There was also the near-lynching scene at the jail, where the mob confronts Atticus and demands he step aside so they can get their hands on Tom Robinson. Atticus refuses and things are about to get ugly when Scout inserts herself. She is confused to see that this gang bent on murder is made up of people she knows and likes - ordinary people, to her. Things are tense, the outcome hangs in the balance for a moment, and then the mob backs off.
That scene clearly shows the potential for normal upstanding citizens for violence and hatred, and how close mob mentality is to the surface. Even if the “happy” ending to that scene was uncommon in real life, it’s not exactly a flattering portrait of white citizenry.
I don’t believe that “supporting racism” is a possible way for a non-racist person to behave. It would be less of a modern 2018-style whitewash, if you had simply said “the majority of white people were racist”.
I would never argue with someone who viewed TKAM as you or the OP, because you’re right.
But on the other hand, isn’t art that is inspirational, that paints the world as we wish it would be, a valuable thing? Isn’t it good thing that there’s a beloved character, who does basically good things, who stands up for what is right (mostly)? Isn’t the fact that maybe he didn’t exist in reality make him all the more important?
If there were no real Atticuses, then isn’t it the very function of artists to create one, to teach us how being better might look?
The point of the book wasn’t to say how things were, or to say how things should be, but to point the direction from the former to the latter. The story is of one person who made a difference for the good. Doing good is not the enemy of being perfect.
If the percentage of enthusiastic lynchers is not as high as the reality of the era, that actually makes current America seem better, because such a thing would be unthinkable amongst most people today. It actually weakens the argument that we have not come a long way since then, if a larger number of people back then, including those in power, would heartily join or condone a lynch mob.
Weird. I never knew a black person who disliked the book. Most of my experience with it being required reading at Booker T. Washington High School in 1980.
I was in a American Lit class in college, about 30% black, and and the consensus was that it was great American Lit, and not a single Black person in that class called it out as you have.
A crappy first draft of To Kill Mockingbird, pushed out by her agent. She did write only one novel.
wiki: "Although promoted by its publisher and initially described in media reports as a sequel to Lee’s best-selling novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960, Go Set a Watchman is actually that novel’s first draft.[2][13] The novel was finished in 1957[13] and purchased by the J.B. Lippincott Company. Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, although impressed with elements of the story, saying that “the spark of the true writer flashed in every line”,[13] thought it was by no means ready for publication. It was, as she described it, “more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel”. As Jonathan Mahler recounts in his Times article on Hohoff, she thought the strongest aspect of Lee’s novel was the flashback sequences featuring a young Scout, and thus requested that Lee use those flashbacks as a basis for a new novel. Lee agreed, and “during the next couple of years, Hohoff led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird.”[13]
Actually, Atticus was a public defender who had been assigned to the case. It was that he was actually going to make an effort to do his job, and not just go through the motions.
Racism isn’t the only -ism in the town; there is also a lot of classism. But keeping in mind that it’s a child’s view is important: to a child, the way their family is, is the Norm. Or at least, the way they understand their family to be; the reality tends to be more complicated, but a lot of the things that go on between adults go way over a child’s head or are completely misunderstood. And very often when a child realizes there is something they’re not understanding completely and tries to ask for clarification, the response is negative (laughter, derision or anger) and not illuminating at all.
Right, but it’s vitally important that the real case that TKAM is based on–the Scottsboro Boys case–there was literally not one single public defender in the state of Alabama willing to do make an effort to do his job. The only organization willing to pay for a lawyer willing to do the job was The American Communist Party, and they couldn’t hire anyone local–they had to get a Jewish lawyer from NY.
But Lee couldn’t have made Atticus a Jewish Lawyer from NY. She couldn’t have even made him a person willing to take money from communists. Because if she had, her audience wouldn’t have been sympathetic to the character. Her audience would not have identified with him. Her audience was too bigoted to accept that such a person was a hero–in a story about the damage bigotry does.
Harper Lee wasn’t responsible for writing any particular book; my beef isn’t with her. But as a culture we use the book as a way to discharge guilt over the horrific acts of the era it depicts. We want to tell outselves #notallwhitepeople , because we still identify with our racial analogues, and admitting that it was pretty damn near all white people makes us feel guilty. It shouldn’t: it wasn’t anyone living today. There’s no guilt there. But as a society our sense of racial identity is so strong that we find a book that offers the possibility of absolution endlessly satisfying.
I see this over and over. People complain about a work of fiction not accurately depicting the typical situation. Juno got slammed by this, for example.
Look, if you write about the typical situation it’s going to be incredibly boring. C’mon, who wants to see a movie about the everyday life of an average teenager???
So you write about the atypical. In the case of TKaM the atypical means that the bulk of the white community doesn’t get together and hang the (falsely) accused black guy right away. The atypical means there’s a white lawyer in town who sees injustice and seeks to correct it. Etc.
I can’t believe this aspect of writing fiction isn’t obvious to everyone.
What sort of novel would 1984 be if Winston Smith was a typical bureaucrat, kept his head down, did his job, and didn’t do anything to upset the state???
Well, I loved the book as did my husband and children.
See, as black people, we know racism. As an old people, my husband and I know what it was like during the civil rights era. As a southerner, my husband knows how racist southern whites were and are. But we all loved this book. For one thing, we know it is fiction so we don’t put the weight of all of real life onto it. That’s unfair to the story. And Harper is telling a story here, not reporting on race relations. The story is about how hard it is for one person to stand up against what he knows is wrong but how necessary it is.
All the black people I know who read it look at it as a story of hope and not a story of white people trying to make themselves look better than they were.
It occurs to me: Lizard says that he only knows one black person who likes the book. How many black people does he know who dislike it? How many black people does he know for whom he doesn’t know their opinion?