When the Common Core State Standards Initiative came on the scene on 2010, English language arts and humanities teachers began hearing a lot about “close reading.” Without paying much attention to its origin or intended meanings, I used the term in my own classes. It seemed a modest concept, indicating that we should develop a deeper appreciation for the finer nuances of a text.

Close reading is not a new phenomenon. It has been defined a lot of ways but is most commonly considered a “text-dependent” technique of reading, one that focuses on the text as an autonomous entity, existing apart from both authorial intent, historical or political context, and reader response. Louise Rosenblatt, tracking the development of this trend through the 19th and the 20th century, observed how the reader was relegated the role of an “invisible eavesdropper” and the text, in the words of John Stuart Mill, a “soliloquy overheard.” One finds in it another echo of Horace Mann’s edict to read the Bible “without comment.” Although this movement largely peaked with New Criticism in the mid-20th century, it has enjoyed a renaissance under the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT and AP Exams.

The College Board and its current CEO, David Coleman, have exerted a powerful influence in instituting this approach in American schools. As architect of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, Coleman inscribed the values of close reading into the English language arts curriculum. Now, as CEO of the College Board, he closes the loop, hoping that a revamped SAT will ensure their de facto implementation, even in states that originally rejected the CCSS.

The dominance of so-called “objective” approaches like close reading is not without consequences or content. Since white culture is the only one for whom this kind of cultural “invisibility” is possible, close reading, by its very nature, prefers and privileges white writers, readers, and characters. It shouldn’t surprise us then that the eminently “universal” genius Shakespeare is mentioned nine times by name in the high school Common Core, but everyone else is “other authors.”

Nonwhite writers admitted into this canon must aspire mainly toward the white standards of universality, invisibility, racelessness. If this can’t be done through an evocation of timeless American themes, as in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, it must at least provide enough formal interest to render any social and political context secondary or irrelevant. Although intended perhaps to “revere” the writer, this process possesses an uncanny ability to turn a powerful work into a harmless museum piece. David Coleman modeled how to use the approach with Martin Luther King’s Letter.

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