The school district of Burbank, California, is embroiled in a bitter debate about book banning. The books in questions are about racism, and black parents are complaining that the books are racist. Among the books that parents want removed are: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the most censored books in American literature; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
I wrote a book about censorship of language on tests and in textbooks and of books used in school. It is called The Language Police. I recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about the history of these practices.
The Los Angeles Times describes the controversy:
During a virtual meeting on Sept. 9, middle and high school English teachers in the Burbank Unified School District received a bit of surprising news: Until further notice, they would not be allowed to teach some of the books on their curriculum.
Five novels had been challenged in Burbank: Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Theodore Taylor’s “The Cay” and Mildred D. Taylor’s Newbery Medal-winning young-adult classic “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”
The challenges came from four parents (three of them Black) for alleged potential harm to the public-school district’s roughly 400 Black students. All but “Huckleberry Finn” have been required reading in the BUSD.
The ongoing case has drawn the attention of free-speech organizations across the country, which are decrying it as the latest act of school censorship. The charge against these books — racism — has been invoked in the past, but in contrast to earlier fights across the country, this one is heavily inflected by an atmosphere of urgent reckoning, as both opponents and defenders of the novels claim the mantle of antiracism.
The debate within the district comes after a summer of mass protests calling for an end to the unjust treatment of Black people. As a result, many institutions and school districts like BUSD are taking a hard look at themselves, their policies, curriculums and practices, in many cases publishing antiracist statements. And while book banning has a long history in America, the situation in Burbank — once a sundown town that practiced racial segregation — is freshly complicated.
In the abstract, it’s a dispute about the meaning of free speech and who gets heard. More specifically, it’s about what should be taught to the district’s roughly 15,200 enrolled students — who are 47.2% white, 34.5% Latino, 9.2% Asian and 2.6% Black — and how Burbank can move forward on race boldly but sensitively...
A week after teachers learned of the removal, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) sent a letter to BUSD urging the district to allow teaching of the books while the challenges are under review. On Oct. 14, PEN America released a petition calling for the same.
“[W]e believe that the books … have a great pedagogical value and should be retained in the curriculum,” read letter from the NCAC.
Books written by or featuring people of color are “disproportionately likely to be banned,” said James Tager, PEN’s deputy director of free expression research and policy. “That is a decades-long trend that advocates and observers have seen.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They can’t ban John Steinbeck. Not in California, for crying out loud. They can’t ban Harper Lee. To kill To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the greatest novels ever written? No. Not acceptable.
The problem that traumatized a young person in Burbank was the behavior of a classmate, not the reading of a book. Don’t blame literature when people misunderstand. We cannot whitewash history. That a school district in Southern California is even considering it is a moral outrage.
LCT, I agree.
The Grapes of Wrath. That, with Moby Dick, my two candidates for the greatest American novels. Yet.
Yes, until Arne Duncan’s autobiography (Hoops and Dupes) comes out, for sure.
Hoops and Dupes. ROFLMAO!!!
I’m actually re-reading the Grapes of Wrath for the first time in maybe 30 years right now. I remember liking it, but it really is stunning.
It is!
Of Nice and Men
Of banning Mice
And banning Huck
Of feigning nice
When life is muck
Banning books
The work of crooks
by hook or by crook
when no one looks
the best will be “poof”
without any proof
no reason to ban
but to keep intellectualism
aloof . . .
I agree – To Kill a mockingbird has gotten a lot of publicity (probably due to the movie) but there are plenty of comparable and maybe better books. Roll of Thunder is written by Mildred Taylor who is African American.
I think it’s likely that the parents have not read the books. This is common with book challenges.
Does the school have a librarian who can work on a school wide ethical policy to deal with book challenges, to defend students’ right to read? This is part of the job of a school librarian.
That there are objections to Roll of Thunder,… really makes one think. Here is a book written by a black woman objected to by other blacks as racist. Wow! Is it possible that the African American population is not this monolith of like thinking human beings because they happen to all be labeled as black?
This is a good point. Wouldn’t it be good if anyone challenging and asking for a ban had to participate in a book group first to understand what they are banning. I am not assuming they have not read the books…. but if they haven’t.
Wait a minute, I just realized there’s a silver lining to this story. They’re still reading books instead of killing short snippets of decontextualized CCSS test prep texts. Additionally, the books they’re reading are not advertising previews of web videos and Hollywood blockbusters, like the trash in all the CCSS textbooks nowadays are. That’s good.
Yes!!! There are English teachers everywhere who are bucking the system and continuing to do real teaching despite it!
Anyone who thinks that these are racist books hasn’t understood them. That said, racial sensitivity discussions in English departments regarding approaches to teaching them and readiness of students to grok them are very much in order.
Bob Neither have they understood the historical value of literature an the arts as such . . . that’s what’s so shameful about it. CBK
It’s freaking tragic!
I can understand some black parents feeling offended by the non-standard dialect depicted in some of these books. These dialects say nothing about the capabilities of the people. They reflect a lot more on the cultural conditions under which black people were forced to live.
Yes. And about stereotyping by whites. Consider, for example, the introduction of dialectical usages to the transcription of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Truth didn’t speak this way. Something that must be taught.
retired teacher,
It’s more than the non-standard dialect.
It makes me incredibly sad to see so many people on here offer up their own opinions of why parents might be offended instead of actually trying to read more about why they are offended (as opposed to what some news articles characterizes or vaguely alludes to).
It’s more than the non-standard dialect.
I referenced a few things — including an excellent Teen Vogue article!
Maybe if educators understood that this not simply about “non-standard dialect”, those parents wouldn’t decide that clearly the teachers have no idea how to teach these books to address the racism in them. And then they would be open to teaching them properly and not banning them.
Dialect alone should spark a healthy classroom discussion. About culture, period – why cultural conditions under which people are “forced” to live? Contrast dialects among the students in class. Talk about Gullah language syntax. Talk about Creole languages and their evolution. How about the evolution of “ain’t.” normal usage for all classes from 1550 to 1850, forcibly pushed out by class-conscious bourgeois [while still in use by upper & lower classes]? Compare and contrast: do your grandparents say “shut the light” instead of “turn it off “? [& other Rom-lang-influenced elimination of the annoying proliferation of prepositional verb-helpers in Eng/ German].
Bob,
I disagree with you when you make a blanket statement like “Anyone who thinks that these are racist books hasn’t understood them.”
It is absolutely possible to find casual racism in To Kill A Mockingbird. I’m not saying that means it should be banned, but part of the problem is the idea that a stereotypical portrayal is not racist. (Sort of like how people now recognize how racist Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, even though many decades ago that novel was considered to be the opposite of racist by many.)
There is a good article in the Guardian (I can’t post links)
“Is To Kill a Mockingbird a racist book?” The Guardian, October 20, 2015.
I believe one problem is when parents who are concerned about racist portrayals are belittled and dismissed.
I suspect a lot of this could be solved by people trying to understand why something in a book offends people and try to walk a bit in their shoes. Discuss ways to address this in teaching — perhaps by also reading other texts critical of the portrayal — instead of simply saying “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a classic and will be taught a such and if anything about it bothers you, tough because it doesn’t bother us.”
Rather than make it “ban” versus “read”, it is very possible to understand that there are legitimate problems in the book and they should be addressed rather than to ban it.
Whenever I see a story that demonizes people concerned with racism by turning those people into “politically correct” stereotypes, I often find that what happened before is that those parents trying to talk about the racist portrayals were demeaned and dismissed and told that they should shut up. When had their complaints been taking seriously, something other than banning could have been done that was a better solution for everyone.
I take, and have always taken, these complains extremely seriously. Such issues have always been the primary ones informing my teaching of these works. I stand by my initial statement.
These are powerful anti-racist books that are nonetheless infected by the general, systemic racism of the culture in which they were produced. Both these facts, and the evidence supporting them, MUST BE TAUGHT.
I had a friend, an African-American lawyer, with a large collection of Jim Crow memorabilia. Is such a collection racist? Well, no, because unlike Trump’s statues to genocidal slavers, it is curated. It is the responsibility of teachers to teach these important works and curate them.
I read somewhere that Whoopi Goldberg also has a collection of Jim Crow memorabilia.
Years ago, a girlfriend of mine returned from study abroad in Hamburg, quite radicalized. She thought that the Baader–Meinhof gang had the right idea. We had a big argument about her contention that all American whites are racist because they have imbued a racist culture. I pointed out to her that these monsters survive only in the dark and that I am extremely committed to rooting them out and destroying them. I’ve given a great deal of my scholarly and work life to doing just that: https://www.amazon.com/Abounding-Knowledge-Anthology-African-American-Literature/dp/1933486023 I loathe racism to the depths of my being.
Bob,
I urge you to read the Guardian article.
I don’t think it is useful to respond to a discussion about parents’ concerns about To Kill a Mockingbird by talking about African American friends with Jim Crow memorabilia collections. I did not read anything about parents saying that every person who owned a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird is racist.
In fact, this post was about TEACHING that book, and how it is done. And given the replies, I think it is highly likely that the majority of students are taught that “Anyone who thinks that these are racist books hasn’t understood them.”
And if my kid was taught that there is no racism in TKAM, it’s just that the people upset don’t understand them, I would be pretty angry, too.
NYC Though fictionalized, it’s an historical account of how things were in a specific time period. We learn from that and by comparisons.
On the “ban” principle, however, we should get rid of “The Diary of Ann Frank” because it gives an account of anti-Semitism. Soon, we’ll be allowing our artists to paint ONLY “realist” pictures. CBK
There’s a basic misunderstanding there of how literature works. A literary work creates a world. That world may have many disturbing elements. That doesn’t mean that the author necessarily approves of or is intent upon teaching those as models of thought and behavior. But yes, many great works do have racist and sexist and classiist elements that were unintended, perhaps, by crusading authors attempting to challenge that very racism, sexism, or classism. This stuff is part of the vast amount of unexamined baggage that everyone, including crusading authors, picks up, unknowlingly, from the culture at large via what the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser called “Interpellation,” and it is part of a teacher’s job to curate these works and bring those elements to light. Much of Postmodern literary theory is about this very paradox. The same thought occurred to me years ago, when I was a kid and thinking about the paintings of Salvador Dali or Rene Magritte or other surrealists. In their attempt to shock us out of conventional thinking, they depend even more than conventional paintings do on conventional ways of seeing.
