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‘Hurtful language that has oppressed the people for over 200 years’ …
Brock Peters and Gregory Peck in the film version of To Kill a
Mockingbird.
Photograph: Allstar
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When everything is nice, how nice could anything actually be? When art does not rattle one kind of dishes or another, is it any longer art? When banning "nigger" becomes the rule, does that free the "nigger" on a thousand street corners?
A school district in Minnesota
has pulled To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
from its curriculum, arguing that the classic novels’ use of racial
slurs risked students being “humiliated or marginalised”.
The Duluth school district will keep the titles in its libraries, but
from the next school year, they will be replaced on the curriculum for
ninth and 11th-grade English classes, according to local newspaper the Bemidji Pioneer....
The Duluth move was supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People....
[T]he move was strongly criticised by the National Coalition Against Censorship....
Sometimes the niceness of nice people can drive you nuts, not least because, in the end, its kindness is cruel and unrealistic (you should pardon the expression), in spades.
You can argue that the usage that was common then, though hurtful, demonstrated the hurtfulness of the times. You can hope that there's more to be taken from the stories than that word usage. But you can underestimate the stupidity of our species too. Pearls before swine probably covers it.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you’re thinking a school district covers college. It does not. The Duluth Public School District appears to cover grades K through 12.
ReplyDeleteI think one needs to consider the students who were required to read these books. What is their maturity level? What is their commmunity like? Etc. Also, one needs to consider the current set of parents.
Presumably the books were being read by junior high school level students. Discussing rape and the repeated use of the n-word may have presented more problems in the classroom and the principal’s office than the lessons the literature were purportedly used to teach. (Personally I could care less about Twin’s book, it’s just too dated.)
Some 12-14 year olds can handle material such as TKM but others cannot. In some communities the parents themselves barely understand the intent of books such as TKM.
If a community is trying to stop name calling, bullying, etc. there’s no overwhelming need to present books where name calling is acceptable. (I do find that Harper Lee herself didn’t understand why some people had a problem with the book presented to young, immature students as ironical as calling the book racist was and evidently still is.)
However if the real reason is actually that the school district is trying avoid the controversy of discussing rape and racism up and down the curriculum _that_ would be very problematic.