In To Kill a Mockingbird, when a racist jury threatens to condemn a black man for a crime he didn’t commit, defense attorney Atticus Finch valiantly tries the case he’s supposed to throw, insisting upon the purity of an obviously flawed American justice system. The responsibility felt even more urgent at the beginning of the 2017 school year when unrest over a Confederate monument saw a self-professed neo-Nazi kill a counterprotester in Charlottesville, Virginia. From experience, I knew a classic (and mandated) text like To Kill a Mockingbird could make discussions less immediately confrontational.
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After the Darren incident, the school convened student panels and hired consultants to lead professional development lessons, but I figured that my approach to teaching could help heal my school too. Brown students walk to the bus station after school as white classmates steer newish cars out of the lot. But most knew racism had always been there-in the isolation of newcomer immigrant students, in the white students’ domination of student government and Homecoming courts. Some faculty fretted over Darren’s diminished college prospects while others wondered how bigotry could bubble over in enlightened Marin. His friends considered a retaliatory walkout. After serving a suspension, Darren left school to avoid tension with classmates and teachers. Via slur-riddled Snapchat posts, the owner of the car, let’s call him Darren, threatened to deliver a beatdown. Months later, a Latino student accidentally grazed one of their cars in the school parking lot. Three boys whooped in a jeep booming the late, racist country singer Johnny Rebel. Both white and Latinx students marched out of class in protest of the election results, but a contingent of white counterprotesters wore familiar red hats and swaggered among them. Yet my public high school’s student body is 65 percent Latinx, and in the days after the 2016 presidential election, a handful of these students reported heckling by town residents as they walked to school. Tam views, elk reserves, and George Lucas.
I teach very few black students in Marin County, a punchline for moneyed liberal dippiness, home of hot tubs with Mt. A book exemplifying our ailments may be a better starting point than one that claims to have transcended them. With To Kill a Mockingbird, I can help students, like Scout Finch, lose some innocence (and ignorance) about their country. Still, To Kill a Mockingbird lets students assail a book’s long-proclaimed importance, which is common in college, but less so in high school, where literature is usually presented as something to “get” more than attack. I agree with much of the contemporary criticism I’ve read (although not complaints that the book is too audacious in its message or raw in its language). The problem isn’t To Kill a Mockingbird as much as how teachers have learned to teach the novel-the way our teachers taught us when we were in high school, which reveals more about our past and present relationship with race than the book itself. Even before the 2015 publication of a controversial sequel, Go Set a Watchman, and a more recent legal battle over Aaron Sorkin’s newly opened Broadway adaptation, writers have scrutinized Atticus Finch’s flaws, some suggesting that the novel be excised from high school curricula. As a chronicle of our country’s racism, To Kill a Mockingbird is quaint, ill-equipped to deflect turds flung by an evolved state of bigotry.
The teenagers of today, in my experience, chortle (and bristle) at racist memes on Instagram, explore trollish sectors of Reddit, and absorb frequent police shootings of unarmed black men. In the 2012 documentary Hey Boo, Oprah Winfrey calls it “our national novel.” Written by a white woman, To Kill a Mockingbird was published at the dawn of a civil rights movement distant to high school students accustomed to dutiful but shallow observations of Black History Month. In ninth-grade English classes around the country, To Kill a Mockingbird is supposed to deliver a reckoning with American racism. We’re tasked with teaching a book that doesn’t live up to its longstanding responsibility. Most of us have to teach the novel every year, and our irreverence springs from discomfort. Just, you know, take a walk in her shoes, dude, I might sneer, interrupting a teacher’s account of an encounter with a difficult student’s unpleasant parent. A literary roast punctuated by sarcastic regurgitations of Atticus Finch’s sanctimonious advice. My English department colleagues and I can spend a whole lunch break making fun of To Kill a Mockingbird.