But it’s the job of the teacher to bring that stuff to light, to curate the works. Keeping kids from encountering these great monuments in the struggle against racism because of this issue that is inherent to all literary work isn’t acceptable.
CBK,
But I did not say to ban the books.
What I said is that when people who try to point out that a book being taught as a classic of non-racism try to point out that there is casual racism, but are dismissed, belittled and treated as politically idiots, it is not useful and leads to them feeling as if asking to ban them is the only solution.
“If you think To Kill a Mockingbird is racist, you haven’t understood it”, is not an answer to those who are concerned about the racist stereotypes in the book. It is completely dismissive of their concerns and implies that the books contain no racist stereotypes that should bother anyone, and therefore they are far too sensitive and should shut up.
There are ways to acknowledge that they have an excellent point and talk about ways to make students aware of that racism in the books.
NYC The fundamental problem is to equate information, or their children becoming informed, with the author and work as engaging in some sort of persuasive propaganda . . . so that the reader, instead of being informed by literature that contains expressions of racism, is endorsing racism (or whatever) instead.
Like giving an account of life and death in a Nazi concentration camp . . . it can be written as information only . . . story-telling can be like that, which is commonly referred to as great literature.
That’s why the teacher is so important . . . they can raise the proper questions for children to answer for themselves in the context of the developmental stages of their students along with a finger-on-the-pulse of the culture they are growing up in. I would ask, is history next? CBK CBK
And I’ve seen, again and again and again, the extraordinary progressive power, in mixed-race classrooms, of confronting these works and the issues that they raise.
Racism thrive in fear and intellectual darkness. The way to combat it is to bring it out into the light. That’s what teaching does.
I want to point out that the replies demonstrate the problem.
No one is trying to ban To Kill A Mockingbird because it shows the racism of that era.
They are banning it because there is racism in the way that the characters are portrayed in the book!
And comparing it to Diary of Anne Frank makes no sense. It would make sense if it was a fictionalized book about Anne Frank in which she and every Jewish person in the book was portrayed as a caricature of a Jew. “Noble” but a stereotype doesn’t cut it.
NYC Regardless, for democracy, it’s a bad road to go down with unintended consequences all over the place. CBK
Bob,
I don’t understand how you can possibly have a good discussion of To Kill A Mockingbird without noting that the author chose to make every African American character into a stereotype where they are incredibly grateful to their savior, Atticus Finch.
I saw the play on Broadway of TKAM and the play actually made an attempt to address that casual racism of the book.
But acknowledging that there IS that kind of racism in the book is the first step, and I have not seen that here.
What I see is a lot of people explaining that it is an accurate depiction of the racism in the south at the time. So what? That has nothing to do with the criticism, which is about how the CHARACTERS are portrayed as stereotypes.
NYC So the teacher also can show that the author was (or is thought of by many) to be short-sighted in her writing. Such teaching offers the student a window into both good and expansive reading and the development of critical consciousness, which BTW is quite fungible. CBK
CBK,
I agree with you about the teacher being able to show that. But my point was that if parents concerned about racist stereotypes in a book are immediately told that those books are classics with no racism, they aren’t going to have a lot of faith that is going to be included.
And seriously, given the replies, I wonder how many teachers are teaching TKAM with anything but “here is a classic book, isn’t it amazing” and then reject – as I heard here – any idea of there being any racism in it by saying “it’s just showing the racism of that era” .
I repeat, the complaint is not that those books show the racism of the era. That wasn’t the complaint about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and yet we now acknowledge the problems with that book. The complaint about the racism in TKAM is about characters being stereotypes. And as a Jewish person, I would find it pretty offensive to read a portrayal of the Holocaust where all of the Jews were stereotypes, but the Christian family who “saved” them were not. And someone who said “but the book shows the anti-Semitism in Germany so shut up because this is an important book about the Holocaust” would just make me feel even worse about my kid being taught that book as a “classic”. But if the response is “you are right, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in how this author portrays all of the Jewish characters as stereotypes who are so grateful to the Christians who saved them and XXXX is the way that will be addressed”, it would be a far better way to address this.
But think about it. The FIRST thing that has to be done is to actually acknowledge that the parent’s concerns are valid and not treat them like trouble makers or idiots.
NYC As teachers, we cannot have it both ways. I used to start every class with a sort of “policy statement.” That is, I want everyone to like me, but not at the expense of their education or of raising questions about their viewpoint of things. . . . precisely because I had experienced many who thought that raising questions about their viewpoint, and presenting a different viewpoint as a counterpoint, was thought of as “treating them like idiots.” Beginning with an openness of mind is a worthwhile ideal in any case. CBK
The history of the world is far from clean. We descend from apes, for example. That makes some people upset. The knowledge doesn’t let them experience the feeling of pride they seek. We can’t just, however, read fairy tales and futuristic fantasies. If you take a Common Core approach to teaching great works of literature, every volume of which raises ticklish issues or it wouldn’t be of any significance, you will provide no historical period context before and during the reading and let the students try to decipher everything from old social classes to old dialects.
Before high stakes testing took us out of the equation, we teachers used to understand how to guide students through the reading so they better understood the literary work, the historical period from which it came, and therefore, the unclean world today. Sometimes, parents still got upset and one teacher, for example, was lucky to have Clarence Darrow defend him in the Scopes Trial. But we kept teaching. And it’s wise to let us continue teaching without restrictions because he that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.
What makes me sad in the responses that I have read is that this doesn’t have to be as difficult if those in power actually acknowledge that their critics might just have a point!
“Hamilton” was also the subject of criticism. Instead of attacking his critics as politically correct or demeaning and belittling them, Lin-Manuel Miranda acknowledged that they made good points (something that I am not hearing here).
“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda even admitted that “all the criticisms are valid” on Twitter Monday. “The sheer tonnage of complexities & failings of these people I couldn’t get. Or wrestled with but cut. I took 6 years and fit as much as I could in a 2.5 hour musical. Did my best. It’s all fair game.”
One can object to “banning” but also acknowledge that if it is allowed to be taught as a classic and those who point out racism in it belittled, that is arguably as bad as banning it.
Nycpsp, I really think you are off-base here.
From the Guardian article: “To Kill a Mockingbird was the first book I came across that showed me that guilt or innocence is immaterial if the system is stacked against you. Racism is like sexism; if you’re not on the receiving end you simply don’t see it.”
To me, that is the feature that makes this book a key selection for middle or early high school. Not just its premise, but that the fact that the author conveys this nuanced message so clearly and accessibly to youths as well as adults. Also important, though usually eclipsed by the racial discussion: the same point is made about social stigma against the mentally-disabled.
It’s an astounding accomplishment, and the article-writer’s quibbles miss the point. Those observations are important, but what do they convey? That the oppression and violence of those times caused blacks in service positions, or even members of the accused’s family, to hide their opinions and emotions from those in power, suppress their anger at the system that oppressed them, finding it safest simply to express gratitude to one championing their cause.
Are they “quibbles” or important?
““When I suggested to the group in Edinburgh that maybe, possibly, To Kill a Mockingbird might be considered a profoundly racist novel there was a collective sharp intake of breath and some very stony stares. But what followed – once they’d recovered from the shock of having a beloved book described that way – was an extremely considered and thoughtful discussion. Of course, it helped that Go Set a Watchman had been published by then. The book Harper Lee had originally set out to write is a slap in the face not only for Scout but for white society as a whole.”
……
“Talking about these things can be difficult, but we shouldn’t shy away from them. To Kill a Mockingbird gives an insight into the subject, but the way in which it is still read demonstrates that we have a very long way to go before we can declare ourselves to be truly “colour blind”.”
And from Teen Vogue about Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway version:
““What Aaron Sorkin did was looked into this time, into 2019, by giving Calpurnia agency, and giving Tom some degree of agency, so that we were not fitting as props or as scenery or as devices used to move the story,” Jackson tells Teen Vogue. “Part of the issue that the culture has in understanding African Americans is that no one ever asks, really, what the African American is thinking, as if we exist in some sort of void. It’s important now that you hear some, you don’t hear enough, but you at least hear something of what this woman is thinking as it relates to her and her people.”
I feel as if these responses are missing my point, which is that I don’t see anyone actually trying to understand this from the POV of the parents who objected. I have no doubt they were also lectured to about what the African American characters “conveyed”. Just like as a Jew, I’m sure that I’d be really reassured to be lectured to about how a Holocaust novel’s portrayal of Jews as only victims grateful for the “good” German’s charity was really symbolic of something else.
I don’t know how to make this more clear but I will try. To Kill a Mockingbird is a remarkable piece of literature. But that does not mean it cannot be criticized for its failures in the portrayal of the African American characters in it. It does not mean that it should not be criticized, nor that parents who are bothered by those failures should be demeaned and belittled. And often, when these issues get to the point where parents are asking a book not to be taught in class anymore, it is because those parents are not being offered anything but “this is a classic, and those characters acting so grateful are simply reflecting their time (which completely ignores that they could be reflecting their time and ALSO have some agency that reveals that is not the entirety of the character.)
I think it is the dismissal of concerns that causes these things to escalate. If a Jewish family objected to the only Holocaust book being taught in 7th grade having a stereotypical portrayal of all Jews, hearing from the school system that the stereotypical portrayal was simply how Jews had to behave to get by is a cop out. And it escalates the issue that very likely might have been solved by listening. Perhaps by adding a book where Jews aren’t portrayed as stereotypes. Perhaps by showing the parents additional readings that will be part of the class study of that book that addresses those stereotypes. There are alot of better ways to address this – in my opinion – and just insisting that those stereotypes are just symbolic of how those characters were forced to act like at the time isn’t really good enough. If it was, wouldn’t Uncle Tom’s Cabin still be required reading?
Nycpsp 11/23 12:32 am:
“But that does not mean it cannot be criticized for its failures in the portrayal of the African American characters in it. It does not mean that it should not be criticized.” ‘Failures’ in portrayal ‘corrected’ by Sorkin’s 2019 version “by giving Calpurnia agency, and giving Tom some degree of agency, so that we were not fitting as props or as scenery or as devices used to move the story.” Or as you said, “(which completely ignores that they could be reflecting their time and ALSO have some agency that reveals that is not the entirety of the character.)”
Who’s to say that the original play wasn’t right on the $: these characters had no agency. What I said: “The
oppression and violence of those times caused blacks in service positions, or even members of the accused’s family, to hide their opinions and emotions from those in power, suppress their anger at the system that oppressed them, finding it safest simply to express gratitude to one championing their cause.”
