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WA schools became a battleground over books [1]
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Date: 2023-08
Mockingbird has remained one of the most controversial titles in classrooms since it came out in 1961, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was also adapted into an acclaimed movie starring Gregory Peck, and has been produced for the stage multiple times. In 2018, a national survey touted it as America’s #1 best-loved novel, but it is also one of the most challenged in schools.
Educators who criticize Mockingbird say that in the 60 years since it was published, other novels centering the experiences and viewpoints of Black people in depicting the Jim Crow South have become available for teachers and students — instead of one that focuses on the experience of a white child learning to recognize racism.
Mockingbird is about the coming of age of 6-year-old Scout Finch, who as an adult looks back on how her neighbors and fellow townsfolk react to her father’s defense in court of a Black man accused of rape in a small Southern town in the 1930s.
The book, published amid the Civil Rights movement, astutely paints a portrait of the systemic racism and other bigotry embedded in the fictional town – but does so solely through the eyes of a very young girl who doesn’t yet possess the language to name and criticize it. Scout also idolizes her father Atticus in a way that some critics say romanticizes personal responsibility in a racist world instead of addressing systemic racism. Lee’s narrative also frames the perspectives and experiences of the characters who are facing the town’s prejudices, including the accused man Tom Robinson, primarily through Scout’s eyes.
Geoffrey Glover, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who specializes in African American literature and 20th-century American prose, told Crosscut earlier this year that Mockingbird is worth teaching as a way to introduce those exact criticisms and questions into the classroom, and suggested pairing Lee’s novel with novels by Black authors such as Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, Angie Thomas and Walter Dean Myers.
“I do think that approaching the novel through its weaknesses is perhaps one of the most American things you can do when you're talking about a novel that deals with race,” Glover said. “Because I mean, in many ways, the complexities of the racial landscape in the United States are there because we haven't succeeded in dealing with these issues yet.”
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[1] Url:
https://crosscut.com/news/2022/12/wa-schools-became-battleground-over-books?r=repub
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