Now that you mention it, yeah.

[firecat]

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird was published 50 years ago yesterday. This blog post by macon d points out some of the ways that To Kill a Mockingbird is racist. A comment by sanguinity suggests a couple of alternatives.

http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/2010/07/warmly-embrace-racist-novel-to-kill.html

The comments on that post, as of right now, are mostly thoughtful.

Comments

[firecat]

I agree.

As for the harshness -- it is indeed an ahistorical view, but part of the point was that some people who read the book are very upset by it. Is it right to force children to read a work that upsets them because the work includes language that attacks who they are? I don't think it's right. I liked the solution one commenter mentioned, that the book was taught but students could opt out of reading that particular book.

[flarenut]

"Is it right to force children to read a work that upsets them because the work includes language that attacks who they are?"

I'm not sure that captures things exactly -- that statement needs, I think, not to be colorblind or genderblind or blind to all the other possibilities for privilege vs oppression. Otherwise you get all kinds of false symmetry.

On the general question, I think this is also a place for nonuniversal curriculums. As with amethystfirefly, the environment where I read the book was one where "racism is really bad" was already a pretty controversial statement. I know incrementalism is sometimes worse than the ills it claims to fight, and yet. (I had a really eloquent part here about moses syndrome, which is the tendency for most people who break out of old systems to fully enter into the new system they're trying to enable, but it probably doesn't go here.)

[firecat]

that statement needs, I think, not to be colorblind or genderblind or blind to all the other possibilities for privilege vs oppression.

I'm not sure I follow this.

nonuniversal curriculums

Seems reasonable.

[flarenut]

What I meant is that being attacked for who you are is (imo) not such a bad thing for members of privileged groups to experience. And that privileged assholes or their parents can feel attacked for who they are by pretty much any decent book ever printed. So you need, somehow, to take that into account.

[firecat]

Oh! Yes. Very good point.