers to research their historic contributions to the fight for social justice, better equipping them to take up the fight themselves.
Endless Mourning
Justin Grinage (2019a), a Black teacher educator and former high school teacher, theorized about racial melancholia and racial mourning as experienced by students of color in U.S. schools. He explained that Freud originally dichotomized mourning and melancholia as “good” and “bad” responses to grief, with mourning as a necessary process to be worked through on the path to healing and melancholia as a state of being stuck in grief. Freud later updated his thinking on these processes to reflect more of a give-and-take between them (Freud, 1923), and scholars have described their applicability to the specific phenomenon of racial trauma (Cheng, 2001; Eng, 2000), which Comas-Diaz and colleagues (2019) defined as stress related to racial discrimination including “threats of harm and injury, humiliating and shaming events, and witnessing harm to other people of color and Indigenous individuals due to real or perceived racism” (p. 1). According to Grinage, racial melancholia positions people of color as perpetual victims “locked” in a state of suffering, whereas the state of racial mourning connotes agency on the part of the mourner since there is hope of eventually moving past it. Yet, because racism is endemic (Bell, 1992) and students of color are continually retraumatized, they can never fully emerge from racial mourning. Thus, Grinage offers “endless mourning” as a different way to think about racial trauma. Mourning itself cannot ever be completed, as grief, say over the loss of a loved one, reemerges in waves throughout the rest of the person’s life. Yet, mourners do not just stay in melancholia with no agency to effect change—instead, they persist in a state of endless mourning.
Grinage applied the lens of endless mourning to his ethnographic study with five Black students attending a large, multiracial suburban high school. The students banded together to process and resist racial trauma (e.g., their teachers’ avoidance of discussing race in the classroom; their white classmates’ dismissal of their experiences with racism) “by adopting practices of mourning that challenge racism despite the unceasing permanence of these traumas” (p. 233). For example, they read and discussed books like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s (2015) Between the World and Me to raise their critical consciousness (i.e., their awareness of the ways in which society is structured to perpetuate racial inequality), which they understood to be a necessary part of legislating their trauma and learning to resist it. In my close reading of The Parker Inheritance, I used endless mourning as a framework to investigate how characters in both the present-day and historical narratives experience racial trauma and whether and how they move through states of racial melancholia and mourning.
Plot Summary
The Parker Inheritance employs a third-person omniscient narrator to tell the story from multiple perspectives, giving the reader access to much more information than what a first-person narrator would know and be able to communicate. The protagonist, Candice, is a twelve-year-old Black girl from Atlanta who is spending the summer in rural Lambert, South Carolina, where her grandmother had lived before her recent passing. Candice’s grandmother had been the first Black city manager of Lambert but had left her position in disgrace after controversy erupted when she tried to investigate a mystery surrounding the town’s racist past. After finding a letter to her grandmother with cryptic information about the mystery, Candice teams up with her new neighbor, Brandon, who is also Black, to solve the mystery and clear her grandmother’s name.
As the two friends work to gather information, Johnson provides readers with clues through a second historical narrative, scenes from which depict various racial traumas including racial violence, “passing,” and school segregation and are interspersed throughout the present-day story. Meanwhile, Candice and Brandon experience traumas related to their intersectional identities (Crenshaw, 1991). In the following sections, I consider the historical and present-day narratives separately before discussing them collectively.
Historical Racial Trauma
In the present-day narrative, Candice and Brandon meet with elderly community members to try to glean information from the past that might help them solve the mystery, with exposition from these older characters providing historical knowledge to readers as well as to the book’s protagonists. In the historical narrative, Johnson provides this information directly to the reader. For example, when introducing a character as “colored,” the narrator explains: “Colored was not a derogatory term—certainly not at the turn of the century. However, there were many other offensive, racist terms hurled at [him]” (Johnson, 2019, p. 46). In this section, I discuss themes related to racial trauma from both narratives.
Colorism
The historical narrative begins in 1914. Enoch Washington is a six-year-old boy whose family of sharecroppers is forced to work the landowner’s crops before tending to their own, a hopelessly unfair system that ensures Enoch’s family can never earn the money needed to repay their debt, making their situation not much different from slavery. Interestingly, it’s not a white man who owns the land, but a lighter-skinned Black man who holds more social and economic power due to his closer proximity to whiteness (Harris, 1993), a phenomenon known as colorism (Walker, 1983). Enoch, whose skin is very dark, resolves to marry a light-skinned woman so their future children will have lighter skin and, consequently, access to more opportunities. “As Enoch had come to learn, the ‘brown paper bag test’ was a way of life for a Negro—the fairer you were, the more power you were allowed to have” (Johnson, 2019, p. 65).