Sure: criticize, discuss, in class. You’re right, “quibbles” is the wrong word. It is important to examine whether the black characters come across as “yazzum, right-away, massah” stereotypes and why that might be, in the reality of the “justice” system & lynchings w/ which they lived. Important to discuss the stereotype itself, how it was used to paint blacks as half-wits who lacked the integrity to stand up for their own people and fight the system, thus proving the system was OK as is. Rewriting the story to lend “agency” to characters who were simply trying to thread a dangerous needle in order to survive seems to me a travesty.
bethree,
“agency” means that the character is shown to be acting that way as a conscious choice.
It doesn’t mean that after the fact, to address criticisms, white people justify the portrayal of a character with no agency as being an intentional choice to demonstrate that character has no choice.
And I’m sorry, but i don’t believe for a second that would fly if it was a story about Jews who were only portrayed as happily grateful to the “good Germans”. I don’t believe for a second the Jewish community wouild say “oh, that’s fine, it was a conscious choice to show that they were so grateful because we were all supposed to understand that they acted so grateful because that was the situation they were in and so there was no reason for the author to show anything but happy and grateful Jews.”
And I say that as a Jew — I went back and read some of the scathing criticism of Schindler’s List by Jews about the portrayal of Jews.
I know I sound like a broken record, but imagine a different Holocaust film (not Schindler’s List), in which in a Nazi concentration camp the Jews are shown to be incredible grateful to the one “good” German and that was the sum total of how the Jews were portrayed. That film also shows Jews being victims of extermination and degraded by the Nazis, but the main story is how grateful they are to the one “good” German. I think criticism of that would absolutely be warranted, and if the defenders of this wonderful film tried to argue that Jews were portrayed this way because “they had no agency”, I wouldn’t buy it. Would you?
Having “agency” isn’t just about power. And if you just show those who are powerless only as characters who are grateful when they are given any consideration, without any insight into their own decision-making, it seems pretty lame to argue after the fact that was a conscious decision because since they have no power, there is no need to show them as anything but people who are grateful when anyone is nice to them.
I know that is asking a lot of TKAM, which is really more of a coming of age story about a young girl. And yet it seems to be taught as some great story about racism. In the abstract, that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but if there isn’t equal time given to much better books about racism, where there is more insight into the non-white characters, it is a problem.
From The Guardian article
“To Kill a Mockingbird started me thinking.
But did it make me think enough?
Harper Lee’s focus is purely white. Given that her narrator is a child growing up in the 1930s segregated South, maybe that’s inevitable. Perhaps nothing else would be plausible. But one of the book’s central themes is that you need to walk around in someone else’s skin to understand them and Harper Lee doesn’t actually get under the skin of any of the black characters.
The closest we get is Calpurnia, the family’s cook, but we never know what she’s thinking or feeling. Only once does she express an opinion – an event so startling that Scout remarks on it. Calpurnia is in the fictional tradition of the “happy black”, the contented slave – the descendent of the ever-loyal Mammy in Gone With the Wind. And the rest of the black community is depicted as a group of simple, respectful folk – passive and helpless and all touchingly grateful to Atticus Finch – the white saviour. We never see any of them angry or upset. We never see the effect of Tom Robinson’s death on his family up close – we don’t witness Helen, Tom’s wife, grieving and Scout never wonders about his children. Their distress is kept at safe distance from the reader. “…..
“When I suggested to the group in Edinburgh that maybe, possibly, To Kill a Mockingbird might be considered a profoundly racist novel there was a collective sharp intake of breath and some very stony stares. But what followed – once they’d recovered from the shock of having a beloved book described that way – was an extremely considered and thoughtful discussion. Of course, it helped that Go Set a Watchman had been published by then. The book Harper Lee had originally set out to write is a slap in the face not only for Scout but for white society as a whole.”
……
“Talking about these things can be difficult, but we shouldn’t shy away from them. To Kill a Mockingbird gives an insight into the subject, but the way in which it is still read demonstrates that we have a very long way to go before we can declare ourselves to be truly “colour blind”.”
“Calpurnia is in the fictional tradition of the “happy black”, the contented slave – the descendent of the ever-loyal Mammy in Gone With the Wind.”
Seriously? This person REALLY needs to reread this novel a little more carefully. Here, a few passages from the first part of the novel:
At last the sawhorses were taken away, and we stood watching from the front porch when Mr. Radley made his final journey past our house.
“There goes the meanest man ever God blew breath into,” murmured Calpurnia, and she spat meditatively into the yard.
In Calpurnia’s teaching, there was no sentimentality: I seldom pleased her and she seldom rewarded me.
It was then that Calpurnia requested my presence in the kitchen.
She was furious, and when she was furious Calpurnia’s grammar became erratic. When in tranquility, her grammar was as good as anybody’s in Maycomb. Atticus said Calpurnia had more education than most colored folks.
When she squinted down at me the tiny lines around her eyes deepened. “There’s some folks who don’t eat like us,” she whispered fiercely, “but you ain’t called on to contradict ‘em at the table when they don’t. That boy’s yo’ comp’ny and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear?”
“He ain’t company, Cal, he’s just a Cunningham—”
“Hush your mouth! Don’t matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house’s yo’ comp’ny, and don’t you let me catch you remarkin’ on their ways like you was so high and mighty! Yo’ folks might be better’n the Cunninghams but it don’t count for nothin’ the way you’re disgracin’ ‘em—if you can’t act fit to eat at the table you can just set here and eat in the kitchen!”
That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.
It was written by Tanya Landman, a British author.
I think you make excellent points, Bob. But what she also wrote is “Talking about these things can be difficult, but we shouldn’t shy away from them.”
I saw a lot of assumptions here about why the parents didn’t like TKAM without any interest in hearing from the parents or any interest in hearing WHY people might find it problematic. There was a knee jerk response on this blog among some teachers who I most admire! to dismiss the parents by immediately portraying their complaints as being about never showing any racism at all, with the condescending comments about how racism is historically accurate. Do you really think the parents who complained don’t know that? Do you think it might be possible that was the first response they got from their school when they dared to even bring up any criticism of the book? Don’t you think that kind of response makes things worse?
Teen Vogue – which writes some excellent stories – published an article on October 3, 2019 “”To Kill a Mockingbird” Broadway Cast Discusses the Story’s Complicated Legacy”
“The Broadway version, to its credit, fills some of those gaps in how the story’s black characters are presented, which is a huge reason cast members like LaTanya Richardson Jackson agreed to be part of the production in the first place. Jackson plays Calpurnia, the Finch family’s maid and maternal figure, a role that has been expanded to have more discussions with Atticus; during several of those conversations, she checks him on his white privilege. In the play, when Atticus says the children shouldn’t have to be afraid to walk around where they live, Cal wryly remarks, “Well, let me see if I can find a way to relate to that.”
“What Aaron Sorkin did was looked into this time, into 2019, by giving Calpurnia agency, and giving Tom some degree of agency, so that we were not fitting as props or as scenery or as devices used to move the story,” Jackson tells Teen Vogue. “Part of the issue that the culture has in understanding African Americans is that no one ever asks, really, what the African American is thinking, as if we exist in some sort of void. It’s important now that you hear some, you don’t hear enough, but you at least hear something of what this woman is thinking as it relates to her and her people.”
I strongly recommend that Teen Vogue article. It isn’t saying to BAN the book. It is talking about LISTENING to those who have criticisms instead of condescendingly dismissing them.
Maybe I am a Pollyanna, but I bet if the school board had actually treated those parents as if their issues had any merit, there could have been a much better outcome for everyone. And the reason I feel certain those parents had a point is that I didn’t hear any teacher here willing to even acknowledge what the criticisms of TKAM were! I jujst heard a straw dog being attacked with lots of condescension about how there was racism in that era and the book showed it — which ignored the real criticisms that people had!
A number of years ago, I was editor-in-chief for a new K6-K12 literature textbook program. Of course, at Grades 9-12, all the major lit programs have a Shakespeare play at three levels. The almost invariant progression is Romeo and Juliet at Gr 9, Julius Caesar at Gr 10, one ore more American plays at Gr 11 (typically Our Town and The Crucible), and Macbeth at Gr 12. (If David Coleman had known anything about the teaching of English when he hacked together his ridiculous, puerile “standards” for Gates, he would have known that every major literature textbook series was ALREADY full of substantive, classic texts and close reading questions related to these texts).
In reviewing competitor’s texts, I found that they were HIGHLY bowdlerized. Typically, the editors had cut ALMOST A THIRD of Romeo and Juliet due to sexual innuendo (e.g., “The bawdy hand of the dial is on the prick of noon”) and had done this without a word to teachers about the censorship! I left the plays intact. The only cut I made was of the phrase “liver of blaspheming Jew” from our edition of Macbeth (Act IV, Scene i), and I included a note in the Teacher’s Edition about this. If I had this to do over again, I would have left the line and included a note in the margin, to students, about the horrific anti-Semitism of Shakespeare’s day, would have included in that note Portia’s great speech (“The quality of mercy”) from The Merchant of Venice, and would have noted that this horrific phrase is placed into the mouths of foul, equivocating, evil-making creatures.
And, ofc, I would have included the famous “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech from The Merchant of Venice III, i.
Bob We could do the same with any of the biases, not the least of which is misogyny. CBK
yes. yes. yes. yes. yes!
This is a really big one. Our classic literature is shot through with it. What do we do about that? Teach it. What’s all this crazy woman in the attic stuff about, anyway?
Bob Jane Austin comes to mind, and a more recent “rebuttal” of a favorite movie: MASH.
. . . but also the entire sweep of human history . . . though there is a dialectic also to be had there. Apparently in long-ago China, they had a coin with an imprint of a woman holding a broom. I found that and many other interesting historical points in: “The ‘Natural Inferiority’ of Women: Outrageous Pronouncements by Misguided Males,” Compiled by Tama Starr (Poseidon Press NY 1991) CBK
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sandra-bland-and-texts-of-terror_b_7844260?fbclid=IwAR1QMNgkOtU-wyAQTHSDECL-LwiDkhRlFn99P0PE6TO5JsFv5u-UihfNqcg
Teachable moments. They are priceless.
An excellent question to pose: Why the foul female witches and the noble wizard Prospero? Where did these motifs come from? What’s the cultural history there? Teachable moments. Prospero, ofc, is Shakespeare’s surrogate–the maker behind the play.
