Nearly six decades after it was published, the book To Kill a Mockingbird remains a classic. While it has always provoked controversy, it has also been a wonderful tool for fostering dialogue, education and awareness among young people about racism and white supremacy in the United States. Thus, it is somewhat telling and most certainly ironic that so many school systems continue to ban the book because of the language used in it—the most recent being the public school system of Biloxi, Mississippi.
The public school district in Biloxi, Miss., did not specify which words, exactly, in “To Kill a Mockingbird” are so objectionable that the book was yanked from an eighth-grade reading list last week, 57 years after it published.
“There is some language in the book that makes people uncomfortable,” school board vice president Kenny Holloway vaguely told the Sun Herald.
Presumably, the language Holloway refers to is the n-word, which appears more than 50 times throughout the book. In 2017, that word may feel jarring to read but it is not without context. It is certainly a word that would have been commonplace at the time and illustrates the dehumanization and humiliation that is experienced by black people at the hands of racists. With the deep history of racism and inequality that still exists to this day in Mississippi, it is most definitely language that would have been used locally. Reading it in a book is not worse than the actual racism or consequences of racism that black people and people of color endure on a daily basis.
The novel won its author a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and “made the values of the civil rights movement — particularly a feeling for the god-awful unfairness of segregation — real for millions,” as Michael Gerson once wrote for The Washington Post. [...]
Garvey Jackson, 13, sat at his desk in Hillsborough, N.C., one day in 2004 and listened to his classmates read “Mockingbird” aloud. N-word after n-word.
“To put it simple, I felt uncomfortable,” Garvey told the Chapel Hill Herald. His mom did, too.
So the boy made a shirt covered in words from the book — the n-word and its many 1930s-era derivatives — and wore it to English class.
“If it’s good enough for the book, it’s good enough for the shirt,” Garvey told his teacher. He was promptly sent to the principal’s office, after which the boy declared that he wanted the book “out of the school system.”
For black students, reading this book can come with a whole range of emotions. It can feel uncomfortable to have to read this word repeatedly and know that people who look like you were subjected to such awful treatment. That discomfort is intensified by reading this book in a mixed race classroom. But the practice of banning books and ignoring realistic works of fiction that portray such a horrific time in our history is not the answer.
We’ve spent decades whitewashing history in classrooms and teaching society that it is impolite to talk about race and racism. And those decades of silence didn’t do anything to change hearts and minds or structures. Instead we were fooled into thinking we were post-racial, and that race didn’t matter at all. That kind of thinking lulled us into a complacency which prevented us from realizing that a racist and a bigot like Trump could actually be elected into the presidency. And now here we are, with an unapologetic racist who supports white supremacists as the head of our government.
“Race has long been a target for censorship in schools,” [James LaRue, of the American Library Association] said. “ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ has been challenged pretty much from the beginning — I think because it does such a deft job of capturing a moment in history.” [...]
“Silence doesn’t make us smarter,” LaRue said. “A classic is something that makes us uncomfortable because it talks about things that matter.”
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) might agree. “Our kids are tough enough to read a real book,” he chided after the Biloxi school district yanked “Mockingbird” last week.
It’s hard to admit agreeing with Ben Sasse and Republicans on anything but in this case, he’s right. If our children can watch all kinds of sex on television, listen to explicit lyrics in music and live through a Trump presidency, they are tough enough to read this book. There are Neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching in broad daylight in major cities across the country. Like it or not, this is language they are hearing and experiencing very publicly now. Racism and white supremacy are damaging and harmful and they have never gone away. Erasing this book and pretending the language and beliefs behind it don’t exist won’t help anyone’s children. Instead, we need to have them read this book and talk openly about the world they’ve inherited, how much it’s changed and how much it remains the same. That’s really the only way we’ll help young people develop into critical thinkers and thoughtful human beings.
Besides, if textbooks used in Texas classrooms can lie about the truth and call enslaved people “workers” and “immigrants,” that should offend us way more than language used in 1960 that is both historically accurate and in context. That kind of language, which was used so carefreely, should offend children—and anyone else reading it. And knowing how things were should be the impetus for parents, teachers and other members of the community to teach their children to be better than their predecessors.