In this short paper, I argue that the windows and mirrors framework falls far short of a liberatory strategy for anti-oppression, instead encouraging continued white supremacist colonization through the strategy of white voyeurism. I draw on the work of critical theorists including Said’s Orientalism to implicate Style’s founding text in a larger project of Western domination.[2] These arguments are further illustrated through anecdotes from my own experience as an educator.
One fundamental issue with the windows and mirrors framework is that it requires a binary classification of stories as relating either to the self, or to the Other. Teaching Tolerance suggests that educators ask students, “Is this text a window or a mirror for you,” and provide two answer choices.[3] The centrality of binary oppositional thought to the project of Western imperialism has been explored by critical theorists including Said, and further elaborated in the context of Library and Information Studies. David J. Hudson writes that “narratives of racial difference [...] came to be elaborated in binaries of self and Other.”[4] Hudson argues that this racialized binary promotes descriptions of the West as universal and superior, legitimizing conquest through the physical violence of empire. In effect, asking students to approach and to classify all stories as either mirror or window reaffirms colonial conceptions of self and Other that maintain ideological boundaries between racialized groups.
In 1990, educator Rudine Sims Bishop challenged Style’s framework when asserting, “Usually the window is also a door, and a reader has only to walk through in imagination to become a part of whatever world has been created or re-created in the book.”[5] Here Bishop identifies that the ideological boundary implied by a “window” framing of cultural difference is in fact artificial. Said has further suggested the very notion of separate and distinct cultures is little more than the requisite grounds for aggression.[6] I am not suggesting “all cultures are the same,” but that Western delineations of cultural sameness and difference were and continue to be mobilized for Western domination. By framing literature as a door, Bishop rightly asserts the reader’s agency to meaningfully engage with human experience as constituted by all people. After all, educators can–and I believe they should–use literature to build students’ capacity for supportive engagement in community, rather than promoting passive observation (voyeurism). While “literature as door” may not be a useful framework in isolation, it does effectively demonstrate a major limitation in the window-mirror binary. However, as educators continue to extol the virtues of Style’s framework decades later, Bishop’s contributions have rarely been incorporated into the pedagogical tools shared widely across institutions.
A few years ago, I read the book Jacob’s New Dress with my kindergarten classes.[7] The book is about a child who endeavors to, and then wears a dress to school, which falls outside of the gendered expectations placed on them by family and classmates. After our discussion, each student received a sheet of paper with a simple, customizable drawing of Jacob. I invited the students to “draw an outfit you think Jacob would like.” While the majority designed colorful dresses akin to those Jacob admired throughout the book, many of my students socialized as boys quickly drew Jacob wearing a t-shirt and shorts. More recently, I designed a similar extension activity with the book Hair Love.[8] The story is about Zuri, a Black girl whose father gives her a range of hairstyles before finally finding one Zuri really loves. Kindergarten and first grade students were asked to draw a hairstyle on Zuri that they thought Zuri might like. While some truly beautiful renditions emerged, in multiple classes, several non-Black students colored Zuri’s eyes red, drew devil horns, and/or scribbled emphatically across Zuri’s face.
In both examples, many students who occupied social positions of privilege struggled with extension activities that asked them to consider the feelings of characters in corresponding positions of marginalization. Even after three to four years of daily lessons using diverse representations in literature, longstanding windows and mirrors curricula failed to prepare students for exercises that employed literature as a door. When presented opportunities to engage and show care informed by what these characters would like, some students responded with expressions of symbolic violence. These outcomes encouraged me to reflect on the uncontroversial adoption of this framework for diverse representation in US schools and libraries.
In Style’s founding piece (which cites the intellectual work of over a dozen scholars and artists, all of whom are white) she writes, “Differences exist. They never melted down into “the melting pot” and, now, in a nuclear age we have no choice but to educate youngsters (and ourselves) to handle them more realistically so as to avoid, at all costs, a foolish nuclear melt-down of us all.”[9] This argument for diverse representation as a means to prevent global catastrophe recalls Said’s invocation of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s charge that the duty of the US is to “construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a necessity.”[10] Here we see the value of diverse curricula as a means to ensure the survival of (white) US empire.
The imperative for white children to learn about the Other therefore tacitly serves to proliferate white voyeurism–observation without relationship–in order to ensure continued colonial control.[11] Meanwhile, the demand for non-white children to see themselves reflected in US literary programs may be read as part of a larger shift to assimilate non-white people into the project of US imperialism. In Orientalism, Said pays particular attention to the role that educational institutions play in incorporating what might otherwise pose a threat to Western hegemony.[12] In this sense, the mirror is a consolation. In Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson calls this passive recognition of cultural difference “a multicultural solution to the settler’s Indian problem.”[13]
These and other projects clearly stress the need for white students to learn about the Other (through windows), and for non-white students to see themselves represented in US educational institutions (in mirrors). But why is it important for white students to see whiteness in literature and, importantly, why should non-white students read about white culture? Moreover, if as Style puts it, “the student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self,” what happens to opportunities for cohabitation?[14] Must we live in isolation, in a home with no doors? Is this not in simpler terms a prison? I believe the gaping absence of these considerations from pedagogical discourse about diversity is profound. Ultimately, these silences only further implicate the windows and mirrors approach to literature–and to culture more broadly–as a project of continued colonization through divisive systems of control.
[1] “Window or Mirror?” 2016. Teaching Tolerance. April 18, 2016. https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/teaching-strategies/close-and-critical-reading/window-or-mirror.
[2] Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
[3] “Window or Mirror?” 2016. Teaching Tolerance.
[4] Hudson, David J. "On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies." (2016), 66.
[5] Bishop, Rudine Sims. "Windows and mirrors: Children’s books and parallel cultures." In California State University reading conference: 14th annual conference proceedings, pp. 3-12. 1990, 11.
[6] Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 325.
[7] Hoffman, Sarah, Ian Hoffman, and Chris Case. 2014. Jacob's New Dress.
[8] Cherry, Matthew A., and Vashti Harrison. 2019. Hair Love.
[9] Style, Emily. "Curriculum as window and mirror." Social science record 33, no. 2 (1996): 21-28.
[10] Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 47.
[11] In further writing I would like to elaborate on the concept of white voyeurism, and to implicate gentrification as one contemporary project for colonial control facilitated by a windows and mirrors approach.
[12] Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 322-324.
[13] Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press, 19.
[14] Style, Emily. "Curriculum as window and mirror." Social science record 33, no. 2 (1996): 21-28.
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