The experiences of any cultural or racial group should only be presented by a member of that group.
The argument
Proponents of this position argue that the problem with teaching multicultural literature lies not with the texts but with who would be standing in front of the class. A teacher who does not identify with the cultural or racial group a work comes from is, on this account, an outsider to it, and an outsider is incapable of fully empathising with the experiences of people from a culture different from their own. Multicultural literature is largely made of exactly those experiences, so the person charged with interpreting it would be interpreting material they cannot reach from the inside. The consequence proponents anticipate falls on students. Being taught one's own cultural inheritance by someone outside it is not a neutral arrangement: students will be confused by an interpretation that does not match what they know, and angered by the position it puts them in, with an outsider's reading of their culture presented to them with a teacher's authority behind it. The text intended to include them becomes the occasion of a particular kind of exclusion. The argument then treats this as the likely outcome rather than a risk that could be managed. Proponents point to the demographic gap between American students and their teachers: by the year 2020, one in every two students in the United States will be a person of colour, while fewer than twenty per cent of teachers are. A subject added to the curriculum has to be taught by the teachers a school actually employs, and given that distribution the likelihood of a white teacher instructing a multicultural literature course is high. Because the outsider problem would therefore be the norm rather than the exception, proponents conclude that multicultural literature should not be taught in schools.
Premises
Counter-arguments
A qualified instructor does not have to share their own experiences or talk about cultural groups' experiences for it to be valid for students. Teachers can increase their own cultural knowledge and develop their sensitivity and teaching skills to promote cross-cultural understanding and use multicultural literature to validate expressions of cultural knowledge, perspectives and differences.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] A teacher does not have to have lived a culture to be able to credibly teach it.