School district pulls 'To Kill A Mockingbird' from reading list; 'makes people uncomfortable' I'm curious what other books teach that lesson. And I've read the book and watched the movie. There isn't anything wrong with that story except that it probably hits too close to home for residents who identify with the racists.
The premise that black people deserve empathy and compassion is triggering for the right wing snowflakes. In this case I think it is something we need to put in their face until they figure things out, or die.
It is supposed to make people feel uncomfortable. Rather than running and hiding from every uncomfortable thing they should try manning up and facing it for a change? Just a thought.
Yeah, the @Dinner plan, just drink and enjoy your racism and stop feeling guilty about it. Remember you always hated brown people anyway.
That's a first for a school outta Mississippi But honestly, what language? I only read the book once for class, but I can't think of anything that would offend people on word choice (unless Boo Radley was called retarded, which people under 30 consider to be a slur up there with the n word).
The original article says the story is the result of an anonymous tip, and the tip claims people were offended by the use of the n word, but there's nothing else in the article to substantiate that claim. If Mockingbird came out today, I'm 99% sure it'd be white southerners complaining, outraged at being stereotyped.
It is clearly an attempt to hide bigotry behind PC culture. The book is clearly a product of it's time, and if a black student is offended by the language they should be. The use of the language for the time is offensive now, and it should be a moment where school teaches we should have moved beyond these terms and recognize they are terrible terms. It should be taught that when Donald Trump says lets go back to the good old days of racism this is one of the reasons those days were not the good old days, and we need to keep on fighting against the racist culture of america. White people should find the use of those words shameful and our teachers should be there showing this is a stumbling point we still have orange skin color on our face from. We need to learn how to address certain things in an adult matter, and censorship does not work for many subjects with children. The only thing censorship does with children is to put a word into an area of taboo which then makes saying the word a form of rebellion against parents and society. Another part of our problem is we put the wrong direction on why certain words cannot be said. When parents and teachers blame black people for not being able to say nigger then white kids think it is reverse oppression. Then they want to say it and blame black people for the consequences of them saying it. Really, we have to teach that manners and respect are important and the use of that word as a white person has a context which is inappropriate that you cannot change. Blame the white people who used it as a slur for the problem and not those who were the victims of it. Put it the right way, that racist white people made that word to harm black people and when you use it as a white person that meaning comes across and hurts black people. You are the asshole hurting people when you use it, not the black people for being hurt.
Not unusual for the time. Q.v. Emmett Till. A quick Google search indicates that school board V.P. Kenny Holloway is whiter than white. I can't help wondering about the ethnic makeup of the people who complained. I'm guessing it was one of those "That was the past. We don't do those things anymore" situations. Not saying prejudice doesn't go both ways. Butterfly McQueen was hounded for the rest of her life by segments of the Black community for her portrayal of Prissy in Gone with the Wind. The argument was "Black people don't talk like that." Um, actually, Black people in the 20th century talk lots of different ways. But a child born into slavery, illiterate, never been off the plantation until the Yankees burned Atlanta, would have talked that way. (So did many of the white overseers, descendants of indentured servants who spoke Cockney English - close your eyes and listen to that sometime). There are audio tapes of the last of the former slaves to verify it. I hate Gone with the Wind. It presents a South that never was, except for a very small elite. But Ms. McQueen spoke the way she knew slaves of that era would have spoken. It's interesting that nobody raised an eyebrow when Hattie McDaniel ("Hol' on an' suck in!") got her Oscar, but Prissy got trampled in the Hollywood onrush of "Oh, look, we nominated a colored person!"
At least black people can get a role in hollywood. I am getting tired of seeing scarlett johansson playing in those Rush hour movies. They really need to have some asian actors.
Oh, I agree. It wasn't unusual for the time, but neither was throwing around the N-word without consequence. But looking back through the lens of nowadays, <Cough>Me too</Cough> I can see how the old "She lied about being raped" trope could be seen as an example of a toxic masculinity...maybe even as bad as the N-word being an example of racism and slavery.
