In late December 2021, "To Kill a Mockingbird" won a New York Times contest for the best work of fiction published over the past 125 years. About a month later, a school board in Mukilteo, Washington voted to remove it from the required reading list for ninth graders,
Mukilteo, for those unfamiliar with it, is a coastal town north of Seattle next door to Everett, Washington, the site of one of Boeing's largest aircraft assembly plants,
Removing a book from a required reading list is not the same as banning it since individual teachers can still assign it, but it is nonetheless an interesting development and, appropriately, the Mukilteo decision has been widely reported.
According to a report by the Everett HeraldNet, a local news outlet, the book was dropped for several reasons including that it "celebrates white saviorhood," is guilty of "marginalizing characters of color" and it uses "the n-word almost 50 times."
This is a HUGE topic for anyone interested in fiction and and/or interested in whether, in the current, fraught sociopolitical climate, writers have to exercise self-censorship to avoid getting "cancelled" by the thought police. So what follows is, even more than usual, is meant to be provocative as opposed to dispositive.
First, of course, one has to ask why children are assigned to read works of fiction in school. Is this to familiarize themselves with writing as an art form, and in the process, learn how differing writers deal with differing subject matter in the course of practicing their art? Or is it an exercise in political correctness, which is to say school children should be assigned books deemed ideologically appropriate for young minds and therefore properly instructive in the prevailing sociopolitical context?
This is, of course, a moving target. Much Young Adult fiction is now celebrated for dealing with topics of sexual identity that would have been deemed highly inappropriate not that long ago. One could go on and on and especially with respect to themes of violence.
But back to "Mockingbird," a book about which I have had very mixed feelings after the controversial publication of "Go Set a Watchman," essentially the first draft of "Mockingbird," a few years ago. In a nutshell, a very talented editor known as Tay Hohoff worked with Harper Lee for a couple of years, an effort that significantly recast Lee's original conception and made the book vastly more sellable. One can argue the final product was as much a work of commerce as a work of art.
"I was a first-time writer so I did as I was told," Lee said in 1015 -- in the wake of the publication of "Watchman."
Most significantly, the chief character, Atticus Finch, depicted as a bigot in "Watchman," was turned into what the Mukilteo school board viewed as a representative of objectionable "white saviorhood" in "Mockingbird."
That's interesting on its face. Readers of "Mockingbird" surely know that Finch succeeds in saving no one. At best he is a "savior wannabe," but frankly, not even that. He just believes that in a society established under the rule of law, justice should be applied fairly and equally to everyone. But gosh, he has white skin and is a male -- apparently cis-gender as well -- and we now know that cis-gender white males are responsible for The Patriarchy, slavery, colonialism, a fundamentally racist American Constitution and a systematically racist society and so forth and so on. So out he has to go.
But wait a minute: "Mockingbird" was written about a different era when such notions were not in vogue. It's a story about how a particular family, and a particular community, reacted to a certain situation during a certain period of time. Is that so difficult to understand? Can't a high school child, with a teacher's help, evaluate it in that context? Or does this instead have to be taught as a now all-too-transparent attempt by Lee and her editor to make white America look better than it actually has been -- and to make whites feel better about themselves than they "should."
Then there is the charge that black characters were "marginalized" and that the "n-word" was used -- at all, or too often? Well, one of the three main characters in "Mockingbird" is black his role in central as opposed to marginal. But, too be fair, he is given more to say in the current Broadway play version of the story than in the book itself, perhaps reflecting such concerns. Interestingly, the Finch family's black maid, Calpurnia, is given more to say in "Watchman" than in the edited version of Lee's story, which is to say "Mockingbird."
But Lee can fairly argue that Tom Robinson, the falsely accused black man Atticus Finch attempts to defend, and Calpurnia were accurately depicted as they would have been during the time period in question.
As for the "n-word," one hardly knows what to make of this when, walking down a crowded street in New York city, just ahead of a group of black males, one hears the taboo "n-word" in just about every sentence.
