Stuff White People Do: Warmly Embrace A Racist Novel

This part of Neary’s segment clarifies the second problem I have with how the novel comes across to so many American readers — its messages get read as “universal” — “To Kill a Mockingbird can teach anyone how to be a better person!” I suppose that’s a nice message, but when people claim that the novel’s messages can be embraced by anyone, the realities of white supremacist violence, past and present, fade from view.

Neary carries on about the book’s widespread appeal — which somehow circles right back to white people:

“The story of Scout’s initiation and maturing is the story of finding out who you are in the world,” says author Mary McDonagh Murphy. “And at the same time, the novel is about finding out who we are as a country.”

Murphy’s new book, Scout, Atticus & Boo, is based on interviews about To Kill a Mockingbird with well-known writers, journalists, historians and artists. Murphy says the novel, narrated from a child’s point of view, gave white people, especially in the South, a nonthreatening way to think about race differently.

Yes, “we” wouldn’t want white people, the principle enactors of racism, to feel at all “threatened” when we try to talk to them about racism. I guess if we did, they’d just up and run away!

Anyway, I could go on dissecting the saccharine nostalgia of this NPR piece (and I should add that, to Neary’s credit, she does get around to injecting some realism, especially by mentioning the horrific and iconic death of Emmett Till). But I’d rather turn to a more critical and insightful view, of both the novel and its effects on different readers.

In a 2003 academic article (published in Race and Class), Isaac Saney wrote about successful black efforts against Lee’s novel in Nova Scotia, efforts undertaken because it’s a racist novel. In 1996, “intense community pressure” by the African Nova Scotian population managed to remove the novel from the Department of Education’s list of recommended, authorized books; in 2002, a committee consisting of parents and educators, seconded by members of the Black Educators’ Association (BEA), recommended that the book “be removed from school use altogether.”

A report (by the African Canadian Division of the Nova Scotia Department of Education) “laid out the community’s concerns”:

In this novel, African-Canadian students are presented with language that portrays all the stereotypical generalizations that demean them as a people. While the White student and the White teacher many misconstrue it as language of an ealier era or the way it was, this language is still widely used today and the book serves as tool to reinforce its usage even further. . . .

The terminology in this novel subjects students to humiliating experiences that rob them of their self-respect and the respect of their peers. The word ‘Nigger’ is used 48 times. . . .

There are many available books which reflect the past history of African-Canadians or Americans without subjecting African-Canadian learners to this type of degradation. . . We believe that the English Language Arts curriculum in Nova Scotia must enable all students to feel comfortable with ideas, feelings and experiences presented without fear of humiliation … To Kill a Mockingbird is clearly a book that no longer meets these goals and therefore must no longer be used for classroom instruction.

So aside from the multiple usages of the n-word, what exactly is it about the book that provoked such a strong black revulsion? (And I do not mean to imply with this question, of course, that I think all black readers respond to the book in just one way.)

After reviewing common white distortions in the media of this collective African-Canadian complaint,* Saney goes on to offer three primary and compelling reasons of his own for knocking To Kill a Mockingbird from its lofty perch:

1. A common reading of its central symbol (mockingbird = black people) degrades black people.

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