Ironically, Enoch’s daughter, Siobhan, falls in love with a classmate who has very light skin, and a crucial part of the story revolves around the resentment caused by Enoch’s refusal to allow her to date this “poor, high-yellow” boy. High-yellow is a derogatory term for a light-skinned Black person, and considering the way Enoch had been treated based on the shade of his own skin, it seems inconceivable that he would judge another person so harshly because of theirs; this fallacy of logic speaks to the insidiousness of racism and the social construction of race in the first place (Haney López, 2004).
Racial Pride
The primary conflict in the historical narrative comes when Enoch, now known as “Coach Dub” (for “W”) because of his role as coach of Lambert’s Black high school’s tennis team, slides a newspaper featuring a story about Althea Gibson’s 1957 Wimbledon victory under the windshield wipers of the white high school coach’s car. He was proud to see a Black player perform so well, and he wanted to show his counterpart that Black people could be competitive against white people in tennis. Members of the rich and powerful Allen family joined the white coach in castigating Dub for his audacity. The men agreed to a secret, late-night match to settle once and for all which team was superior athletically, and when the Black players not only defeated the white team soundly but showed they enjoyed themselves while doing it, the white men’s racial pride was damaged, and they retaliated by violently attacking Coach Dub and threatening to do even worse to his daughter. (Like in Elijah of Buxton, sexual violence is implied, but not made explicit, to protect the child reader.) With no legal recourse available to them, the coach’s family had no choice but to start a new life elsewhere. With his wife and daughter angry with him for ignoring their pleas to cancel the match, Dub spent the rest of his days disabled, unemployed, and heavily dependent on alcohol.
Passing
The Black team’s star player, Reggie, was the young man whom Coach Dub forbade his daughter from dating. With his own life in serious danger after the match, Reggie, too, was forced to flee Lambert. It was the Black high school’s white athletic director, Adam Douglas (hired by Lambert’s school board as a nod to making the “separate” Black school more “equal” to the white school in an effort to preserve segregation), who drove Reggie across state lines. There, Adam revealed that he had once been known by another name—as a Black person. He said:
People don’t think you’re colored just because of your skin. They think you’re colored because your grandmother is dark-skinned, and you attend a Negro school . . . and because you’re poor. But what if those same people passed you on the street when you were dressed in a sharp suit? What if they met you in the White part of town? . . . What would they see then? (p. 226)
He advised Reggie, whose only living relative was his grandmother, to do the same—to take advantage of his light skin to “become” white, a historical practice known as passing. As a white man, Reggie could enlist in the Army, rise to a much higher rank than he could as a Black man, then use the G.I. Bill (available almost exclusively to white veterans at the time) to pay for college and build the kind of wealth he could never earn as a Black man due to the racist policies and practices that would block him at every turn. After Adam convinced Reggie there was no possibility of continuing his relationship with Siobhan and that his grandmother would want him to seize the opportunity (similar to how, in Elijah of Buxton, Elijah’s grandmother loved his mother so much that she’d prefer to never see her again than for her to remain enslaved), Reggie relinquishes his name and identity and becomes known thereafter as James Parker.
Racial Resentment
Years later, after having accumulated millions in business, Parker’s longtime secretary—the closest thing he has to a friend or family member—helps him to see that he needs to find Siobhan and find out if there’s any chance of rekindling their romance. He does, and the two get along wonderfully at first, but when Siobhan realizes how much Parker still hates her father and the Allens and that he hasn’t used his newfound wealth and privilege to make things better for Black people, she ends their relationship. Moving forward, Parker takes Siobhan’s admonition to heart and starts working to combat the effects of systemic racism by diversifying his company’s board of directors, donating money to fund programs in Lambert’s historically Black neighborhood, and providing college scholarships for Black youth. Having learned about his efforts, Siobhan contacts him while in the final stage of cancer, and together they devise a plan (the puzzle mystery) to donate the rest of Parker’s wealth to advancing the Black community and ensuring stories about how racism affected their families’ lives are told. This amounts to a somewhat-happy ending, but Johnson remains honest to historical realities by leaving a great deal of regret over what could have been.
