Washington school board removes ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ from curriculum due to racial sensitivity

[Kamaji]

Washington school board removes ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ from curriculum due to racial sensitivity

By Jesse O’Neill
January 25, 2022

A school board outside Seattle voted to stop requiring students to read an iconic novel about racism and injustice in the Jim Crow-era Deep South.

The Mukilteo School Board approved a resolution to remove “To Kill a Mockingbird” from its ninth-grade curriculum after complaints that it was racially insensitive, according to Fox News.

The move reportedly had the support of the district’s superintendent.

The 1960 Harper Lee novel about a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman would still be found in the school library, and teachers could still assign the fiction classic if they chose, according to the article.

Parents, students and teachers overwhelmingly spoke out against requiring students to read the book at a board meeting Monday night, the outlet said.

*  *  *

Source:  https://nypost.com/2022/01/25/seattle-school-removes-to-kill-a-mockingbird-from-curriculum/

[Kamaji]

Whose racial sensitivities?

The only racial sensitivities being gored by To Kill a Mockingbird are the sensitivities of racists.

So, whom is the board protecting, other than racists and racism?

[mystery-ak]

OMG one of my fav books...have they even read it!

[mountaineer]

The last days of Harper Lee
Posted on April 20, 2021
 by Jonathon Van Maren   

“I think one could argue that To Kill a Mockingbird did for twentieth-century race relations, or at any rate for white attitudes toward blacks, what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for white attitudes about slavery in the antebellum nineteenth century,” historian Wilfried McClay wrote fifteen years ago in First Things. “And yet it is rarely examined as a work of serious literature, not to mention one whose convicting force changed the moral life of the nation. And the book’s influence is probably not anywhere near being over. At least, one can hope not.”

That was then, and this is now. Despite being one of the greatest works of American literature, written by a woman from Alabama just as the civil rights movement was forcing an ugly and often bloody reckoning with America’s cruel race policies, the iconoclasts have set their sights on Nelle Harper Lee’s monumental novel. This month, a teacher in British Columbia was suspended for showing the film; a high-brow school in Los Angeles cancelled To Kill a Mockingbird as part of their “anti-racism” initiative; the American Library Association reported a few weeks ago that the novel was one of the most “objected to” of 2020. And that’s just this year.

Cancel culture has become the norm over the past half-decade, and Harper Lee—who died in 2016 in Monroeville, Alabama at the age of 89—lived to see it, although she said nothing publicly about it. She must have marveled at our profoundly stupid political moment. One can at least understand—although I disagree—with decisions to pull some novels by great American novelists such as Mark Twain for the racial attitudes in books like Huckleberry Finn, although Twain’s attitudes, too, were complicated and are not easy to categorize. Or at least, they weren’t.

Despite the publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015, which is an earlier version of To Kill a Mockingbird rather than a new novel, Lee’s 1960 masterpiece must stand on its own as her response to the critics.  ...

“To revisit [To Kill a Mockingbird] again is to reach back and experience the dawning of a sense of interracial good will and hopefulness and possibility that, at times, seems very remote today, even with all that we have achieved as a society in the intervening years,” Wilfrid McClay wrote. “[T]he moral world of Mockingbird may seem hopelessly innocent and idealistic, in just the way that Harper Lee’s admirable reticence may seem impossibly ascetic and futile in a publicity-saturated time. Mockingbird could not envision the immense harm that has been wrought in the years since by the cynical exploitation of race as an issue–not least, the damage done to precisely the willingness of the heart that Mockingbird helped bring about.”

But perhaps by making Harper Lee’s masterpiece mandatory rather than cancelling it, she can once again achieve in the hearts of the upcoming generation what she achieved in the hearts of their grandparents. If anyone can do it, the magnificent recluse from Monroeville can.

Entire article at The Bridgehead

[DefiantMassRINO]

Will the school's Audio-Visual Club also ban "White Men Can't Jump" because of its racial sensitivities?



It's ironic that they are banning a book that illustrates the injustice and hypocrisy of historic racism.

[catfish1957]

Another example of the left exercising the law of unintended consequences.

This book and movie as an event probably did more to raise awareness around race relations, than anything MLK ever did.

And they want to ban this?  You just can't make this shit up.

[berdie]

I read Watchman. Atticus is bigoted. OMG...a person of that time period being a bigot?? No way! /s But he overcame his bigotry to do the right thing and give exceptional representation to a man who would not have received it otherwise.

IMHO, TKAM should be required reading. I'm sorry there is a bad word in the book. Maybe students should be taught to look as more than, what at the time was the acceptable word, and look at what the morality is.

Yeah...I'm a dreamer.

[Smokin Joe]

OMG one of my fav books...have they even read it!

Likely not.

[Smokin Joe]

I read Watchman. Atticus is bigoted. OMG...a person of that time period being a bigot?? No way! /s But he overcame his bigotry to do the right thing and give exceptional representation to a man who would not have received it otherwise.

IMHO, TKAM should be required reading. I'm sorry there is a bad word in the book. Maybe students should be taught to look as more than, what at the time was the acceptable word, and look at what the morality is.

Yeah...I'm a dreamer.

Or they could bowdlerize it like they did Mark Twain...

[Fishrrman]

I once thought "To Kill a Mockingbird" was a fine story.
Now, having lived life, not so much any more.
There's a definite "leftward-tilt" to it.

I'll go so far as to say I have suspicions to this day that Harper Lee wrote it all herself. Someone who can produce such a widely-read work, and then... nothing else? Sumthin' ain't right 'bout that.
Who was her ghostwriter/collaborator/helper...?