Monday
A month or so ago the Washington Post had an article on books that schools are banning—or should I say, canceling? (I list the books at the end of this post.) All but one of the attacks are from the right and the reasons will surprise no one. To Kill a Mockingbird is the one exception in that it has been attacked by liberal parents, and that imbalance is reason enough why liberals should back off.
After all, if you ban To Kill a Mockingbird for its politics, how are you going to keep conservatives from using that same rationale to ban The Bluest Eye and Beloved and Song of Solomon and The Color Purple and Native Son and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Hate U Give and The New Kid and Black Boy and Go Tell It on the Mountain.
I’ve written several times about my own reservations with regard to To Kill a Mockingbird (for instance, here) so I won’t do more than mention some of the concerns here—how it feeds into the White savior myth, how it gives us only saintly Black figures, how it papers over the White terrorist violence that underpinned segregation. Harper Lee’s sequel Go Set a Watchman is more honest in these areas, showing how the White establishment is benign only so long as it is unchallenged. In Watchman, Atticus Finch is so upset by the Civil Rights movement than he has joined the White Citizens Council, which is basically an upscale KKK: it doesn’t engage in outright violence like the KKK but it relies on that organization to do the dirty work of voter suppression. As a result, a disgusted Calpurnia has stopped working for him.
But it’s because such conversations can grow out of To Kill a Mockingbird that I think teachers should continue to teach it—although only if it is taught along with these other works that I mention. In fact, I believe that, by looking at Lee’s two novels, one can understand a lot about what has happened to the GOP in the years since the Civil Rights movement.
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch looks saintly in part because he has an ideal defendant. Not only is Tom Robinson innocent but the book goes out of the way to note that he doesn’t, in fact, sexually desire Mayella Ewell (which would have clouded the picture for 1961 White audiences). Robinson is, to borrow a phrase from D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a “faithful soul.” The good Blacks, in that racist movie, are those who know their place while the villains are the freed slaves who want what the Whites have.
To shift registers for a moment, I think of what Jed Leland says to the entitled Charles Foster Kane about the working class on the eve of their breakup. Kane, like Finch, thinks of himself as a defender of the downtrodden, but only to a point:
You talk about the people as though you owned them, as though they belong to you. Goodness. As long as I can remember, you’ve talked about giving the people their rights, as if you can make them a present of Liberty, as a reward for services rendered…Remember the working man?… You used to write an awful lot about the workingman…He’s turning into something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your workingman expects something is his right, not as your gift! Charlie, when your precious underprivileged really get together, oh boy! That’s going to add up to something bigger than your privileges! Then I don’t know what you’ll do! Sail away to a desert island probably and lord it over the monkeys!
Substitute “people of color” for “working man” and you have what has happened to the GOP establishment. I’ve seen the shift up close because I have GOP cousins. At one time they labeled themselves “Percy Republicans,” taking the designation from the moderate Illinois Republican senator Charles Percy. They saw themselves as faithful stewards of society (and they were), and some even voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election. If Obama managed to get their vote, it was in part because he maintained a delicate balance, appearing Black but not too Black.
He lost them, however, when (1) he voiced his anger at the Cambridge, Massachusetts police for arresting Henry Louis Gates in his home (they thought he was an intruder); and (2) he observed, after Trayvon Martin was killed by a vigilante, that, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” While this endeared him to many in the Black community, who had had their suspicions about their mixed-race president, it signaled to my GOP cousins that he had thrown in his lot with the other community.
This means, however, that, like Finch, they began allying with the Bob Ewells of the world—or to get specific, with Donald Trump, whose ridiculous “born in Kenya” charge was an emotional appeal designed to delegitimize a Black president. Trump prevailed and now it’s Bob Ewell running the GOP, not Atticus Finch. To win elections, Republican politicians believe they have to attack teachers who teach novels that allude to America’s race issues and propagate fears of White replacement.
And because of that fear, they also refuse to condemn the proliferation of guns, at least when guns are mostly in the hands of rightwingers. (The country’s last meaningful gun regulations occurred when the Black Panthers were arming up.) As political scientist John Stoehr explains it,
After Obama’s reelection, Republican governors and legislators began loosening previous firearms restrictions, allowing guns in churches, parks and other public spaces. The liberal reaction was befuddlement. After the bloodbath at Sandy Hook, what they were doing was insane!
Not to the rightwingers, though. After all, the sociopolitical orders of power that had once put them on top had been turned upside down. The oppressors had become the oppressed under this rule by a Black man. Expanding the range of guns was a way out of that predicament.
To restore the natural order – the rule of white power – they first needed to bring down the current one, to knock out its foundation.
As former Bush speechwriter turned NeverTrumper David Frum has observed, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” Stoehr links the dots by showing how the chaos caused by gun violence serves that cause:
[M]ass death works in the rightwingers’ favor whether it comes from bullets or a virus. When an electorate is scared enough, it will stop turning to democracy to solve problems. It will turn to the party that promises to restore “law and order,” that is, rule by white power.
Interestingly, in To Kill a Mockingbird there’s a mention of guns in the passage that gives the novel its title. Scout reports,
When he gave us our air-rifles Atticus wouldn’t teach us to shoot. Uncle Jack instructed us in the rudiments thereof; he said Atticus wasn’t interested in guns. Atticus said to Jem one day, “I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Or to apply the title to the book’s themes, it’s a sin to kill a deserving Black.
As long as Atticus’s class is firmly in power, he doesn’t need to resort to violence. Once white entitlement is threatened, however, he joins the White Citizens Council, and one wonders if he will turn a blind eye if guns take out people he thinks of as blue jays. After all, once previously he turned a blind eye to vigilante justice in service of a good cause—which is to say, Boo Radley killing Ewell to save Scout and Jeb.
Perhaps I’m underestimating Atticus. Perhaps, rather than tolerating white supremacists in his party, he will become a NeverTrumper. To do so, however, he would need to rethink his White identity in a foundational way. In any event, I want teachers teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to address the issues—although, as I say, such a program will only work if they teach it along with Go Set a Watchman, Bluest Eye, Beloved, Stamped and other novels targeted by rightwingers.
Other banned novels mentioned in the Post article: Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, Jerry Craft’s New Kid, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Nicole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, Ashley Hope Perez’ Out of Darkness, Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley’s It’s Perfectly Normal.