Present-Day Racial Trauma
In the present-day narrative, racial trauma is not legally sanctioned in the same way as during the historical narrative, but it is still present and causes harm to the story’s protagonists.
Racial Profiling
Candice is keenly aware of the way Brandon’s older sister, Tori, remains hypervigilant while driving to avoid attracting police attention. At one point, Candice notices Tori is driving well below the speed limit. “‘Sorry.’ She sped up a little. ‘Just don’t trust the police. I don’t want to give them any reason to stop me.’” Tori goes on to explain to Candice—and to Johnson’s young readers—about the elevated risk of Black people being hurt or killed by police; this is also one of the primary examples Grinage (2019a) gives of the racial trauma experienced by the high school students in his study and why the mourning over racial trauma is endless.
About a third of the way through the novel, Candice and Brandon are visiting the Parker-funded memorial room at the local high school to gather more information to help them solve the mystery. They are there with permission, under the supervision of Tori’s history teacher, but when she leaves their side momentarily, the school’s white assistant principal harshly accuses them of breaking into the school. “Everything was happening too fast, and all wrong. Candice [knew] how to handle people who were being rude or nosy. This was something else. Something darker” (p. 132). Luckily, the teacher reappears before the situation escalates further, but Candice and Brandon are shaken, humiliated, and saddened to realize they’ve been racially profiled—that because of the color of their skin, the school official assumed malfeasance and treated them inhumanely.
Intersectionality
There is a strong undercurrent of gendered expectations throughout the book. For example, both Candice and Brandon love to read, but Brandon feels he must disguise his preference for books typically read by girls. Brandon’s grandfather is hard on Brandon for showing emotion, and he implies constantly that Brandon’s interest in Candice is romantic, underscoring his view of heteronormativity as the only acceptable way of being. This relentless pressure makes Brandon extremely uncomfortable, especially as he is also targeted by bullies who presume he is gay. Johnson never reveals whether the bullies’ presumptions are true—instead, he shows the reader that a person’s sexuality has no bearing on their value as a person in the way Candice cares for him the same regardless. When Candice confronts Brandon’s grandfather about his insensitivity, he implicates an intersectionality between race and sexuality that makes him concerned for Brandon. “‘It’s hard out there for kids….‘Boys. Black boys. Brandon’s got to be tough’” (p. 312).
Throughout the story, Candice, whose parents are divorcing, suspects her own father is hiding something from her. It isn’t until the end when he comes out to her as gay, an identity he’s struggled against for similar reasons. For him, being both Black and gay, especially while working in the male-dominated construction industry, was too complicated an intersection with which to contend publicly. Reinforcing the point that one’s value as a person is not tied to their sexuality, Johnson takes care to show that while Candice is surprised, this revelation does not diminish her love for her father in the slightest.
Melancholia and Mourning
If the incidents of racial trauma in The Parker Inheritance were real, they would have caused a period of melancholia for the characters who experienced them. In most cases, the characters do seem to experience melancholia before exercising their agency to move forward, eventually seeming to settle into a state of endless mourning. For example, similar to the students in Grinage’s (2019a) study, during their teenage courtship, Siobhan and Reggie read and discuss books (e.g., Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) that help them make sense of their racialized experiences. However, one notable exception is the character of Enoch Washington. Although he suffered greatly as part of the unjust system of sharecropping and because others tormented him about the darkness of his skin, he eventually attended college, earned a good living, and had a loving family. Still, his mistreatment of Reggie shows he retained an overwhelming level of anger and bitterness, and after the beating, these feelings grew worse, and the narrative contains no indication of his emerging from this melancholic state before his untimely death in 1962.
Unlike her husband, Leanne Washington seems to accept her new circumstances in Maryland, volunteering for the NAACP and getting involved in church activities. She “had decided not to let Big Dub’s mistakes define her” (p. 261). Likewise, Siobhan “had found her voice” (p. 260), standing up to her father when he suggested seeking revenge against the Allens. Siobhan grieved over the loss of Reggie, whom she had been told was dead, but she went on to build a good life for herself, with a meaningful career as a teacher and librarian. And, although Reggie lost many years to melancholia, remaining angry and lonely despite his wealth, he eventually adopted a more agentic stance. When he began donating money to causes supporting the Black community and restructured his business to advance equity, he did so not to win Siobhan back, but because he realized he had wasted opportunities to bring about positive change. By the end of the book, when he takes care of Siobhan in her final days, plans the puzzle mystery, and reclaims his true identity, Reggie appears to have moved into a state of mourning.
