To Kill A Mockingbird

[annwfyn]

So, it's the fiftieth anniversary of 'To Kill A Mockingbird', and there are lots of essays on it all over the internet. Some of them are very clever, so I linked to them here.

Reconstructing Atticus Finch. Was he really that good a lawyer?

Malcolm Gladwell on Atticus Finch and Southern liberalism.

A defense of To Kill A Mockingbird

I must admit, my experience of 'To Kill A Mockingbird' comes from having to study it at GCSE. I suspect this both ruined the book for me (as studying a book at GCSE almost always does), and also was a bit of a waste of time as far as teaching my class any of the lessons Harper Lee wanted to teach the children who read the book. We were a vile collection of privileged white kids in rural Berkshire, who really had little interest in racism, and that which we did pick up mostly taught us that it was something that happened in the American Deep South, which seemed almost entirely alien. We also studied 'Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry', which had much the same effect. Neither White nor Black Southern society seemed anything like our own, the characters felt utterly 'other' and the whole thing became a long grind about strange foreign people doing awful things to other strange foreign people.

I also found Scout very tedious from the word 'go'. This didn't help.

I wish now we'd studied something else if the school wanted us to learn about racism, something which didn't let us opt out of the whole learning process quite so much. Even something about British history in that time period, like the 'Jewel in the Crown' series might have been a bit more useful. But my school determinedly decided to teach us about racism, focusing on racism in the American Deep South. These days, I suspect that might sum up everything that's wrong with the British attitude towards race and racism.

Comments

[dainul.livejournal.com]

I actually quite liked the book, but then I a) had lived in America, albeit a long way in culture and distance from where the book was set, so it felt less distant and b) I read it myself over Easter/half-term before we started it in school. It made the class-readings even more dull, but meant I could actually enjoy the book without the issues associated with a teacher trying to present it to a class.

[madwitch.livejournal.com]

I think I will always love that book. We studied it at GCSE as well, but that just made me more fond of it.

[sl4irl.livejournal.com]

I honestly didn't find the cultures in question all that alien at all when I studied TKAM for GCSE. Different climate, but ultimately there's plenty of "shared humanity wide" stuff in there.

Anyway, I enjoyed the Malcolm Gladwell article. It's a pretty depressing one though, in its jist: cultural/structural disadvantages to poverty really haven't gone away, at all.

[wraithwitch.livejournal.com]

Even something about British history in that time period, like the 'Jewel in the Crown' series might have been a bit more useful...

Because the Deep South is alien but a fictional bit of India in 1950 with the social values of 1900 is totally understandable? =P

But my school determinedly decided to teach us about racism, focusing on racism in the American Deep South.

That rather sounds like you wish they hadn't tried because it was all too embarrassing - nice privileged white people trying to get across the evils of racism to a bunch of kids who've likely never been discriminated against in their lives. Fair enough, but what else are they meant to do? Short of organising a field trip to a ghetto/slum/cornerofhell, I think it's always gonna be a slightly foreign concept to nice sheltered middle class children.

Also, lessons are mostly taught using symbols: rightly or wrongly, what with the KKK and segregation etc, the old South has become one of the most easily recognisable symbols for racism. It's probably because Americans weren't going to far away places and treating the natives with contempt, they'd created a sub-class of citizen in their own country - the laws of which were only repealed in 1964.

These days, I suspect that might sum up everything that's wrong with the British attitude towards race and racism.

Perhaps, or possibly it says a lot about your views on the British Empire =P

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Something I think is an issue with British attitudes towards race and racism, which I've seen come from a lot of people, is the view that racism is an American problem, that it's something that happened in the Deep South, that it isn't something that happened here.

The Jewel in the Crown maybe does have a different resonance for me as my family are Anglo-Indian in parts. There are probably better books than that. Overall, I still think that American racism is a bad thing to teach kids about before British racism.