Too many White teachers, including me, fail to make Mockingbird resonate because we ignore the ways in which discussions about racial justice have changed since we ourselves were taught Mockingbird. And as Kirkland attests, we are damaging too many students of color in the process—and have been for a long time. The book never worked for them at all. So how do we teach To Kill a Mockingbird today? The Facing History folks allowed me to report on the training on the condition that I actively participate.
And so I found myself in snowy Chicago, sitting in a bright conference room alongside some of the hardest-working people in America: a dozen or so middle and high school teachers.
The educators there were predominantly White women. One year classroom veteran estimated she had taught the book 20 to 25 times. This was a common refrain. Not my Atticus!
Teachers who want to prepare young people for texts like this need to be trained in leading healthy discussions about race and identity.
And I completely understood where those teachers were coming from. Gladwell, to his credit, did not respond. Someone suggested that Atticus can be both admirable in certain ways and reprehensible in others. One of our tasks during the workshop was to act out the chapter in which a lynch mob arrives with the intention of kidnapping and killing Tom Robinson. Its climax is the moment in which Scout accidentally and ahistorically turns the mob away. He is rendered a virtual footnote in this scene in which his life nearly ends, speaking only at the very end of the chapter to ask Atticus whether the mob has left.
We were to ask ourselves what problems with reliability this perspective causes. Scout is charming, sure. Her blind spots swallow whole worlds. While my eighth-grade self slowly lost my innocence alongside her, he was left to wonder what such innocence might have felt like in the first place.
So he approached it through a Black critical lens with his students. There is no value for Blackness. One way to counteract this phenomenon is to offer a balance of authors. Who gets to be three-dimensional? In each of them, Atticus Finch is not the wisest person on the stage. The final message is that most white people are nice when you get to know them.
As readers, we can all sleep easy in our beds because the father figure is watching over us. As readers we remain in a state of childlike innocence. 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.
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.
Racism is not a thing of the past that was solved back in the s by Atticus Finch. As he does so, he is shot 17 times in the back. Careful reading reveals Atticus to be racist, and racism, segregation, and a caste system are displayed throughout the story. In acknowledging this simple fact, there is recognition that systemic racism has been present in our society for far too long. In medicine, we have begun to discuss, study, and address disparities in health care outcomes.
Black women are 3 times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white women, the infant mortality rate among black infants is twice that for white infants, and black Americans are more likely to die from cancer and heart disease. We now know the underlying causes to be social determinants of health and systemic racism.
We have much work to do to undo the institutional racism woven into our society's fabric. Those of us fortunate enough not to have suffered the effects of our country's institutionalized racism must recognize and acknowledge how hard it is to grow up black in our society. Everyday reminders include being unfavorably singled out and treated differently, being pulled over while simply driving, being followed suspiciously simply upon entering a store, being subject to unfair hiring and promotion practices, and the everyday panic when a family member comes home late—worrying whether the delay is simply traffic or some awful racist act.
These are common occurrences for those who have evaded incarceration and murder because of their skin color. How far have we come since To Kill a Mockingbird? We want this to be true because it means we could be just as good—we would be just as good were we in his place. Some of the people who love Atticus would have voted to convict Tom Robinson. Just as Atticus cites the so-called ignorance of Black people as justification for holding them back from equality, some of the people who love Atticus turn to myths like Black-on-Black crime, welfare queens, and absent Black fathers to justify their racist thoughts and actions in the present day.
Wherever and whenever Black Americans strived for equality and equity, masses of white people opposed it and masses of their white friends let that opposition go unchallenged. Go Set a Watchman may seem easy to dismiss because it is a bad book in many ways. It helps that it was published under shady circumstances, that Harper Lee most likely never intended it to see publication in its present form, or at all.
When thousands of American parents named their babies Atticus, they were naming them for the myth—the hero Atticus, the Atticus who would stand up to anyone and everyone. We can read Atticus then as a hopeful name, a name that says white people want to do better and be better, even though we have often failed. One day, all those little Atticuses are going to grow up.
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Personalize your subscription preferences here. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work. Activist and organizer Anjali Enjeti writes about developing and claiming her identity as a mixed-race woman in the Deep South.
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