Cultural authenticity is I think hard to define and complex. I used to try to say that a person who is a member of the group that is being written about, if you will, or the cultural milieu that is being written about should recognize it as true, should feel true to such a person.
I don’t know that that’s very helpful for teachers who are not members of those groups. But it’s — I think you have to look at who’s done the writing and if necessary what kind of research they’ve done. It ought not to feel so exotic that these characters are almost alien.
Their humanity needs to come through. But you also then need to get a sense of their specific cultural milieu and how it might be the same, it should be the same as many — as anybody else’s but also the ways in which it might be different and rich. You get that richness when you get the specificity and you get the difference.
I think children readers are looking first — first perhaps for a good story for something that they understand, can relate to, that speaks to them, that speaks to their experience. But the business with the need for diversity for the multicultural for is that business of their needing to see themselves as a part of that world.
And so I’m not sure which is more important to particularly the child readers. It may be that they’re equal, that you need both the quality and the specificity, that the child needs to be able to say ah, I think that’s, you know, that’s me or that’s my uncle Bob or my mom.
And for too many kids it’s not that way, just books are — they are good and they’re enjoyable, but they’re not inclusive of them and the people that they know and that they see every day and live with.
Can a book be culturally specific and also universal? I think absolutely. I think that it’s within the specifics that you find universal if that makes some sense. Someone once said that a book that could be about anybody is really a book about nobody, you know, something like that.
But it’s the specifics that allow you to sort of enter that world. And once you’re there, I mean it’s all about the human condition, the human experience. And humans experience life in different ways.
And so it’s rich to see how people do it, but we’re really sort of solving the same problems, experiencing the same emotions and, therefore, it’s the specifics that make it authentic and make it universal I think.
