Applying Affective Reader Response to Richard Wright’s Native Son: An Invitation to Racializing White Discomfort

This paper proposes an approach to teaching about race in literature in the secondary English language arts (ELA) classroom using an affective reader response framework. Drawing from Coleman’s (2021) application of affective reader response for surfacing the “ordinary affects” of ELA educators, I combine this framework with Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides’ (2019) antiracist literature instruction to consider how providing space for white students to attend to their racialized, embodied, and affective reader responses can allow for the naming of white discomfort in the reading of a text centered around Blackness. I illustrate how I would apply this literary lens in my own positionality as a former white educator in a majority-white suburban school using Richard Wright’s Native Son, a text that elicited white discomfort from my students in the past. I conclude with a proposed lesson plan for teaching the opening of the text, incorporating both spaces for the teacher’s own modeled affective reader response and for white students to engage in this framework communally.