English Proverb Men have many faults, women only two:
Everything they say, and everything they do.” CBK
Sure let’s eliminate all reading that has any reference to any marginalized group in anything but fairy tale form. We can all play pretend and we can raise another generation who don’t recognize what racism looks like.
I just found out why grok sounds like an invented word out of science fiction because it is!
Great word, isn’t it? All the Hippies used it, back in the day.
Shortly after this new literature series was published, a Superintendent from Missouri made the first big purchase–tens of thousands of dollars worth. Then, a short while later, he returned them all and refused to pay for them because the 11th-grade book contained “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” by James Thurber, with its line, “They’re so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know everything.” Evidently, the 15 and 16 year olds of Missouri would have been irreparably damaged by encountering the word “damn,” which, of course, they never hear anywhere else.
Obviously he got some heat from some powerful people, and it was not worth the headaches.
Diane, you actually wrote a book called “The Language Police”?
It’s an outstanding book. Highly recommended. It’s on my shelf next to “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”
The purpose of banning books is to create a cultural and historical amnesia to shape a sanitized narrative to implement reactionary agendas. Anti-Jewish laws promulgated by Nazis included not allowing Jews to attend universities or schools. These were supplemented by the banning of use of libraries and purchasing of writing materials and books.
GregB And then the slaves, where it was illegal for them to read or to be taught to read. CBK
Another good point. Glad these folks weren’t around when I would teach about and play George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” case in high school government. Never once had a parent complain.
Although this discussion is about books, there are similar issues with visual art. Some are based on depictions of the nude human figure, others may reflect a distain for abstract art, surrealism, or the traditional arts of a particular culture such as mask making. Then there are works targeted for distain simply because they have been created by African Americans or some member of another “minority group.” This distain is much less if the images are heroic depictions or if they are free of references to racial/ethnic identities.
The works of Jerry Pinkney straddle these distinctions and they are interesting for another reason. Before there was a name for dyslexia, Jerry Pinkney struggled with reading. He says he developed skill in drawing to avoid issues in reading. He studied commercial art in high school and with a level of performance so high he earned a full scholarship to Philadelphia University of the Arts.
For nearly fifty years he has illustrated award-winning children’s books. Many of these celebrate multiculturalism and African-American heritage. Add nine commissions for US postage stamps. He received the 2010 Caldecott award for his exceptional illustrations of Aesops Fables.
Needless to say there are also issues in music, theater, dance, and newer multi-media performances if/when offered in schools. Culture matters. The once taken for granted values of a “mainstream” culture. That mainstream– largely white, male, and Protestant and committed to the canon of Western Civilization–is being challenged by a newly visible and and multi-cultural majority… and by women, never a minority.
We should always add to our culture. We should not subtract from it. Even when a book is offensive to some, the offense preserves the history of what offends. When we allow a statue of a person who has fallen out of social admiration to exist with interpretation, perhaps in some new location, we remind ourselves of what we used to think i years past.
I know where a person who built a wonderful theme park erected a statue to Ayn Rand. It is a great place, but I want to spit on that statue every time I see it. But I would never want to tear it down. Someday the zeitgeist that produced this statue will be gone. She will sit there, perhaps covered in bird poop. Our creations should always remain, if only to remind us that we once were wrong.
Part of what is going on in both Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird is an accurate portrayal, via a child’s POV, of the racist inclinations that the child has because of his or her culture being subverted and overturned by growing awareness. People who don’t see this simply don’t understand the novels. They haven’t read them carefully enough. Do we need to be sensitive to and outraged by the very things that lead people to raise objections to perceived racism in the novels. Absolutely. Do we need to teach these important novels. Absolutely, again.
“perceived racism”???!!!
Please read the Teen Vogue article. Apparently allow those people just “perceive” something that other reasonable people know isn’t there at all.
When you qualify something that is racist with “perceived”, it is problematic.
I can imagine why those parents ended up asking those books not be taught if they were getting those kinds of responses.
TEEN VOGUE:
“”To Kill a Mockingbird” Broadway Cast Discusses the Story’s Complicated Legacy
“I think the play we do is one of the most important plays on Broadway right now … if we take the opportunity, if we take it a step further after the play to have some uncomfortable conversations.”
By P. Claire Dodson
October 3, 2019
If I write a speech by a Nazi in a play and someone attacks me for being a Nazi, then that is simply perceived and inaccurate. Sorry. But it is.
Bob, you are one of the people I respect most on this blog. And that is why I am totally depressed that you wrote that. You have entirely misunderstood the debate.
I can’t speak for every iota of criticism of TKAM, but I can tell you that most of the criticism I read would not attack a speech by a Nazi in a play.
But they would be critical of a play about Nazis in Germany during WW II, where every single Jew who is portrayed is a stereotype of a noble but suffering jew who is incredibly grateful to the “good” Germans who made their survival possible.
I really do not understand how you can’t see the difference. I blame myself for not doing a better job explaining the difference.
But if someone as intelligent and open minded as you would keep offering up straw man arguments to refute, instead of trying to understand what it is the parents might feel is racist about TKAM, then I can see why the parents might have moved to just banning the book altogether. I don’t agree with that. But I also think that offering up your own argument to refute instead of trying to listen and hear why peoplr might find racism in TKAM makes the problems worse.
Bob, you’re right plain and simple, even though I respectfully acknowledge that NYCPSP has spoken her mind.
The problem is not reading literature with racism in it; the secret to such literature’s power is HOW it is taught and what lessons can be learned by reading the lines themselves and often more importantly, IN BETWEEN the lines.
You hit the nail on the head in this one!!! Great post from you.
The problem has NEVER been reading literature about racism.
It is about the racism that seeps into how non-white characters are portrayed in that literature.
I don’t get why people are suddenly experiencing amnesia about this because the reason that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not presented to students today the way it was presented when I was assigned to read it in the 1970s is because of that. Not because anyone said “you may not ever have a novel with a racist character in it”.
It’s just that we have become more aware of how pernicious casual racism can be.
I wish people would take a lesson from Lin-Manuel Miranda, who understands the difference between listening to his critics and demeaning and belittling them to shut them up.
It goes a long way to be a Lin-Manuel instead of a knee jerk defender of literature that absolutely, positively is not racist at all, even if some deluded people “perceive” it as racist.
Again, anyone who characterizes Calpurnia, in this novel, as a racist stereotype has barely read the novel. He or she certainly has not attended to it closely. And that Atticus is a complex character, both a hero in the novel and compromised by his own racist tendencies, is part of the point of the novel, part of what Scout and the reader must come to grips with. One thing that this novel and all great literature teaches is that people aren’t simple. Atticus is a product of his time, but he is a principled one, able to rise above this TO SOME EXTENT. In part, Calpurnia serves as a foil to him that demonstrates that he is not simply a unidimensional hero, a reality check.
I would like to remind you, NYC, of my initial comment:
That said, racial sensitivity discussions in English departments regarding approaches to teaching them and readiness of students to grok them are very much in order.
Bob,
I still feel as if you don’t understand my point at all. You are making comments I agree with, but they are not addressing what I tried to say.
TKAM never bothered me, personally, and I was happy when my kids were assigned to read it. But when I read Diane Ravitch’s post yesterday, the first thing I did was to look for some comprehensive articles which really addressed the criticisms of TKAM because I wanted to know why critics had problems with it.
And when I did, I understood the criticisms much better. It doesn’t mean I supported “banning” the book (which was not what these Burbank parents said – they asked for it not to be taught in class). And I could not help wondering if they would have been more open to having it taught had they been reassured that TKAM would not be presented as simply a classic book where the white author depicts the racist society of the time. Because that is how it is often taught. And reading the replies here did not give me much confidence that there would be much more than that.
I wish I had seen more attempts to understand the parents instead of defend the book. The good parts of the book aren’t the issue and yet that seems to be the only thing anyone wants to talk about here. Critics of the book are not talking about the good parts. They are talking about the parts that bother them that are dismissed as “quibbles”.
NYT Book Review, June 18, 2018
Roxane Gay wrote an excellent review of Tom Santopietro’s book:
WHY ‘TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD’ MATTERS
What Harper Lee’s Book and the Iconic American Film Mean to Us Today
Roxane Gay makes a point that seems pertinent to this discussion:
“Never does this book take chances or make a persuasive argument for why “To Kill a Mockingbird” matters to anyone but white people who inexplicably still do not understand the ills of racism, and seemingly need this book to show them the light.”
When TKAM came to Broadway, the creators listened to criticism. They made changes to address the criticism. They did not “ban” the play, but they also did not present the play as some fully realized depiction of racism in the south that is so classic that it must never be criticized. It made a big difference.
I want to add that there have been some very good recent articles written about what you describe as “perceived racism” in TKAM and I think it would be good if more teachers who taught TKAM read exactly what the issues are instead of deciding on your own what they are.
The Wannsee Conference is a superb film about the appalling meeting at which the “Final Solution” was agreed upon. The film was written by Paul Mommertz. In the film, characters such as Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and Rudolf Lange say horrific, chilling things. Any suggestion that this is a racist or genocidal film because it contains horrific, chilling racist and genocidal language is absurd prima facie. And any such suggestion would be an unconscionable slander against Mommertz. Obviously, he wrote the film because he was appalled that people sat around and agreed upon this plan of action, and obviously, Mommertz wanted his film to be a warning. This is the kind of thing that can and does happen, and here’s why. Same with To Kill a Mockingbird.
I wrote a story recently in which a character very like an Ingsoc Party official from 1984 speaks at some length, justifying his actions. That doesn’t make the story a fascist story, and it doesn’t make me a fascist. It makes me someone who hates fascists and wishes to show them for what they are, as clearly and as accurately as possible: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/stories/he-sees-you-when-youre-sleeping-a-short-story/
If someone reads this short story and thinks, based on it, that the story is fascist or that I am fascist, he or she just can’t read well. Sorry, but that’s just the truth of the matter.
Far from being a racist stereotype, Calpurnia in To Kill a Mockingbirtd is presented as a complex and very human character, with faults and strengths, smarter than most around her, and subtle in her thinking, and part of what this novel is about is the narrator, Scout’s, learning to appreciate these truths about Calpurnia. If someone thinks that Calpurnia is a stereotypical black housemaid of the kind depicted in so many racist American movies of the early and middle twentieth century, then he or she simply hasn’t read the novel at all well and definitely should not have the temerity to write about it. Calpurnia is no stock character. She’s very fully developed, and that this is so is a testament to the literary genius of Harper Lee.
