Proximity and Distance: Considering the Role of Text Genre in How White Students Read About Historic Acts of Racial Violence

This article investigated how white high school students learned about a historic act of racial violence through reading different genres of historical text. Six white adolescents who attended a diverse high school located in a large urban center in the Southeastern United States thought aloud while reading two historical texts about the Tulsa Race Massacre. They responded to an eyewitness narrative by B.C. Franklin, a Black lawyer living in Tulsa at the time of the Massacre, and a textbook-like account of the Massacre. Two themes emerged from analyses of the think-aloud data. First, where students pictured themselves while reading the text impacted what they took away from reading. Students imagined themselves close to the Massacre as they read Franklin’s narrative. Because of their proximity to the world of the text, they felt empathy for his, and other Black Tulsans’ experiences, and imagined what it might have been like to experience the Massacre. In contrast, students adopted a position of distance from the world of the text as they read the textbook-like account. From their position of remove, students judged white Tulsans and largely overlooked the Black Tulsan experience of the Massacre. Second, students’ imagined positioning while reading each text influenced their historical understanding of these events: while the eyewitness narrative gave students a detailed mental picture of the event itself, it was while reading the textbook-like account that students considered how the Tulsa Race Massacre fit into the broader arc of American history. Implications for selecting and teaching different genres of text about historic acts of racial violence are considered.