Progressive Teachers in Washington State Want to Ban ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
“presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature”
When parents don’t want sexually explicit books in their children’s public school libraries, the media calls it book banning. What do they call this?
The College Fix reports:
Progressive teachers want ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ banished from curriculum
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about book “banning,” primarily focused on conservative parents’ and politicians’ efforts to restrict access to material which is sexually explicit.
While these efforts often have been labeled everything from “terrorism” to “scary” to a “threat to the Republic,” machinations from the opposite side of the political aisle are framed in a positive light — if not outright lauded.
A recent Washington Post story highlighted the efforts of a quartet of Washington State teachers to ditch the Harper Lee classic “To Kill a Mockingbird” in the name of racial enlightenment.
In their formal challenge, the teachers wrote that the novel “centers on whiteness” and “presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature.”
Riley Degamo (pictured), Shanta Freeman-Miller, Rachel Johnson, and Verena Kuzmany of the Mukilteo School District said they “saw themselves as part of an urgent national reckoning with racism, a necessary reconsideration of what we value, teach and memorialize following the killing of George Floyd.”
Johnson said she had listened to a black-hosted podcast which noted the novel “ranked with Confederate monuments as something painful to Black people, but which White people adored.”
Kuzmany claimed both her black and white students “disliked” the book, with one writing “This is f—— bulls—” on a book-related assignment.
Kuzmany said she doesn’t think “White authors and White characters should tell the narratives of African American people.”
Nevertheless, the quartet said they didn’t object to the book being in school libraries or being made available for optional, individual student reading.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
To KIll a Mockingbird “centers on whiteness.”
Where to begin?
There is no such thing as “whiteness.” Anyone who says otherwise is a bigot.
Have we reached the point that it should now be considered child neglect for for any American parent/s to voluntarily willfully place their child into an American K-12 school?
Black high school student overwhelmingly (75%) read at a primary school level.
They don’t possess the skills to read To Kill a Mockingbird in the first place, so it’s no threat to all those black almost-adults, even if it “centers on whiteness”.
In fact, teachers have made sure that as many students as possible are kept safe from books in general.
*edit* black Baltimore high school students (although I suspect this is true for most urban school districts.)
The Baltimore schools are remarkably bad. Hard to imagine it being accidental.
Well, yes as follows: It is about a white kid’s becoming intimately aware of black plight in Jim Crow American South. While To Kill a Mocking Bird does depict some of the suffering of blacks during that era, the novel makes no attempt to either depict or hide blacks’ efforts to overcome Jim Crow. It’s just not part of the story.
And these are ‘teachers.’ Who are so wrapped up in their thing they’re unable to read and understand a book, uncolored by their biases. Actually this explains a lot.
This former English teacher knows that all of your students will hate some of the books you assign, and some of your students will hate all of them.
Agreed. I enjoyed TKaM and still remember parts of it. Lord of the Flies on the other hand was unpleasant, and some of the books pushed these days are even worse! The problem is the ideological divide is so large, what one side considers acceptable and decent the other consider evil and/or traumatic.
As a younger kid I actually ended up changing schools because the books chosen by my teacher for reading hour or whatever it was were nightmarish to the point I asked my mother to get me out of the ‘lesson’. Since I was and remain an avid reader she knew there was a major problem. Her talk with the teacher proved fruitless however with said teacher claiming the content was what the kids identified with – odds are what she identified with too, and she was NOT interested in more wholesome content. Since the teacher refused to change the only option was escaping the system.
This was long before the rise of the extreme racism, sexual content, and other materials now pushed by the Left. Things are far worse now!
I’m fine with skipping Tequila Mockingbird. I thought it was dreary anyway. But I’d be more interested in an accurate historical understanding from contemporary sources, not whatever today’s black leadership wants to say about it.
It’s much more important to hear from a black person of the time than today’s black people.
If you want to understand slavery in America, you really cannot do better than
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220077.Journal_of_a_Residence_on_a_Georgian_Plantation_in_1838_1839
It is available for free via Librivox.com in audible format. The reader is very good.
.
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839
Author: Fanny Kemble
Put it on your Bucket List.
You can thank me
later ; )
Also — also in the public domain are maybe about a dozen or more autobiographical accounts of slaves, escaped slaves, children of slaves.
Also the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. reading now
And if you want to understand life in the Jim Crow South, then you need to keep in mind that freed slaves did not migrate en masse to the North, nor to the West, nor to Canada, nor to Mexico.
The American West was wide open, and right next door.
Mexico had no slavery, and was right next door for those living in the Deep South.
To this day, roughly half of all descendants of America’s slaves live in the former Confederate States of America.
Yes, a lot of jobs were created in factories to build tanks and planes etc for WWII, and many people moved north for those jobs. But the fact remains — to this day that roughly half of America’s descendants of America’s slaves
chose not to leave the South. And even today choose not to leave the South.
Also – the entire death toll from all the years of lynchings is less than one year of Black on Black murders in America today.
I’m not too sure whether there are any/many novels that account realistically for the above.
Generations of students have declared generations of assignments “f— b—-.” The difference is the adult teachers of those generations chose to treat their jejune prickliness with all the consideration it deserved, namely none. That is how those students got EDUCATIONS, something they don’t get today.
the novel … “presents a barrier to understanding ….”
Well, yeah. Since none of your students can actually read or think critically, they absolutely can’t see how the different facets of the story work together.
Riley Degamo (pictured),
In my browser, this starts a paragraph right below the ad. And the ad is a picture of Chuck Norris. That made me laugh. Somehow I don’t think Ms Degamo is anything like Chuck.
The Brave browser is very good. Or install the Ghostery plugin for your present browser.
.
Sadly true. Now retired, I adjunct at a local community college, and the students’ literacy skills are appalling.