I’ve watched the Wannsee Conference probably four or five times. It’s outstanding and fascinating.
Again, you keep setting up straw men.
“In the film, characters such as Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and Rudolf Lange say horrific, chilling things. Any suggestion that this is a racist or genocidal film because it contains horrific, chilling racist and genocidal language is absurd prima facie.”
But what if every single Jewish person in that film was presented as an ethnic stereotypes and every Jewish character spoke with thick accents and all they did was serve as victims and to proclaim how grateful they were to the “good” Germans or to the American army for saving them? And this was presented as a classic “holocaust film”.
What if Jewish person pointed out that no Jewish characters had any agency and those criticisms of the Jewish stereotypes in the play were shut down by someone saying “Any suggestion that this is a racist or genocidal film because it contains horrific, chilling racist and genocidal language is absurd prima facie.”
It would be a sign that the people were not listening to a word that jews were saying about what bothered them about the film and were instead imposing their own view of what bothered the jews. And that is wrong. That is a sign that people aren’t actually listening.
Sorry, NYPCP, your argument falls flat because there are no “Jewish person[s] in that film…presented as…ethnic stereotypes and [the rest of this quote is moot because it was not part of the film] every Jewish character spoke with thick accents and all they did was serve as victims.” If you can’t find this film, I suggest you give Conspiracy a shot (it’s on HBO and probably available in streaming version).
Part of historical understanding these facts and issues is the understanding that contemporary accounts and the reenactment of them do not present “both sides.” I actually think is valuable. The silence about issues and facts that are left out of these accounts are valuable teaching opportunities in and of themselves. The absences of discussion of the “other side,” especially when they did not take place at all is important. That’s why Huck Finn is so important. The opposing arguments are implied in every word Mark Twain writes. These provide wonderful teaching moments.
Please read my comments about what I meant by that term. If someone sees racism in a devastating, scathing portrait of racists as itself racist, then he or she is perceiving racism that isn’t there.
It simply isn’t the case that the black characters in To Kill a Mockingbird are straw men. It just isn’t. Lee was far too subtle a writer to be guilty of that. This is extreme misreading, and it’s the work of a teacher to correct it.
I spent a lot of my childhood on my grandparents’ farm in Southern Kentucky, in a small town with segregated churches and schools and “Whites Only” or “Coloreds Only” water fountains. My grandfather’s best friend was a black man. When my grandfather wasn’t working on the farm or elsewhere, he was with his buddy fishing or hunting. If today, I transcribed word for word a conversation between these two men, someone would call my writing racist. And that person would be wrong. The writing would be simply an accurate portrayal of real people in a particular place and time.
Now, why might I choose, as a writer, to tell that story? Well, it has an interesting ending with a powerful moral. My grandfather’s name was Lilburn. His life-long pal was named Ezra. In that time and place, black men simply didn’t go into white men’s houses, and vice versa. Ezra would show up and stand outside and call for my grandfather, and they would go off together. The two of them were thick as fleas. But over a lifetime of their intense friendship, they were never in one another’s homes.
Back then and there, it was customary, when someone died, to lay the body out in the parlor or living room, and people would come to pay their respects. I was standing on the porch with my mother, with my grandfather’s body lying inside, when Ezra showed up. Here’s the conversation:
MOM: Ezra, it’s awful good to see you. Daddy would be happy you’ve come.
EZRA: You, too, Miss Vonnie. Of course I’ve come.
MOM: So, Ezra, go on inside and say goodbye to Daddy. And there’s plenty of food. Help yourself.
EZRA: Well, I couldn’t do that.
MOM: Ezra Jones, you were the most important person in the world to Daddy, and I’ll be d****d if you aren’t gonna have the opportunity to say goodbye. Come on in, Ezra. Please.
And he did. For the first time in his life, he was inside the home of his best friend.
Bob,
I did not say that the black characters in TKAM were straw men.
I said that you presented a straw man argument when you gave an example of someone supposedly objecting to any anti-Semitic speech by a Nazi in a play because Jews would be offended. Which had nothing to do with my point.
Robert Rendo, you said:
“Do we need to be sensitive to and outraged by the very things that lead people to raise objections to perceived racism in the novels. Absolutely.”
As a parent, it seemed to me that the replies – especially from some of the teachers I admire most – were not being sensitive to those things.
The critics of TKAM seemed to be presented as some stereotypical book banners who objected to any portrayal of racism! Just like Bob thought it was pertinent to bring up a Nazi making an anti-Semitic speech. That belittles and demeans the criticism, when it is reduced to “oh, I can’t even have a Nazi character because if they said something racist or anti-Semitic, those angry parents would object.” That is not being sensitive at all, and it just makes parents dig in deeper believing that TKAM would be taught exactly as they feared.
And for the record, when I tried to make an analogy to the portrayal of Jews in a film that is considered a classic, I was not talking about Wannsee Conference, which I have never seen.
But a good comparison would be to the movie Schindler’s List.
Schindler’s List is a perfectly fine movie and anyone can cite things that were excellent about the film.
But you should read various criticisms of the movie in Jewish publications! There is a lot! It is not off limits!
The difference is in how Schindler’s List is presented. It isn’t “banned”, but it also isn’t presented as some great Holocaust film that reveals important things that Americans need to know about the Holocaust. And if it was being taught as one of the only things that kids were learning about the Holocaust, I think most Jews would object.
It’s a good film, but not that good.
Greg 11/23 12:45 am: Thanks, GregB, you have articulated better what I have tried to convey to nycpsp. In the first place, the Afro-American characters in TKAM are, sorry, not cardboard stereotype props moving the plot. They are simply muted to an extent, i.e., must be gleaned through main character. Like any novel, it is limited by POV. The story is seen through the eyes of a young white girl, hence the most developed characters will be hers and proximate family members: clues to the others’ will be gleaned from snapshots she registers. Reader has to fill in. This is what classroom discussion is for. Any racism curriculum will need to include other novels written from Afro-American POV.
I can see addressing the issue of Atticus’s own racism. I can see teaching the nuances of each character using both literal interpretation, theory, AND history before and during the reading of the novel. And I can see teaching all the “what-ifs” to analyze the black character’s modus operandi also, even if the book was written from a white person’s point of view.
NYCPSP, I see what your re saying, but don’t you see the overlap that you have with what Bob is saying? Yes, I know you are not for banning the book.
Bob is spot on when he says:
“Part of what is going on in both Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird is an accurate portrayal, via a child’s POV, of the racist inclinations that the child has because of his or her culture being subverted and overturned by growing awareness. People who don’t see this simply don’t understand the novels. They haven’t read them carefully enough. Do we need to be sensitive to and outraged by the very things that lead people to raise objections to perceived racism in the novels. Absolutely. Do we need to teach these important novels. Absolutely, again.”
Bob & nycpsp: “Perceived racism” is a new concept for me, but I think maybe at least useful for discussion.
I remember being snubbed—worse than snubbed: ignored, de-personalized— by two black friends in the late ‘60’s (separate occasions). One had been a daily classmate-friend in jr-hi. She already ignored me in hi-sch because she was part of some hi-class-set. When we met again in college yrs, I figured we were past all that, but she was with girlfriends in look-alike red berets/ shirts, perhaps a black activist group, & rebuffed my warm greeting. The other was a budding college friendship formed in the student cafeteria. Soon after, racial unrest/ protests were underway, & sadly she too pretended not to know me.
I did not “perceive racism” in either instance, nor do I imagine either girl perceived me as racist. What I saw, I think, was mostly peer pressure, but also a process they were going through. There was a need to identify separately. And probably also a memory of every slight they’d ever endured from whites, that clung to me in passing. It made them feel a combination of shame and anger, even question themselves: had they been too eager for white approval?– had they bought into some social lie, as kids, that they now can see signs of in everything they read? and determination never to experience that again: a defensive offense.
Those were relatively-privileged young women of an earlier time, going through a tumultuous, consciousness-raising political period. But I suspect many black kids today go through something similar around age 11-12 (if not before). As did their parents, who then—excruciatingly—experience it again through their kids. The difference today is that those parents feel a little more comfortable speaking up, expressing those feelings, making some demands. Their demands may not translate into sensible, rational commentary on curriculum. (Hey I do no even see them coming up with suggestions for the reading list.) But it’s a sign of a dialog opening, & should be treated as such.
At the University of Wisconsin, they’re banning rocks. The University will be digging up a Native American burial ground to remove a big rock because some people used a racist term to refer to the rock a hundred years ago.
https://madison.com/news/local/education/university/uw-madison-moves-forward-on-plan-to-move-70-ton-boulder-seen-as-symbol-of/article_d024d9a7-c143-5a91-8165-b8ac521d1dc6.amp.html
Thanks so much for posting that article. It provides the context your comment omits.
Yes. When concerned voices are reduced to people who want to ban rocks, it generally makes those concerned voices angrier.
Part of the problem.
For the record, I guess I am more sympathetic toward those “rock banners” than FLERP! is.
Trump’s supporters are not the only deplorable people with small minds steeped in ignorance.
Near the end of my thirty years teaching in the public schools, I had a black parent that did not want her son to hear the “N” word that Steinbeck used in “Of Mice and Men,” a novel published in 1937 decades before the Civil Rights movement.
I pointed this fact out to that parent, attempting to convince her that we should not attempt to erase history because we didn’t like how they talked or thought back then. I said we should learn from history and not repeat those mistakes in the present.
She refused to listen, and I was required to come up with an alternative lesson that her son would work on in the library when the rest for my students were reading/working on “Of Mice and Men.”
The boy even came to me and said it wasn’t his idea. He said it wouldn’t have bothered him to have stayed in class for “Of Mice and Men” but his mother wouldn’t listen to him, too.
When I taught these books, I never actually used the word, and I explained to my classes why they were there and why I wouldn’t use them.
When I taught things like this, I would always use the words that were offensive. I wanted my students to hear them, words that were commonly used by their grandparents in private conversations. I wanted them to be shocked, offended, and outraged. I wanted them to feel the intent and respond. But then again, I had the freedom to do so as a teacher. Would that all teachers had that kind of freedom. It’s the essence of responsible autonomy. I wish we would do that today as adults. I used to love the baffled feelings created when teaching about Earl Long’s comment to northern Louisiana political boss Willie Rainach, when Willie complained about Earl’s policies of granting limited rights and opportunities for Blacks, “But Willie, you got to remember that niggers is people too.” Led to a lot of great discussions about how racism is not, excuse the pun, a black or white issue.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, what WordPress choses to moderate. I have a comment in moderation today because it uses the word “d**ned.” but it let the N-word pass, no prob.
