Beyond To Kill a Mockingbird

Reading an old novel in new ways is the opposite of a book ban

The Peel District School Board didn’t recommend courses with “anti-oppression lenses” when I attended The Woodlands School in Mississauga in 1990s, but here’s how that idea played in my Grade 10 history class.

Our textbook mentioned D.W. Griffith’s seminal film Birth of a Nation, describing its immense popularity in Canadian cities in 1915.

The book said Griffith’s cutting-edge cinema technology drew massive crowds, but stayed silent on the film’s plot. When I asked my teacher and classmates if they knew which “Nation” was born in the film, they were all clueless.

So I explained that “Nation” mean the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith portrayed them as heroes for lynching African-Americans in the post-bellum South, who, without slavery to keep them civilized, had gone feral. The storyline suggests something besides cinematography helped this film pack theatres in Canada.

That day, I was our class’s anti-oppression lens, reading the textbook critically so we all gained insight into the nature of Canadian racism.

In recent weeks, debate has simmered around a memo the Peel District School Board sent teachers about Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, directing them to teach the book to students using an “anti-oppression lens.” Lee’s novel condemns racism just as stridently as Birth of a Nation celebrates it, but the same principle applies when discussing them with modern-day teenagers in the GTA.

Anti-oppression lenses aren’t, as critics suggest, book bans that stifle critical thinking skills. They’re the opposite. They facilitate critical thinking to cover a text’s blind spots and enrich everyone’s education.

Thinking critically means recognizing you can’t take a 58-year-old novel set in Alabama, and superimpose its two-dimensional depiction of racism on the multi-ethnic classrooms that abound in the GTA.

Acknowledging that reality doesn’t make anyone racist or dumb. My classmates were all brilliant kids, but they didn’t spend their spare time reading James Baldwin or watching PBS documentaries on the Civil Rights Movement.

I did, because my parents are Black American expatriates who made sure their kids grew up plugged in to African-American history and culture. So I arrived at high school equipped for detailed discussions about racism, whether made plain by Lee or omitted from our textbook’s blurb on Birth of a Nation.

But if you didn’t grow up with my parents, you might need guidelines. And that’s fine, especially if it helps students learn more from To Kill a Mockingbird than simple lessons like “Racism is Bad.”

Suggesting schools look beyond To Kill a Mockingbird to teach 10th Graders about racism is fair. In the 58 years since its publication, dozens of other contenders for that role have emerged, including several by Canadian authors.

And encouraging teachers to read an old novel in new ways is the opposite of a ban. It’s an invitation to make the text relevant to successive generations of readers, each group further removed from the novel’s historical context.

For mainstream white Canadian audiences, often invested in the idea that Canada isn’t racist, To Kill a Mockingbird’s staying power is simple. The novel depicts shameful acts of bigotry — African-American labourer Tom Robinson is falsely accused of rape, railroaded in a crooked trial and sentenced to death. But it locates racism both outside Canada and in the past, allowing contemporary Canadian readers to decry racism without confronting Canada’s ugly history.

I read To Kill a Mockingbird in Grade 10 English, and enjoyed it even if it didn’t challenge me. The good guys were really good, the racists were super racist, and the black folks constantly suffered body blows of bigotry. I found Robinson a moving symbol of racial injustice and a sympathetic victim of a rigged court system.

As a character, though, I found him paper thin, without much personality and little purpose beyond his role as the man whose life racism ruins.

By then I was already reading outside of school, and knew not to ask too much of To Kill a Mockingbird.

If the novel provided an entry point for people unaccustomed to discussing racism, it did its job. It never promised to show me fully formed African-American characters who felt like real people, and show me how they tried to live normal lives even as they grappled daily with racism.

Finding those stories meant doing what school boards should consider and search beyond To Kill a Mockingbird.

Morgan Campbell is the author of The Sports Prism, a weekly Torstar series exploring the intersection of sports and social issues.