Removing To Kill A Mockingbird. I already hear the gnashing of teeth, rending of cloth and screams of Political Correctness run amok. However, as the last of baby boomers, I assure you I have no issue with the language or subject matter of To Kill A Mockingbird. It is a product of its time and yet at nearly sixty years old, holds up quite well; as do I. However the world is no longer the place it was, and perhaps it’s time our students are exposed to content which is forward-facing, as opposed to being rooted in the past.
The concern that I have with TKAM is the same I have with most content created to teach a lesson about injustice, particularly injustice aimed towards people of color; the people of color are little more than props, props used for the White audience to find their reflections in. More often than not, the person of color is portrayed as a victim whose only hope rests in the hands of the White hero. Of course, there is no denying that in 1960, the novel was ahead of its time in its depiction of racism and injustice, which was refreshingly uncomfortable.
However in 2018 and beyond, the fatal flaw with To Kill A Mockingbird and others like it, is that society moves forward. As the arc of time bends slowly towards justice albeit slowly, the value of TKAM as an educational tool is reduced. It may be time to stop using books in which people of color are used merely to reflect the humanity or inhumanity of the White people who inhabit the story. In fact, in a time where Black people can and do tell their own stories, I would suggest we start incorporating such stories into lesson plans.
To Kill a Mockingbird and other examples of this type of storytelling are of course, problematic these days as Black people no longer need White people to translate the injustice of racism in a way that other White people can consume it. One of the benefits of a more integrated and empathic society is that it is now easier than ever to recognize injustice, even if it’s not directed at our group. Of course TKAM being a product of its time, its narrative technique is perfectly understandable. The country was incredibly racist and stories depicting Black people particularly in positions of self-determination or on an equal footing as the majority, wouldn’t sell many books. The truth is in many instances, during that period many in society were unable and unwilling to develop the empathy required to place themselves in the shoes of a Black man; so they needed a translator.
In TKAM it was Scout, who as the narrator guides us through the various issues of class, gender, religion, and race of the 1930s Jim Crow south. Through her narration we are exposed to the complexity of the town, its violence, hypocrisy, and whose childhood innocence is stripped away, leaving a more mature and realistic aspect of how the world is.
Generational Shift
However, that world was sixty years ago, are we still as a nation at the point in which we need the injustice facing people of color to be translated by a six-year-old white child, for this generation of students to understand the unfairness in the world? In a majority-minority classroom, where students of color are constantly being bombarded with incidents that remind them of their otherness and vulnerability in the world, is TKAM the best we can offer them to help them better cope with the reality of their lives? The overall themes in TKAM aren’t fiction to many of the families in a majority-minority school. Many of them aren’t being exposed to racial injustice for the first time, needing it to be translated via the experiences of Scout, Atticus, and of course good ol’ Jim.
A big part of addressing the cultural mismatch in education is developing empathy for your students. Students from populations who before your first day of class, you may have no experience or interactions with. In TKAM Atticus famously said, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
The truth is most educators will never be able to climb into the skin of their minority students. However you can consider their point of view, so ask yourself, if you were them, do you think you would need to read a book about racism, unfairness, or injustice, written from the perspective of a six-year-old White girl, set in the 1930s? Are we to think they need lessons from Scout or Atticus on fighting against the odds, when they may have experienced first hand the power of the state? In the age of the New Jim Crow, of Black Lives Matter, and the rise of the Alt-Right, do students of color need a fictionalized history lesson on race and injustice from the 1960s when they can turn the TV or watch their twitter feed?
To Kill A Mockingbird is absolutely a classic piece of literature, its themes still resonate and have value; however like all literature, its value isn’t timeless. Society changes and generational shifts must be recognized and responded to. This current generation of students deserves better than to be exposed to an outdated method of developing empathy for the experiences of minorities. This is particularly true in a piece of literature that portrays the people who receive the brunt of society’s weight, as disposable, their only value is to push the narrative and allow the White characters opportunities to develop and grow into three-dimensional representations.
One of the mantras of those supporting TKAM in school is that people should feel uncomfortable because being uncomfortable is part of the human experience and that is how we learn. There is, of course, some truth to that, but the question is, who is feeling uncomfortable and how much longer should they be made to feel uncomfortable?
If it’s the White students who need to be uncomfortable, should a book written a couple of generations before they were born, make them feel uncomfortable? Without a sense of context, would the themes even resonant with them? Due to demographics and geography, it’s not like they are going to run into any people of color anytime soon. Moreover, due to a more diverse and connected society, there’s little need for a translator like Scout anymore. On the other hand, in a majority-minority school, how much more uncomfortable do the students of color need to feel? How much more injustice do they need to learn about or empathize with? What new lessons will TKAM provide them when they can go home and most likely ask a relative how it felt to be treated as a second-class citizen or watch the latest video of some Black person having the police called on them for the crime of being Black in a ‘White’ space? So, in regard to comfort, don’t we think they have been made to feel uncomfortable long enough?
What lessons do you think TKAM still has to share, particularly with students of color. Let us know in the comments below. If we remove To Kill A Mockingbird are there any other books to replace it? Here are a couple to consider:
Thomas, Angie. The Hate U Give. HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray. ISBN 9780062498533.
Reynolds, Jason and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. S. & S./Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy. ISBN 9781481463331.