That’s because it’s still commonly used! Not sure if that’s a 😄 or a 😢.
And the frightful “d” word isn’t commonly used? LOL. One of my sons, whom I adopted from Guatemala when he was still a baby, is dark-skinned and works with a lot of black and Latino young men. He went through a period of using the N-word in the familiar, jesting way that some young black men (and a lot of black comics and musicians) do. His argument: I’m a person of color. We can use this word. He and I had many, many discussions of this. I’ve finally broken him of the habit, which can lead to terrible misunderstandings of where, exactly, he stands in the struggle for racial justice and equity.
Yeah, my black students used the term with each other on occasion but it was not a term that anyone not African American could use. All the students, particularly the boys, used to refer to each other by the term bch. My only comment to them on the practice came during a discussion about homosexuality and their asking me what I thought. I told the boys that as far as I was concerned they were all gay since they called each other bch. They burst out laughing.
One of the fallacious arguments put forward to prop up the characterization of the anti-racist novel To Kill a Mockingbird is that the character Calpurnia is a racist stereotype of the “happy black” servant. But consider this passage from the beginning of the novel:
At last the sawhorses were taken away, and we stood watching from the front porch when Mr. Radley made his final journey past our house.
“There goes the meanest man ever God blew breath into,” murmured Calpurnia, and she spat meditatively into the yard.
Another of these fallacious arguments is that the black characters in TKAM lack agency. But consider this passage:
It was then that Calpurnia requested my presence in the kitchen.
She was furious, and when she was furious Calpurnia’s grammar became erratic. When in tranquility, her grammar was as good as anybody’s in Maycomb. Atticus said Calpurnia had more education than most colored folks.
When she squinted down at me the tiny lines around her eyes deepened. “There’s some folks who don’t eat like us,” she whispered fiercely, “but you ain’t called on to contradict ‘em at the table when they don’t. That boy’s yo’ comp’ny and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear?”
“He ain’t company, Cal, he’s just a Cunningham—”
“Hush your mouth! Don’t matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house’s yo’ comp’ny, and don’t you let me catch you remarkin’ on their ways like you was so high and mighty! Yo’ folks might be better’n the Cunninghams but it don’t count for nothin’ the way you’re disgracin’ ‘em—if you can’t act fit to eat at the table you can just set here and eat in the kitchen!”
What this passage makes clear is that Calpurnia, unlike others in the novel, is hip to the evil of classism. And why? Because it is connected to racism. And what does she do about this? She demonstrates agency by acting as a teacher to the young Scout.
Or consider this passage:
That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.
The POINT of this is that Scout is learning that Calpurnia is not a type but a full, complex human being. This is a major theme of the novel. Anyone who can read this novel and miss that that’s one thing the novel teaches just hasn’t read it well.
cx: One of the fallacious arguments put forward to prop up the characterization as racist of the anti-racist novel To Kill a Mockingbird is that the character Calpurnia is a racist stereotype of the “happy black” servant.
Class prejudice and race prejudice are two versions of the same ugly instrument of oppression. Calpurnia understands that. And she’s the character in the book who sees that Atticus isn’t pure, isn’t simply the all-noble white savior hero but a man, with flaws.
SO well put, Bob.
To be wiling to analyze literature and characters in depth is to be willing to learn and grow and also understand human psychology. With that knowledge, we are more poised and equipped to change the world for he better, and that ain’t no pie-in-the-sky thinking. It’s pragmatic.
I just don’t get the polemics of other readers here even though I respectfully acknowledge that they have expressed their thoughts.
Same, Robert. We must always remember that we are on the same side of this issue of race in America.
Maybe this example would help better explain the point I am trying to make. There are two ways to discuss Calpurnia’s role in TKAM.
The first is for the teacher to have the class discuss how Scout is learning that Calpurnia is a full, complex human being and how that is a major theme in the novel. It would focus on how well Harper Lee presents Calpurnia as being more than a racist stereotype and and how successful the author is in presenting how Scout leans more about racism from Calpurnia. The students could be asked to cite examples that show how much Calpurnia teaches Scout and how important her character is to the theme.
But there is a different way to approach this, too.
The second is for the teacher to have the class discuss how the author of this novel about racism reveals some of her own prejudices in how Calpurnia is portrayed. And the teacher leads a discussion that includes what the Calpurnia character helps Scout learn, but ALSO talks about the failings in how the Calpurnia character (and the other black characters) are portrayed by Harper Lee. The students are asked to cite examples of how Harper Lee fails to present Calpurnia (and other characters) as fully drawn characters and are asked to cite examples of how much Calpurnia teaches Scout and how important her character is to the theme.
There is nothing wrong with the first way of discussion, per se. It is not what it includes. It is the POV that such a discussion EXCLUDES.
The teaching of TKAM very often excludes that POV. I would not have believed that was so, but the replies I read here by teachers I respect convince me that while some lip service is given to that, the main ideas that are being taught are that in TKAM, the point of the Calpurnia character is “Scout is learning that Calpurnia is not a type but a full, complex human being.”
And that is true. But that doesn’t mean that the criticisms are not true, too. And excluding those criticisms as something that are either unimportant or “quibbles” reflects unintentional bias. Maybe those criticisms are equally as important and any discussion the Calpurnia character that marginalizes those criticisms is problematic. Including those criticisms as part of the lesson makes it a better lesson. Knee jerk reactions that those criticisms are over the top does not make a better lesson.
Inclusion rather than exclusion. That applies to people who dismiss the criticisms as well.
Carmenita Helligar is one of the complainants; she’s mother of a student who was taunted by a white student w/an n-word phrase used in the “Roll Thunder” book.
From the LAT article, she “believes the core message being taught is that racism is an artifact of history.”
When we teach books depicting racism in a past era, are we unintentionally implying that there’s no more racism today? Possibly—a subtlety white teachers might miss. Hopefully a classroom discussion would automatically include what kids experience currently – but maybe some teachers avoid as a hot potato?
‘They get to read about racism whereas my children have to experience it. That is the privilege that they get to walk around in.’ That’s reality. Seems like books about racism would help to raise consciousness, no?
Helligar told the review committee that the incidents she reported were themselves proof the books had failed in their mission: “You’re not doing well as an education system if the people you have educated still haven’t learned empathy.” This parent seems to expect anti-racism books taught in school should erase racism/ engender empathy in one fell swoop or not be taught at all. There will be a kid in every class who turns such a message into an opportunity to target/ bully. I understand the outrage and sorrow of the parent, but blaming related incidents on the effort itself is irrational. Am I wrong? Is I better to just ‘let sleeping dogs lie’?
Thank you, you bring up some very good issues — given how many replies this discussion has, it’s too bad more of them weren’t along these lines. (I plead guilty to that, too, as I should have figured out a way to better express myself when I was replying).
“the core message being taught is that racism is an artifact of history.”
When we teach books depicting racism in a past era, are we unintentionally implying that there’s no more racism today? ” I don’t think there is a “possibly” about this because looking around this country where half of the voters seem to believe racism is a thing of the past suggests that is what we have been taught.
I thought this information from the article was shocking:
“Notably, the BUSD’s reading list hasn’t been revised in three decades. “For over 30 years,” said Helligar, “these books have been on this list. The true ban is that there aren’t other books of other voices that could ever be on there.”
Nadra Ostrom, another Black parent who filed a complaint, agrees that the perspectives are badly in need of an update. “The portrayal of Black people is mostly from the white perspective,” said Ostrom. “There’s no counter-narrative to this Black person dealing with racism and a white person saving them.”
And that, she said, is doing more harm than good. “The education that students are basically getting is that racism is something in the past,” she added. “And that’s not the conversation that we should be having in 2020. … Unless teachers have been specifically trained to teach these texts through an antiracist lens, they are probably reinforcing racism rather than dismantling it.”
I can see where this might be true from the replies here. The immediate dismissal of any notion that Harper Lee would create non-white characters who are problematic because they reflect her own biases is not even allowed to be discussed! It is rejected as silly and over the top by teachers.
30 years and they have not added other books! These books do define racism in a specific way that is “of the past”.
When you make comments like “This parent seems to expect anti-racism books taught in school should erase racism/ engender empathy in one fell swoop or not be taught at all.”, you are characterizing their issues in a way that makes it easy to dismiss them. Which is exactly what everyone else does.
No one expects that the de-fund the police movement will end all bias in policing. No one expects that better oversight will end all bias. But recognizing that there is bias is an important step.
Here is another comment I had come up with in answer to some of your previous ones:
How does a white kid even know what racism is, if they don’t see it in action— on it’s own turf? In its own literature of its own time? Erase all the historical depictions of racism, and you erase any understanding of what it is, or how it has evolved [or not, or how enlightenment may have crept in to a degree]. It’s like denying covid – refusing to acknowledge as if that would reduce it to “just a bad flu”—thus allowing it to run rampant. To me, this is the epitome of PC, & what’s wrong with it. It’s like that saying about incest, among those who’ve been victim to it: the only thing taboo about it is talking about it.
Of course, that is about banning these books— perhaps even abandoning the attempt to include pubsch books about racism– and I know that’s not what you’re recommending. But I sense that leaning, in the comments of parent-complainants in the article. They are struggling with the fact that discussions about racism raised by books taught in school can actually stir the pot, bring out racism, expose their kids to it. My sense is that that’s better done sooner than later, and better done within the relative safety-zone of the classroom, at a time of life when children’s parents are more likely to be involved with what goes on there. Books discussed in class cannot solve racism, all that they can hope to do is open a conversation and raise consciousness. I like your point that the book-list has not been revised in 30 years. There are undoubtedly more and better books to bring to this issue.
“Erase all the historical depictions of racism, and you erase any understanding of what it is, or how it has evolved [or not, or how enlightenment may have crept in to a degree].”
Um, I don’t believe any of the parents asked for all historical depictions of racism to be erased. So yes, I agree with you 1,000% that all historical depictions of racism should not be erased. And I bet you $100 so do those parents.
“How does a white kid even know what racism is, if they don’t see it in action— on it’s own turf? In its own literature of its own time?” Exactly. A white kid would have no idea what racism is today if they are taught that racism is what the Finch family overcame in TKAM.
