Diversity And The Rise Of Majority-Minority Schools

In the “Historical Notes” conclusion of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the reader discovers through a darkly biting satire of academia that the world of the novel’s main character, June/Offred, developed in part through the shifting proportion of races in the U.S. and throughout the world. The shift in majority and minority status among races resulted in cataclysmic events, including the creation of a bible-based nation, Gilead, that also sought to preserve the Caucasian race through the subjugation of fertile women as handmaid’s.

Atwood explains in “Writing Utopia” that every event in her dystopian novel has already happened in human history—explaining that speculative fiction serves as warnings about what is as much as what may come to be.

Race and power have a long and complex history in the U.S., from the institution of slavery clouding the first century of the nation to Reconstruction segregation to the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. And that social history has often been reflected as well in the history of U.S. education.

More