Complaint prompts school to kill a 'Mockingbird'. ⇒
12 August 2009, mid-morning
How do you ban To Killing a Mockingbird for being racist? How much do you want to be the person who did the complaining has never actually read the book. Also, it sounds like the Dufferin-Peel school board is worth avoiding.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
Perhaps in Dufferin-Peel, anything with black people in it is racist.
Anyone who has ever read the book could never deem it racist.
by radmila on August 12 2009, 10:50 am #
In a recent New Yorker essay Malcolm Gladwell argued that the view of race relations glorified in the book just made racism more palatable without actually taking on Jim Crow itself. He also shows how the book highlights and promotes the brutal classism and sexism that existed within the southern white community at the time.
So I think that it is possible to argue that it shouldn’t be taught to young kids (at least not without a real critique). Also, I wonder if it would be really annoying to be a black student in Dufferin-Peel and have all books on the curriculum that include black characters be about noble, crusading white people coming to their defence. I wonder what they are planning on replacing Mockingbird with?
by m on August 12 2009, 12:54 pm #
I think that it might be an important jumping point to discuss the times that it was written in.
It’s the constant effort to erase any negative stereotypes in literature taught to students that robs them of the opportunity to learn and discuss history.
It would be more palatable to say that perhaps it’s time to update the books they are using rather than to dismiss the book as racist.
by radmila on August 12 2009, 8:22 pm #
That Gladwell essay is really making the rounds. It was on MetaFilter a few days back too. They were less than impressed. (“Malcolm Gladwell is spectacularly full of shit.”) I think it’d be pretty cool if the complaints stemmed from that essay though.
They should make kids read James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Till then, Harper Lee’s book is pretty damn good.
by ramanan on August 12 2009, 9:28 pm #
Malcolm Gladwell makes a great living off of it, Ram!
I agree that he’s spectacularly full of shit.
Good choices of writers for students.
Thumbs up!
by radmila on August 12 2009, 10:07 pm #
Yeah, Gladwell needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Maybe several.
It would be great if kids were forced to read Baldwin and Wright. And Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. And A Raisin in the Sun. Then all the black kids could turn to the white kids and say “What the hell is wrong with you people?!” Ha.
I wonder if the parent who requested that To Kill a Mockingbird be removed from the curriculum didn’t find it racist exactly, but wanted to shield their (black?) children from exposure to certain ugly words and attitudes until they were older.
Dont parents and grandparents who have lived through pretty brutal racism sometimes go to great lengths to protect their children from internalizing any sense of racial inferiority? I suggest a steady diet of Shaft movies and Black Panther comics as a Harper Lee replacement.
by m on August 13 2009, 12:07 am #