TV Note: "To Kill a Mockingbird" (9/11)
David Shasha
"To Kill a Mockingbird" will be screened on Turner Classic Movies Saturday, September 11th at 8:00 PM
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Robin DiAngelo, and Social Science Book “Reading”
I just prepared a special newsletter on the “White Fragility” Social Science Race Separatism of Robin DiAngelo:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/c1_dJkCTKhw
After reading a profile of Professor DiAngelo in The New York Times, I discovered that there is a powerful cottage industry in Corporate seminar training on Race matters.
The new Race seminar industry is apparently allied to the Black Separatism of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
After I posted the special newsletter, an SHU reader forwarded me yet another attack on DiAngelo, this one by Professor John McWhorter:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/
The McWhorter article is a less abrasive version of the Matt Taibbi article that I posted in the special newsletter:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility
The following day, McWhorter appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to discuss his article with Professor Michael Eric Dyson, who wrote the introduction to the DiAngelo book:
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/debating-white-fragility-in-america-88118341868
The very brief Dyson-McWhorter discussion was rather staid, as both men spoke resolutely but politely and did not engage each other directly.
Indeed, I was far more interested in the Morning Joe segment that preceded the exchange:
https://twitter.com/emarvelous/status/1285953441312002051
Errin Haines appeared on the program to discuss her Washington Post article on Harper Lee’s seminal novel To Kill a Mockingbird:
The complete article follows this note.
The novel has taken on outsize status in the culture, given the ubiquity of the book in school curricula, and because of the 1962 movie adaptation which made Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch an indelibly iconic American presence.
Lee made use of her own life experiences in setting out the details and themes of the novel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Lee#Autobiographical_details_in_the_novel
But the work remains a fictional account of the Jim Crow South in the 1930s, and does not pretend to be a factual or sociologically accurate account of the period.
Errin Haines does not treat the novel that way:
But the story is one by a white author, told through primarily white characters. Rereading the book, I was struck that Lee offers rich profiles of the story’s white characters, their personalities, mannerisms, dress, histories, but there are no such character studies to be found for any of the African Americans in this story. Their humanity is obscured from us, suggesting that it is of little consequence to the author, reader or the whites in Maycomb. White privilege means not actually having to know black or brown people, to live among them but to never really see them, even in one’s own house.
Indeed, Lee was a white woman who did see the world out of her own eyes and her own experiences. Why would we even think that she would have such knowledge of Black people given what was going on at the time? Is she too not admitting that she was blind to her own Racism?
And this makes it very different from a work like Richard Wright’s Black Boy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Boy
Like Mockingbird, Wright’s book has also proven to be a staple of many school curricula.
And there too, we see how Wright’s experiences are specific to him, and his move towards the political complexities and vicissitudes of urban America, and specifically his turn to the Communist Party, are as idiosyncratic to him as Lee’s views are to her.
Mockingbird is significant because it does tell the story of the Jim Crow South in a way that White people experienced and understood it.
And this is where the DiAngelo-Coates intersectionality steps into the discussion:
Six decades later, what “Mockingbird” makes clear is that the system works the way it is designed, that this is the way things have always been. In an entire book premised on the idea of right and wrong, the earnest townspeople are able to see this in every other area except race. It is Dill, Scout and Jem who repeatedly question Maycomb’s racism, only to have it repeatedly explained away by the adults they love, respect and trust, reinforcing and normalizing a culture of oppression.
The Social Science feeds the Racial Separatism, as the literary and historical elements are completely de-contextualized.
Haines ignores the novel’s historic role in the Civil Rights Movement:
https://time.com/3928162/mockingbird-civil-rights-movement/
We meet John McWhorter again:
Harper Lee shows signs of hoped-for change in her book. “Moral courage is really inconvenient and it rarely goes unpunished,” says McWhorter. But A.C. Lee would not be punished. Characters like the fictional Atticus Finch and real-life people throughout the South were suddenly agitating within the strictures of society, and Harper Lee was ready to join the proud parade—a parade that was very happy to have her. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., no less, would write in his book Why We Can’t Wait, about “the strength of moral force,” and how, “To the Negro in 1963, as to Atticus Finch, it had become obvious that nonviolence could symbolize the gold badge of heroism rather than the white feather of cowardice.”
It is clear that not only does Haines undermine the novel’s significance to the Civil Rights Movement, but is going a perilous step further, in the Coates manner, to implicitly attack MLK and the activists of that era and erase their accomplishments:
Black Americans are still waiting on enough white people of conscience to care enough to do something about racism, for it to be unacceptable that the work of trying to fix how race is lived should be the burden of only one white person. “Mockingbird” remains an honest and cautionary tale about the idea of “good white folks” and what happens when they prioritize their privilege.
