School board officials in San Francisco are considering a proposal that would force high school teachers to select seven books by non-white authors for every three by white authors in their curriculum. The advocates of this proposal suggest that fiction written by white authors is not very relevant to African-American and Latino students.

As most high school students read about 10 novels in addition to other prose and poetry, this would mean only three books written by whites would be read throughout high school.

However, many authors who have contribute to our literary tradition writers whose works changed the way we thought, warned up, or gave us hope, authors whose new ideas shaped modern writing happen to be white. Does this condition of being white make their work irrelevant to non-white readers?

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Does Catcher in the Rye lose its meaning when read by an African-American? Do non-whites miraculously escape the confusion of adolescence that J. D. Salinger so eloquently brings to life? Does the book’s historical importance dwindle? The formative historical period it describes is what it is, no matter where your ancestors came from.

Does Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, a novel through which I learned many aspects of the Jewish faith something I and many fellow students knew little about lose its importance to non-whites because most non-whites are not Jewish? I was not Jewish, and the book was relevant to me.

Reading literature is about expanding one’s horizons and making you think it is a pursuit of truth, and as such, is colorblind. Works by non-white authors are already read in high school. If whites can identify with Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Native Son, why should we assume that non-whites can not identify with Catcher in the Rye?

White authors have confronted racial tensions as well as non-whites and have done an exquisite job of it. If you doubt, read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

When Atticus Finch says, Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up is something I don’t pretend to understand, Harper Lee is writing about the universality of humanity. Why reasonable people throw up their hands when anything involving a white person comes up is something I do not pretend to understand.

The school board’s proposition is based on the fact that whites comprise only 11.8 percent of the student body in San Francisco’s public schools. Therefore, the concern is not so much to emphasize a education, but that non-whites ought to be reading works by non-whites.

Better yet, why not separate all students by ethnicity and have each group read works by authors of corresponding background? We can have separate schools for whites, blacks, Latinos and others, and each would only hire teachers of the same ethnicity. While we are at it, we can make separate sections in restaurants for ethnic groups, and separate seating areas on public busses.

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Wait. Have we tried this before?