Lit Think Core Values: Authenticity
Are we listening to media voices that are true to culture and identity in all spaces?
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
As we mentioned last week, we’re trying some new things in 2023.
In preparation for presenting at two conferences this year, we took time to think about what we wanted to stand for as a podcast team. When we came up with five core values, we felt it just as important to spend some time in our blog parsing out what exactly these ideas mean in our daily work at Lit Think.
Last week, Alicia covered diversity. This week, I am looking at our second value: authenticity. But what exactly does that mean to our team?
Why Authenticity
As a child of the 1980s and a teenager of the 1990s, the media world I consumed was very white. I saw myself in most of the television shows, movies, and books that I read. Even when I was presented with diversity, it was presented through a white Eurocentric lens. AC Slater and Lisa Turtle (of Saved by the Bell) didn’t give any indication that their racial identity played any role in how they moved about in the world. We accepted The Cosby Show’s Huxtables because, with only occasional exceptions, they acted and sounded like every other middle-class family on television. Yes, the Winslows of Family Matters lived in Chicago and occasionally discussed race issues, but Urkel’s antics served the effective purpose of helping audiences forget that Eddie ever had issues with one of Carl’s police officer colleagues.
According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, authentic means, “true to one's own personality, spirit, or character.” Experience with relationships and a diversified reading list has helped me see just how inauthentic those first experiences with diverse media actually were. That wasn’t necessarily the fault of creators who were trying to break into a monocultural market; much of it had to do with the lack of support from white majority audiences.
Authenticity matters because for our stories to be truly about all of us, they have to be about each person’s whole self. We shouldn’t expect creators to sacrifice a part of their identity or culture in order to tell stories that are true to their lived experiences. This is done for the comfort of the consumer, not the creator.
What We Mean By Authenticity
For a piece of media to be authentic, the characters do not have to sacrifice any of their identity to tell their story. The characters do not have to engage in code-switching—the modifying of one's behavior, appearance, etc., to adapt to different sociocultural norms—in order to tell their story or make it more palatable for readers. The story doesn’t rely on stereotypes and confronts them when appropriate.
Authentic stories don’t apologize for putting characters into situations that make sense for them. When we see characters struggle with their identity, they are doing so at the intersection of worlds that may seem at odds with each other. In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza desperately wants to live in a world very different from the life she describes on Mango Street, and yet she recognizes that the people and experiences have shaped who she is. In American Born Chinese, Jin tries to bury his Chinese identity by creating an entirely different alter-ego, only to realize that he has hurt himself in the process. In Ted Lasso, Colin’s story as a gay football (soccer) player coming out to his teammates helps to redefine what it means to be masculine in the highly competitive world of professional team sports.
Similarly, we as female podcasters choose authenticity every time we highlight stories that reflect our own lived experiences. This is authentic to our role as leaders and thinkers in the spaces we know.
How We Live It
Just as Alicia and I have had to do a lot of work to expand the diversity of voices in the media we consume, we’ve also had to let go of some of our childhood darlings as we’ve started to recognize the need for more authentic storytelling.
But we are doing it by pushing each other to read, watch, and listen to new pieces that challenge the way we see the world. Want to do that for yourself? Here are some of the episodes from past seasons that highlight authentic storytelling:
More Resources
And if you want some great, quick conversation starters to talk about authentic storytelling in your classroom, I highly recommend these resources:
Check out Trevor Muir’s blog post about storytelling as a teacher.
This character analysis assignment looks at different traits of the character in a given story, as well as relationships with other characters and theme development.
This argumentative writing assignment challenges students to consider how an event transformed their lives and asks them to be authentic with themselves and their reader.
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