Reading such a statement, the uneducated would not even know that MLK ever lived, or that people like the late John Lewis ever accomplished anything:
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/19/890796423/civil-rights-leader-john-lewis-never-gave-up-or-gave-in
The new Black Separatism is very much a scorched-earth phenomenon.
In her Morning Joe appearance, Haines nervously claimed that she did not want to “cancel” the Lee novel, but it has become clear that it is not just about “canceling” a book, but about demonizing an entire political process that is viewed as having had no actual impact on American society.
Haines, in the name of all Black Americans, claims that she is “waiting on enough white people of conscience to care enough to do something about racism,” implying that no one has cared enough to this point.
Racism is thus not a matter of degree, but is an absolute value which turns, as DiAngelo does, all White Americans into George Wallace and Bull Connor:
https://www.al.com/wire/2013/09/gov_george_c_wallace_a_progres.html
The idea is that things have not changed at all since the Jim Crow era, that no Civil Rights legislation has been passed, and that every single African-American is on the receiving end of the same form of Racism in precisely equal measure.
As I have written, this pernicious idea is fodder for the Trump forces; the very reactionaries who want to restore the old system:
Mockingbird presents a community of Southern White Racists who convict an African-American man for a crime he did not commit. They use their privilege to frame that man, as Black people are seen as less human than White people. The condemned man attempts to flee his jailer and is killed by the police. His reluctant lawyer, a single father who loves his children, is presented as a flawed man; a man who is being taught a tragic lesson in human equality and justice that he has hitherto been too blind to see. No final resolutions are presented.
Harper Lee was loosely recounting her own life, but her book has become a lesson plan for Whites to reconsider their Race hatred and the injustice it engenders.
This lesson was learned by many people since the book and its movie adaptation were released. It can be argued that it helped play a salutary role in the tumultuous changes set off by King and the Civil Rights Movement.
But that valuable lesson was clearly not learned by many others, who continue to harbor a toxic Racism towards Black people.
Mockingbird was not written as a Social Science tract any more than Black Boy was.
Both Lee and Wright spoke of their experiences, as was the case in the latter’s Africa books:
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Power-Three-Curtain-Listen/dp/0061449458
Like other persecuted African-Americans, such as W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson, Wright found himself in exile, but he did not react well when he experienced Africa in the flesh:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wright_(author)#France
Indeed, with all he had experienced in America, he actually served the government in that exile:
In mid-1953, Wright traveled to the Gold Coast, where Kwame Nkrumah was leading the country to independence from British rule, to be established as Ghana. Before Wright returned to Paris, he gave a confidential report to the United States consulate in Accra on what he had learned about Nkrumah and his political party.
After Wright returned to Paris, he met twice with an officer from the US State Department. The officer's report includes what Wright had learned from Nkrumah adviser George Padmore about Nkrumah's plans for the Gold Coast after independence. Padmore, a Trinidadian living in London, believed Wright to be a good friend. His many letters in the Wright papers at Yale's Beinecke Library attest to this, and the two men continued their correspondence. Wright's book on his African journey, Black Power, was published in 1954; its London publisher was Dennis Dobson, who also published Padmore's work.
Whatever political motivations Wright had for reporting to American officials, he was also an American who wanted to stay abroad and needed their approval to have his passport renewed. According to Wright biographer Addison Gayle, a few months later Wright talked to officials at the American embassy in Paris about people he had met in the Communist Party; at the time these individuals were being prosecuted in the US under the Smith Act.
Wright’s view of Africa was marked by the pressures he felt as a political exile, as well as a deep cultural disdain for the local culture:
https://ips-dc.org/richard_wright_on_black_power/
While he still maintained his radical Marxist anti-Colonial politics, he was not at all happy with what he saw there:
Michele L. Simms Burton: Upon his visit to the Gold Coast in 1953, Wright was taken aback by traditional African culture, particularly fetish worshiping.
Jerry W. Ward: Wright’s opinions were mixed, almost tortured. Ultimately, from his perspective as a man of the West, Wright’s opinions were largely negative.
James Miller: In Black Power, he presents himself as a quintessential Westerner who regards African traditions from a position of rational, critical detachment.
We should also recall the role played by White Liberal Guilt in the formation of Wright’s character Bigger Thomas in his novel Native Son:
Most famously, it was James Baldwin who criticized the book for its Agit-Prop character:
James Baldwin excoriated the protest novel as a pamphlet in literary disguise, tenanted by caricatures in service to a social or political agenda. Its failure, he wrote, lay in “its insistence that it is . . . categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.” Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” cannot transcend blackness, and his blackness, in Wright’s hands, is as ugly and debased a thing as ever was.