Candice and Brandon show agency and resilience in multiple ways. First, after they are chastised by the assistant principal, Candice takes some quiet moments to herself. But, instead of keeping her sadness bottled up, she confides in her mother, who affirms her suspicions about the racism behind his behavior, then promises to take action to prevent it from happening again. “‘No buts,’ she said. ‘I’m your mom. It’s my job to deal with things like this. I want to make sure this doesn’t happen again—to you or any other kids’” (p. 140). She, along with Brandon’s mother and Candice’s father, arranges a meeting with the school superintendent to discuss the incident and demand change. Another time, when Brandon and Candice meet an older man who had been part of the white high school’s tennis team, he tries to defend his teammates’ actions by explaining that things were different back then, but the children don’t let him get away with excuses. “‘They beat them up and drove them out of town,’ Brandon said. ‘How can you justify that?’” (p. 240). Similarly, Candice stands up to Brandon’s grandfather when he claims he’s only hard on Brandon for his own good. In no uncertain terms, Candice tells him that Brandon “‘is perfect. Just the way he is . . . He. Is. Perfect’” (p. 311). When the two friends solve the mystery and learn they have won Parker’s inheritance, they dedicate most of it to fund a sports camp for LGBTQIA students, “‘where it’s safe to be whoever you want to be’” (p. 254), leveraging their newfound economic power to help others who need and deserve support.
In sparing his young audience from the more violent details of racial trauma and by showing the agency of characters who experience racial trauma, Johnson, like Curtis before him, fulfills his ethical responsibility as an author of children’s fiction (Barker, 2013). He presented the information honestly in a way sure to evoke emotions, particularly from readers of color who, unfortunately, have experienced their own racial trauma and will continue to experience it throughout life. At the end of his author’s note, Johnson acknowledges this reality, but leaves his readers with hope:
Conditions have slowly gotten better for African Americans, but you only have to look at the questionable shootings of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Michael Brown in 2014, and Philando Castile in 2016, and countless others, to realize that life today is still very dangerous for a person of color. But I do believe that if we work together, we can make the world a safe place for all people, no matter their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, or religion. We have a long way to go, but I believe we’ll get there. (Johnson, 2018, p. 340)
Teaching with The Parker Inheritance
Despite the latest wave of controversy, literacy researchers must continue exploring ways to facilitate students’ engagement with high-quality literature that allows them to think critically about race and racism and may aid students of color in building resilience. Therefore, while the purpose of this essay was primarily academic, I want to conclude by offering some suggestions for how teachers might use this book to teach young people about racial history and to support students of color in processing racial trauma.
- Use The Parker Inheritance as a literature circle text during language arts instruction, or consider hosting an after-school book club where students can read and discuss novels that feature historic and present-day racial trauma.
- Reserve a few minutes in your daily schedule to read The Parker Inheritance aloud to your class. Map out clues on a bulletin board so students can try to solve the mystery alongside the characters.
- Invite students to choose a historical figure mentioned in the book to research further (e.g., Wimbledon champion Althea Gibson; Negro League baseball player Biz Mackey).
- Strengthen your awareness of historical racism by reading books, such as The 1619 Project (Hannah-Jones, 2021), The Warmth of Other Suns (Wilkerson, 2010), How the Word Is Passed (Smith, 2022), and The New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2020).
- Work with your school’s counselor to create systems of support where students of color might come together with racially-matched mentors, creating bonds that can be drawn upon when racism surfaces (Grinage, 2019a).
- Use your own voice to resist book bans and challenges, and refer to your state’s social studies and social–emotional learning standards to support your literature choices.
Conclusion
“The Parker Inheritance” offers a valuable resource for educators seeking to address racial trauma in their teaching. This essay highlights the importance of using literature to foster empathy and understanding among students, emphasizing the role of storytelling in preserving historical memory. By incorporating the practical strategies outlined in this essay, teachers can guide students through the complex legacy of racial trauma, promoting a more inclusive and compassionate classroom environment.
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