30 years?? Something tells me that white kids in Burbank are not learning at all what racism is today, but I have every confidence that they are learning that they shouldn’t be racist like the characters in TKAM. The problem is when they are being taught that racism looks like what it is in TKAM and nothing else, it is a problem.
To me, this demonstrates how weak the argument is. Do you really think even the most ardent Trump supporting children don’t know what racism looked like in the time of TKAM? That’s pretty much what everyone is taught. And that’s exactly why they find it so easy to dismiss anyone who points out racism today. If it doesn’t look like the racism of TKAM, they don’t see it. And I wonder how many of their teachers don’t see it either.
bethree,
I just wanted to thank you again. I think these are the kinds of conversations that are needed and likely would lead to fewer efforts to “ban” books altogether, but too often there is a knee jerk reaction that belittles the parents.
I love your post NYC public school parent.
I always hated teaching Roll of Thunder in Texas when I taught middle school. No matter how it was rolled out… The letters home so everyone understood the context… The insistence that we needed to read it with maturity… It was a hot potato. There was never any discussion at a district level or even a campus level on how to sensitively handle this text. Additionally, as one of the few white teachers on my campus which was 95% minority, it was especially uncomfortable to teach it without real guidance and planning so that all teachers could be on the same page. My black colleagues could teach the text with a lot more authority in front of minority kids and a trust level that they themselves were not advocating for racism. A white teacher is in a really awkward place trying to set the stage to read this together with the huge amount of “authentic” language no matter how well their rapport is with their kids. There’s so many contextual situations where these kind of texts should not be left up to individual teachers to teach. There should be an anti-racist consensus on how to teach it so that all the kids in the school get the same context. There should be a webinar or parent meeting to explain what the goals are in teaching these text to create trust in the outside communities.
It’s especially disheartening how, probably, very few minority teachers are on this blog right now even reading this discussion perhaps. I would like to hear from a lot more of their voices.
Texastitleoneteacher,
Thanks, it’s interesting hearing your experiences.
One thing is that I don’t think the attitude is just about whether teachers are white or non-white but also perhaps more generational. I have no doubt that there are teachers of every ethnic and racial background who like TKAM but I wonder if the youngest teachers might be more sympathetic to the parents.
(As a comparison, when women first started using Ms. instead of Miss or Mrs., there were lots of women who said they were perfectly fine with Mrs. or Miss who were trotted out to belittle those who were using Ms).
I’ve had a huge education as the parent of a now in college kid. I admit to starting off with the complete certainty that I was the most liberal, open minded person possible, and it took me quite a while to stop knee jerk reacting badly to any criticisms of long cherished “liberal” beliefs or long cherished movies or tv shows or books. A few years ago I would have likely had the same immediate reaction to criticisms of TKAM as many people did here. It was a classic! It taught about racism! What’s not to like! These complaining people don’t understand that we need to teach about racism!
I have no particular expertise to either defend the To Kill a Mockingbird nor to criticize the book. But what I am defending is the idea that there is a legitimate reason that parents and other critics might take issue with the way that the black characters are portrayed. What I am defending is the right of those parents to be taken seriously instead of automatically dismissing them and mischaracterizing what they want. There is legitimate criticism to be made about Harper Lee’s depiction of those characters! What if the discussion started with THAT premise? That there is real criticism that can be made, which means that when the book is taught, that problematic depiction is an important part of all of the discussions, not something that may be mentioned once or twice, with the main focus about how TKAM is a superb book that does a fantastic job of teaching students about racism. Or not even mentioned at all.
I don’t think the younger generation and their wokeness ideas are always right. But I have come to realize that they are a lot more right than I originally thought! We could all do with listening to them more — and they could also do with listening to us more. But I sometimes see that people think they are listening but aren’t, which makes things worse.
“looking around this country where half of the voters seem to believe racism is a thing of the past.” Heh, heh. It’s a long road. Some seem to tune in for a minute every decade & come to this conclusion.
30+ yrs ago [Bklyn], 2 good friends/ colleagues of ours married [he white, she black]. Her mom was a landlord on the other side of the Park, & they rented in a family bldg for a few years. They came back to the Slope: she was sick of remarks her husband would get on the street.
My N Central NJ town was lily-white when we arrived 28 yrs ago—except for the one tiny black nbhd (some of whom are descendants of families living here since its founding 300 yrs ago). [Sidebar: proud to say that one of my musician sons, due to early talent at composing hip-hop beats, was buddies with every kid in that nbhd capable of laying vocal tracks; they trudged the 2 flights to his attic bedroom-studio every wkend.] But why mention it, as there’s so little mixing even today (aside from rare situations like that one), judging from who I see on the street, and what’s printed in the local rag.
I go more by mixed families as a sign of the future. Ten years in, my kids had 2 or 3 friends in the working-class town next door w/mixed [black-white] parents (it would be another few yrs before you encountered that here). A decade later they had a good number of mixed-race friends (incl white-black. -hispanic, -Asian, -S Asian).
But it wasn’t until last year—another decade later—the first black family on our block (ever) moved in. And you still read about ordinary citizens getting pulled over on the nearest highway for DWB.
I am sickened by many of the assumptions made by some posters here about how those of us who have defended To Kill a Mockingbird approach teaching this text. Appalling.
The latest salvo, here, that this text pushes out other texts written by contemporary people of color from their points of view. I, for one, have spent much of my work life striving to make those voices heard by expanding what people used to think of as “the canon.”
To Kill a Mockingbird is partly the story, from the point of view of a child, of her coming to see the racism of the time and place in which she was raised for what it is. And as such, the novel is one of the best works I know for demonstrating how people, including the kids and our classrooms, can rise above being stuck like a fly in treacle in the systemic racism of the milieu in which they live. One reason why this book is so powerful and important is that it teaches this universal truth, that one can and must do that, a truth that transcends time and place. Another is that it is extremely accessible. Sometimes works attain this schoolroom classic status because they have been tested in the crucible in the classroom and have proved, again and again, that they work. This novel has long been and continues to be a powerful tool in the arsenal for teaching antiracism.
Amen.
Earlier today, I shared this thread with a friend of mine who teaches in Alabama. He’s white and Jewish and married to a woman of color. His two passions in life, aside from teaching, have always been basketball and Hip Hop music, and his close friends, sharing these passions with him, have almost always been African American. He is one of the most committed antiracists I have encountered in my lifetime, black or white. Like me, he has spent a lot of his life studying race and racism and black American music, literature, history, literature, and art because this, along with the experiences of the native peoples of this land, is the most engaging and interesting and horrifying and morally and spiritually important part of the American experience. As I put it to my American lit classes, in the final year of my teaching, when I started our unit on African American music, poetry, and song:
Beginning with Columbus, between 12 and 13 million Africans, mostly West Africans, were ripped away from everything they knew. They had their families, their homes, their history, their religions, their ways of dress, their languages, their foods, their very names, EVERYTHING, stolen from them. Everything. Everything was taken. Except what they had between their ears. They were shoved naked into the holes of ships and shipped to the New World, where, those of them who survived the passage, who weren’t thrown overboard when they got sick, were sold like cattle and made to spend lifetimes laboring and serving viscous overlords. Laws were passed calling them less than human and refusing them even the right to learn how to read and write. And yet, as you will learn, they kept things alive, their stories, their dance, their music, and they invented much of the modern world. Today, go anywhere in the world, and you will hear their music, in blues clubs in Beijing, in jazz clubs in France, in Bossa Nova in Brazil and Soca in the Caribbean, in rock n roll and pop, in Afro-Pop, in Hip Hop worldwide. Even the so-called country music of the US owes its origins to West Africa. In other words, that culture that people tried to steal from them? Those people kept it alive. And in the hundred years since slavery was abolished in this country, their music and dance went back out and conquered the world. This is the most amazing story I know, a story of breathtaking resilience and of the grace bestowed by a wronged people upon the world. And it’s going to be my privilege to share some of that with you.
When I told my friend, who had just finished teaching this novel to his students in Alabama and opening a lot of eyes, that people were debating this issue, his response was, “Jesus, Bob. You have to be kidding me.”
Bob,
Your friend sounds amazing and I wish my kids had someone like him as a teacher.
I don’t understand something you said — and maybe it’s because I’m forgetting some parts of the plot of TKAM.
You said: “the novel is one of the best works I know for demonstrating how people, including the kids and our classrooms, can rise above being stuck like a fly in treacle in the systemic racism of the milieu in which they live.”
Wasn’t it only the white characters who did that in the book? Were the black characters able to rise above being stuck in the systemic racism of the milieu in which they live?
Also, how were the eyes of the Alabama students opened? I feel like even writing this sounds snarky and I don’t want to be. But I wonder if your friend taught the book in a certain way that opened kids’ eyes to issues of race. I could definitely see how the book is a good coming of age story in general, but doesn’t seem as enlightening as an anti-racist book.
Again, I appreciate reading your posts and having this discussion and I apologize if I seemed to be attacking your teaching.
Part of the point of this book, NYC, is that the system, in that time and place, severely limited black agency in dealings with whites, and one of the things that the book demonstrates is how very smart people like Calpurnia found ways to express her agency despite the official bonds. This is the story of a little white girl in a racist environment learning that that environment is totally FUBAR. It’s an important story and demonstrates that that learning can take place.
Harper Lee could well have entitled her novel, How I Learned That I Grew up in a Racist Culture That Was Totally FUBAR.
Ok, fair enough — I don’t necessarily agree that TKAM shows how Calpurnia is able to “rise above being stuck like a fly in treacle in the systemic racism of the milieu”, but I guess that is a way of describing it although it seems like she is still stuck in systemic racism to me.
To me,TKAM seems a much better coming of age story than an antiracist story. I think the antiracist story seems less enlightening today, but just my opinion.
She fights the fight where and how she can, in her instruction of Scout, for example. One of the issues with racist societies is that they steal away agency. An example: for much of a century, the U.S. federal government had official housing policies that made it almost impossible for black people in the United States to build generational wealth as most white people did, by paying off a house and then passing it on to their kids. The systemic theft of agency. One of the intriguing things about TKaM is how Calpurnia does, in fact, display agency. The human spirit, like water, will find its way when most are blocked.