Baldwin’s own relationship to political dogma and radical chic was arguably just as, or perhaps even more, complicated than Wright’s:
His own viewpoint was molded by his multivalent understanding of Culture and Race, as it was by his homosexuality:
For every The Fire Next Time, Baldwin's 1963 book of "letters" about the racial injustices he experienced growing up in Harlem, he also wrote a Go Tell It on the Mountain, his 1953 novel about a young black boy discovering himself, featuring a number of allusions to his developing homosexuality. And for every Notes of a Native Son, his 1955 collection of essays about black life during the early civil rights era, he also had a Giovanni's Room, his most directly homoerotic work. When his American publisher refused to release it, fearing its gay subplots would alienate his core audience, he published it in England instead. For Baldwin, it was important to be completely honest in his writings, no matter what that may have revealed about his personal identity.
That honesty becomes clear in I Am Not Your Negro, as you begin to see how Baldwin refused to sacrifice any of his identities for another. In the film, he discusses how he avoided joining organizations if they held beliefs he didn't support; that meant refusing to join the NAACP because of their tendency to promote and condone classist elitism, Christian churches because of their failure to love everyone equally, and the Black Panthers—because, in his words, "I did not believe that all white people were devils, and I didn't want young black people to believe that [either]."
Baldwin was no Black Separatist, as he understood Culture and Race in more nuanced and less dogmatic ways than what we see in the DiAngelo-Coates movement.
Again, as I have repeatedly insisted, it is not that Racism has magically disappeared, or that we are living in a perfect society. It is that the long march to achieve a better society has been blazed by many people who have sometimes had to shed their blood or compromise their material security to effect change.
What we see in the new Black Separatism is an abject refusal to accept that evolutionary process, and the moral, literary, and intellectual means that have been deployed in order to achieve the noble aim of a society where all people are equal.
The Corporate Race seminar industry might well be far less effective a means to achieve that aim. Indeed, as I have also argued, the idea of Race War has an appeal to those who refuse multiculturalism and an ecumenical society.
More than this, it allows the Corporate structure to withstand attacks on its own cultural Racism, that often comes in the form of degrading African-Americans through the market-enforced promulgation of vulgarity, ignorance, and minstrelsy.
Punching your Corporate Race seminar timeclock is not the same as doing a thorough analysis of how our Idiocracy is constituted, and the damage it is doing to people in both economic and existential terms.
We must again go back to the landmark Robert Townsend movie “Hollywood Shuffle,” which calls out and parodies in a very real way this Corporatist degradation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Shuffle
Townsend lamented the way that Hollywood stereotyped Blacks as pimps, whores, and drug dealers in a way that presaged the Gangsta Rap movement and the Corporate Hip-Hop we see today.
I have addressed this degradation in my article on a debate between the aforementioned Michael Eric Dyson and Boyce Watkins:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/boyce/davidshasha/7ukJpjVEHxI/34U6-GGeSyIJ
Here is what I said there:
By so freely acquiescing to corporate demands, Hip-Hop artists have found a secure path to financial success, but in the process have jettisoned their critical independence and been forced to rely on clichés and vulgar stereotypes that continue, as Boyce Watkins insists in his lecture, to inflict an untold amount of damage on young African-American children. Indeed, beyond the harm that Hip-Hop has done to African-Americans, the damage that it has done to White Americans is also substantial. Presenting and affirming images of African-Americans as criminal thugs, Hip-Hop reverses the many important and necessary advances that have been achieved by the long years of hard work and struggle of many activists in the Civil Rights movement.
What we are now seeing is the final step in that process, which allows the Separatists to rewrite history, and in the process sow further discord and division in American society, at the very time when people of conscience should be firmly uniting against our Trumpist enemies.
David Shasha
From SHU 968, October 14, 2020
The Truths ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Tells about White People
By: Errin Haines
I was probably 15 or 16 when I first read Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird.” I may have seen the movie before then (one I have watched countless times since). The story, one of my favorites of all time, solidified Lee’s unwavering status as one of my top-five authors.
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. For me, the enduring appeal of “Mockingbird” lies not only in the plot or characters; the book is a mirror, a source of endless and revelatory conversation about who we are and have been as a country.
I doubt I had this understanding completely as a teenager. But what I believe I knew at some level, as a young black woman in America who had already had her own coming-of-age experiences around race and racism, was that “Mockingbird” tells the truth about white people. It is a truth our country has chosen not to see for a long time, since before the book was published and in the six decades since. After recently rereading it, that’s still at the heart of why I love the story so much.
This anniversary coincides with a national reckoning on race that is challenging America’s long-held beliefs and long-standing institutions. The moment presents an opportunity for Americans to finally read “Mockingbird” for the story it is — not the one too many would like for it to be. To do so is to not only see the truth Lee tries to tell in its pages but to begin to understand the truth about America.
I was born nearly half a century after the 1930s, when Lee’s story took place, and yet so much of the dynamics of Maycomb County felt familiar to me. I grew up in the shadow of my hometown of Atlanta, in the south-side suburb of Fairburn, Ga. We were the first African Americans to move onto our street; by the time I finished high school, my graduating class was nearly evenly split between black and white. Both places were charming backdrops and lovely places to grow up that maintained and protected white supremacy veiled as racial harmony.