I thought the book made it quite clear that this was a Very Bad Thing, and clearly showed that her abusive father did it and probably pressured her into accusing that man. But I can see your point. I think we can acknowledge the fact that most people aren't lying about this and that at one point in time, one very specific group of women did do this for white supremacy reasons. One has nothing to do with the other, or the fact that the overall conviction rate for rape today is 3 in every 1000. Even a black man with the worst laywer in the world has great odds of getting off scot free. Too often (but somewhat understandably), we're quick to tear down down our own for things that were very likely out of their control. Butterfly McQueen could have spoken in BBC English in her real life but no one in Hollywood at that time was going to.allow a black slave to speak any other way but the way she did not. Hattie MacDonald didn't escape the pressure, either. People chided her for always playing servents, but that's all Hollywood would cast her for. As she once put it, "I can make $7 a week being a maid, or make $7000 a week playing one." In the whole discussion around this movie and the stereotyping, it's gotten lost that black people playing black roles was actually a very recent thing in 1939, as was MacDonald's character being allowed to raise her voice to a white character on screen. Hell, I think she actually smacked the stupid bitch for doing stupid bitch things! And that too, was accurate for the time period. As much as I hate the film (90 percent of that for Scarlet O'Hara, after whom I assume Brooke Logan from The Bold and the Beautiful was modeled after in her dogged persuit of one worthless ass man), knowing the history it took to even have black women play Mammy and Prissy, I view it as a huge step. There's a really good video detailing the history of depiction of black women in particular. It's a review of one of the first large pieces of queer media from a black woman, but it does a great overview of this history in general: The history part starts at the 9 minute mark and the discussion on the mammy stereotype around the 14:30 point.
If I've interpreted his post correctly I agree with @Dinner here. The book is indeed supposed to challenge our preconceptions and remains as relevant today as the day it was written. Ignoring the ideas and the human traits portrayed in TKaM is the very core of societal racism, accepting the worst in ourselves by failing to acknowledging its' existence. People have objected to rap music, punk, folk music before it for much the same reasons, that they are uncomfortable with the ideas being expressed but make the language, the aggression, the anger, the sexuality, the issue rather than looking at what underlies those things. Art, true art, doesn't come about in a vacuum, it speaks for the people, the times and the places in which it was born and makes us ask questions of ourselves. Those questions are frequently uncomfortable, that's the point and for once Dinner and I are on the same page. You aren't supposed to read TKaM and simply enjoy it, it isn't supposed to be a light read or one which can be watered down. It's supposed to bite the reader on the ass and in their unnoticed ignorance. The people in Alabama who have opted to ban this book are, I posit, not really uncomfortable with the language, but with the fact that the place that language comes from is, well, us.
@Shirogayne : Definitely on my "when you get out from under today's mountain of paperwork, I will watch this" list.
There was a lot of social pressure on white women to go along with false rape accusations. This wasn't something they came up with on their own. They certainly weren't raging man-hating feminazis. All of America at that time, but especially the South, was rigidly patriarchal. Some women might have been expected to claim rape to preserve their reputations. There's really no basis for comparing an accusation made under that climate with one today.
And yet the human beings whose thought processes and prejudices made that bias possible were in no way different to the ones we see around us today. Those people who supported segregation, who joined in the lynchings, they were you and I. They were what any of us could have become under the wrong circumstances. That's the uncomfortable truth I'm talking about, the fact that our progressive attitudes and our willingness to embrace diversity don't mark us out as superior to our predecessors, they've come about because of the work and sacrifices of generations of people of all colours challenging those attitudes bit by bit until they (we thought) had become all but obsolete. We're seeing a backtrack in society, we're seeing a not so subtle shift towards the mentality that back men are inherently violent, are rapists by virtue of some inherent weakness of character. If you doubt this feel free to do even the most cursory scouting about as to conviction rates and the attitudes in certain fairly sizeable quarters towards the dangers allegedly posed by the back community as essentially being at base level more prone to criminality. If that is not challenged, if that is allowed to go unquestioned, we are all but inviting ignorance into the world we have created and TKaM is a powerful example of the tools at our disposal for promoting people asking those questions of themselves at an early age, especially the ones whose intelligence makes them more amenable to learn from the written word.
Funny thing is, I envision kids wanting to read this book more now that it is pulled from the shelves. I mean I am hoping.
The good thing is they will have access to them, it just wont be presented to them in their development.
Lady Chatterley's Lover was my generation's forbidden book. Naturally we all haunted secondhand bookstores to find a copy and it turned out to be...no big deal. Funnily enough, it was required reading for a college lit course. Go figure.