The thing that I stick on with your posts about TKAM, nycpsp, is that you keep skipping over the reality of that day, demanding “agency” from characters who had none [under the law!]. Bob says Calpurnia found some sort of agency— sly and clever tho it had to be—in her life among white overlords; that it’s a story of “how people… can rise above being stuck like a fly in treacle in the systemic racism of the milieu in which they live.” You respond that the black characters did not in fact rise above systemic racism. Of course they didn’t. Who does, even today? I think what Bob is saying: it’s a story of how people with no legal agency, baked into systemic racism, found ways to maintain their human dignity and push things forward. “Stuck like a fly in treacle” would have been kowtowing to injustice within the white household without a word, accepting white injustice in the courts like lambs to slaughter. When you say it’s just a ‘coming-of-age’ not an anti-racism story, note that Scout’s coming of age was all about understanding that people she knew as full-fledged individuals in her life were treated by her town—with the power of law behind it—as less than human. [Goes for Boo Radley too].
Your point about enlarging/ updating the anti-racist curriculum is important, as is listening closely to parent reaction. I suspect parents might feel differently about the earlier works if they saw them as part of a whole & growing body of work where Afro-Americans are seen to acquire more agency through time (as long as nobody kids themselves about where we are currently).
Bob,
I really hope you aren’t referring to me. I am making no assumptions about how you teach the text and from your posts here I have always thought you must be (or have been) a terrific teacher.
It is very likely I missed something you posted about this in one of your replies. The one thing I thought I’d read more of on here was an acknowledgement that at least some of the parents’ concerns are valid. So it surprised me when it seemed that almost all the replies seemed to be saying that they are wrong, they just don’t understand the book, the characters are all there to serve a specific purpose and they serve that purpose so the criticism is not valid, period.
Isn’t it possible to acknowledge that Harper Lee’s novel has many strengths, but that some of those criticisms of her failures with the non-white characters are valid? You know TKAM far better than I do, but do you think that there are enough moments in book when Harper Lee does show more of what Calpurnia is thinking? Do those moments invalidate that criticism?
Maybe that’s how you taught TKAM — that it was a classic book with many wonderful qualities but also flaws that are important to discuss. If it seemed like I was implying you did not, then I apologize. I misunderstood some of your replies, as I thought you were dismissing the criticism.
If you will look above, you will find my discussion of the ways in which most of what people understand of the world is imbibed unconsciously, from their culture, via interpellation, and this includes automatic, ingrained, unaware racism. The cure for that is dragging it into the light. That’s what teachers do. And that’s what Harper Lee did. I took issue with specific points made above, for example, that Calpurnia is a stereotypical “happy black,” or that the book is racist because it depicts its black characters as lacking agency. Those are simply poor reading of the book, so poor that they make me wonder whether the folks making those claims have read the book at all.
And part of what this book teaches is that when people are robbed of their agency by those exerting the power of the system, they find ways to act anyway, as best they can. As Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., has explained at length, picking up where W.E.B. DuBois left off with his concept of “double-consciousness,” one of the major themes of African American literature and orature has always been this working around the system via signification. When enslaved persons held cake walks, mocking their white overseers, the idiot whites attributed their behavior to “antics.” The whites were too foolish to grok that the blacks, in these performances, were mocking THEM. And ironically, the whites then invented the minstrel show, imitating that very mocking of white airs, without the slightest understanding that they were enacting their own ridiculousness.
Bob,
You don’t think there is any kind of discussion to be had about the flaws in how Harper Lee portrays the black characters in TKAM?
You are right that Harper Lee wrote a book that dragged racism into the light. But if she unconsciously wrote a book that gives little insight into the black characters, doesn’t that need to be talked about, too? Isn’t there a discussion to be had about Harper Lee’s failings in the book?
Let’s assume those criticisms you mentioned aren’t valid.
But are there other valid and important criticisms of how those characters are portrayed? Did Harper Lee reveal some of her own biases when she wrote those characters?
Maybe the problem is that if TKAM is taught primarily as a coming of age book, this criticism matters less. But it seems that often TKAM is taught as one of the great antiracist novels despite being almost entirely about how a white family thinks about racism.
I do not expect a book on gardening to explain to me how to play the sitar. Lee wrote her antiracism book, and that is what it is, out of the crucible of her own experience. It provides a devastating portrait of systemic, official racism and classism in a small Southern town, and it describes her coming to awareness about this. So, it has these two important values: It demonstrates what stystemic racism looks like in a very raw form and teaches kids how to recognize it. And it demonstrates that one can be raised in a racist culture and become hip to that fact, as Scout/Harper Lee does/did.
Calling this book racist is like calling Mother Jones’s “The Wail of the Children” speech anti-child. Such a thing would be simply, utterly, completely, prima facie ridiculous. She described the abuses of children in her day. She didn’t CONDONE them.
Just as I don’t expect an apple to be a sock, I don’t expect a white woman’s account of learning to recognize the horror of the systemic racism in the town she grew up in to be a black person’s account of experiencing systemic racism. The criticism simply isn’t valid. It’s like saying, This apple isn’t a very good sock, or this sock isn’t a very good apple.
Bob,
Your points are all valid and I don’t disagree. I almost feel as if we are talking about two different things.
You say:
“I don’t expect a white woman’s account of learning to recognize the horror of the systemic racism in the town she grew up in to be a black person’s account of experiencing systemic racism.”
I understand that these are two different things. But I can empathize with people who feel that if one of the main (perhaps only) “antiracism” novels read in class is “a white woman’s account of learning to recognize the horror of the systematic racism in the town she grew up in”, it might be problematic.
I keep thinking of Schindler’s List, which can be praised on many levels. But like TKAM, it could similarly be called “a non-Jewish person’s account of learning to recognize the horror of the Holocaust in the country he grew up in.” And it was criticized a lot because of that! And if it had been made by someone who wasn’t Jewish, it would likely have been criticized even more, especially if it became one of the primary (perhaps the only) ways of teaching about the Holocaust.
A petition you can sign asking the Burbank School District to allow the teaching of these books:
https://pen.org/demand-burbank-schools-reinstate-banned-books/
One of the many great merits of To Kill a Mockingbird is its use of point of view to illustrate the process of a character’s growth out of childishness toward understanding that systemic racism of the kind demonstrated by the police and the court toward Tom Robinson is connected to the classism that the protagonist, Scout, herself feels toward Walter Cunningham and to the ableism that she feels toward Arthur “Boo” Radley. The novel illustrates that racism, classism, and ableism, like sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia, are all examples of the same filthy system of coinage, examples of unexamined acquisitions from the culture at large–interpellations, as Althusser called them, rooted in unwarranted fear due to ignorance–of unexamined interpellations that are destroyed when dragged into the light and seen for what they are, as childish ignorance (“Boo!”). The heavy lifting of that dragging into the light is what this novel does. The novel has been and continues to be one of our most powerful tools for innoculating children against racism, for showing them the mechanism, how it works. Harper Lee could have written about anything. She chose to do this because she had to because the Maycomb of the novel is America.
cx: inoculating. One “c.” I had to look that up. Arthur Radley, in the novel, has been made into an Other in the eyes of the townspeople because of having been subjected, as a child, to horrific abuse.
Yikes. One “n.”
Makes me want to re-read To Kill a Mockingbird.
NYCpublicschoolparent
Thanks for the kudos, but I don’t think I am super enlightened (nor young, I’m 54 lol!). I used to think as Bob does about this argument. Then about 7 years into getting the same complaints each year from the same types of parents, I started to ask myself why I thought that I could step back and look at this as a “book banning” thing and not react to it on a more visceral level….no surprise.I also realized that there was some inherent distrust in the community in which I worked, in terms of my being a white teacher teaching mostly Black and Latinx kids. There was a strong assumption from some parents that I was someone similar to the white police, other white authority figures in the area…that assumption was that I was either someone who might not give their child a fair shot or that I was some “crazy hippie” lady who pitied them. As much as I resented that assumption-voila it was there. And my job as an educator was to reach out to these parents, sit down with them face to face, and listen to them. Invariably this created a positive relationship. It also was a surprise to many of these parents that we, as teachers, had no say in the curriculum.After talking with them face to face and showing them some of our lesson plans they were more comfortable
I think it is sad that so many on this thread are assuming that these parents have no legitimate gripe. I also think that we need to expand the canon and stop teaching the same “classic” texts and/or at least augment them with some critical reading of our own as teachers. https://thiwww.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/11/01/i-saw-myself-in-the-racism-of.html
I write creatively myself, so of course I appreciate a well drawn character. But in creating minority characters now I ask myself if, in the current light of day with all that is going on, I have the right to create minority characters that come from my own “experience”. That experience might be tinged by my own bias. I am currently working on a book set in the deep south and one of the fun things for me has been asking my Black friends for feedback and my one trans friend what they think about my POC characters and the one trans one.
What a gift you gave the parents of your students by sitting down and talking with them and working together. It both alleviated their concerns and most likely improved your curriculum, teaching and relationships with your students and families.
I am not hearing that anyone thinks literature needs to be limited to the classics. I am hearing that many think the classics should not be completely “banned” – especially without a thoughtful process.
I agree Beachteach. I don’t think that it should be banned but I think there is a really strong argument for not having the one anti-racist text a year to be TKAM…
There is so much wealth out there literally we could spend all day reading black authors writing from their perspective. Why is it that I didn’t read Zora Neale Hurston till I was in college or Baldwin or Morrison? Why wasn’t Invisible Man taught in high school? Why wasn’t it taught in high school along with Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky like it was in my junior year of college that made for great discussions? Why weren’t these canonical? It would be great if these districts worked alongside the parents and said…”Hey instead of banning a book let’s add books to this so we can get a more well-rounded anti-racist agenda going here. What would you like us to add and what could we drop?” Wouldn’t it be great if people asked the parents their fears instead of lecturing to them from on high.
A middle school I worked in (7-8) routinely never got further than the Vietnam War in the second year of its U.S. history focused social studies curriculum. Between a study of U.S. Constitution and WWII, with an emphasis on the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, it was always a rush to the finish to look beyond the Vietnam era. There is just too much “good stuff” to teach! Balancing creating a historical and literary background against the living history of more recent events is a really difficult task. K-12 education has to provide a solid base for people to go off and live the rest of their lives whether they go on to higher education or not. Perhaps the critical piece is to instill in students the ability and the desire to continue to learn and grow both for their own and society’s benefit no matter where life takes them. How we do that is the real challenge.
Texastitleoneteacher: Completely agree with everything you wrote in the last reply.