Many of Scout and Jem’s neighbors recalled my own, from Miss Maudie to Miss Stephanie to Mrs. Dubose: They were polite white folks who could be civil to and even fond of black people individually but at their core were committed to a racial hierarchy that maintained the way of life in town. They may have been willing to help — albeit reluctantly — but never to the extent that it would cost them anything personally or collectively. They could conceive of and perhaps even confront incidences of individual injustice but not systemic racism. It was either too big of a problem or just “the way things were,” to be considered only when someone not yet conditioned to the status quo — like children or outsiders — raised the issue.
Familiar, too, were the black characters in the story and their relationship to the town’s white citizens. Calpurnia felt like a loving but no-nonsense aunt; Rev. Sykes sounded like a community elder who might have looked out for me, my brother and our friends; the Robinsons were working-class, honest black folks like the ones in my childhood best friend’s family.
But the story is one by a white author, told through primarily white characters. Rereading the book, I was struck that Lee offers rich profiles of the story’s white characters, their personalities, mannerisms, dress, histories, but there are no such character studies to be found for any of the African Americans in this story. Their humanity is obscured from us, suggesting that it is of little consequence to the author, reader or the whites in Maycomb. White privilege means not actually having to know black or brown people, to live among them but to never really see them, even in one’s own house.
And that privilege extends to the hero of Lee’s novel in the minds of many readers: Atticus Finch. Generations of Americans have named their sons and pets for the lawyer and dad, who was based on the author’s father. The legend of Atticus Finch took on an outsized role with the unforgettable performance of actor Gregory Peck, who breathed life into the idea of a man apart from the Jim Crow South in the throes of the Great Depression.
Atticus has come to represent more than just a white savior. He stood in an Alabama courthouse not to block justice for a black man but to fight for it. In doing so, he wasn’t just attempting to save Tom Robinson (in an alternate version, he would have been the hero); he was absolving the entire white race from the ills of racism. Atticus is the unimpeachable and quintessential example of what it means to be a Good White Person, inspiring young people across the country to become lawyers and enabling white Americans to point again and again to a fictional character as proof that not all actual white people are racist.
It is a myth, a lie that America tells itself that perpetuates racism. At best, he was the least overtly racist person in a racist town.
In reality, Atticus was an unwilling participant in the racial fight. He accepted the assignment not only to attempt to prevent a miscarriage of justice but to maintain the racial order in Maycomb. He was not a civil rights crusader; he attempted to save the life of one black person because he understood the implications for his town if he did not. And when he lost, Maycomb’s racial order was eventually restored.
In truth, the egregious verdict didn’t stop Atticus or any of the county’s residents, black and white, from resuming their separate and unequal lives. When Bob Ewell is killed at the hands of Boo Radley — perhaps the only good white person in Maycomb — racism as a matter of fact is affirmed and upheld.
The inevitable truth of Robinson’s case and trial echoes across the decades in an era where America is again being confronted with the inequality of its criminal justice system. Tom Robinson was accused of raping Mayella Ewell, and his case revolves around the word of a black man against a poor, but still white, woman, making the outcome both tragically predictable and unpreventable, despite the facts.
Writing recently on the case of Amy Cooper, who weaponized her white womanhood against birdwatcher Christian Cooper in Central Park this spring, I was reminded of this dynamic. What if Robinson had a cellphone camera that day? Or what if Mayella had a cellphone and had called 911 to falsely accuse Robinson of rape? Would either of them have ever made it to the county courthouse? How much sooner would Robinson have been killed?
Six decades later, what “Mockingbird” makes clear is that the system works the way it is designed, that this is the way things have always been. In an entire book premised on the idea of right and wrong, the earnest townspeople are able to see this in every other area except race. It is Dill, Scout and Jem who repeatedly question Maycomb’s racism, only to have it repeatedly explained away by the adults they love, respect and trust, reinforcing and normalizing a culture of oppression.
Black Americans are still waiting on enough white people of conscience to care enough to do something about racism, for it to be unacceptable that the work of trying to fix how race is lived should be the burden of only one white person. “Mockingbird” remains an honest and cautionary tale about the idea of “good white folks” and what happens when they prioritize their privilege.
In recent weeks, thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in protest, including many white people, to challenge systemic racism and injustice. But will the uprising be limited to one summer, a moment in time, like the tumultuous summer in Maycomb? Or will the work carry over into confronting inequities in education, income, housing, business and other aspects of our society?
It is up to all of us to decide whether we will heed the story of “Mockingbird” and choose a different verdict for America.
This story is part of a collaboration between The Washington Post and The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics and policy.
From The Washington Post, July 22, 2020