Last week, the folks over at Racialicious re-posted a piece by Macon D., the creator of the blog, Stuff White People Do.  The article, “Stuff White People Do: Warmly Embrace a Racist Novel,” addresses the 50th anniversary celebration of Harper Lee’s only novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, published in the summer of 1960.  Macon D. took issue with all the attention TKAM was receiving, and consequently wrote a polemic railing against the (praise of the) novel.



Macon D. spends the first part of his post skewering the novel’s 2010 reception. He finds NPR’s story on the novel a prime, and perhaps common example of the kinds of anniversary stories media outlets produced.  He describes the NPR  piece as a “typically laudatory” one where racism is described as a historical ill and the novel is praised for its apparent universality.


Here, Macon D. seems to be simultaneously conflating and confusing the book’s public reception–and its reception 50 years after its initial publication, mind you–with its intent.   I’m not sure what page and/or chapter TKAM encourages its readers to regard racism as a thing of the past, but I surely cannot recall that part.  In fact, how could Harper Lee, writing in the late 1950s, in the middle of the civil rights movement, when reality television starred black people and water hoses (no wonder 70% of black kids don’t know how to swim), be prescient enough to say to herself, “You know, this novel will be published many times over.  And a certain demographic, say half a century from now, will use this fiction to regard racism as a kind of fossil they only re-discover when they encounter items such as my novel.  I should write a different book.”?   How can one charge Harper Lee with not anticipating the reaction of today’s “well-meaning white people”?  How can one take issue with Lee for not being radical enough…for 2010?  In addition, what does it mean to privilege “well-meaning white people’s” positive response to the novel, and implicitly argue that their’s is the only kind of positive reaction?

Macon D. counters the NPR story by mentioning an effort in Nova Scotia to have the text removed from its school curriculum.  Macon D. appreciates  this story because it seems to represent the way the novel affects “different” (and by “different,” he means African-Canadian) readers.  According to the article Macon D. cites, these readers are negatively affected by TKAM because of, among other things, its use of the word “nigger.” According to that logic, then, the folks in Nova Scotia not only need to ban The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but practically all of Faulkner, Beloved, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Invisible Man, to name a few.  (Ralph Ellison, incidentally, called chapter 31 of Huck Finn one of the most moral moments in American literature.  Who cares?  That was over fifty years ago.)  How at all is it useful to remove texts from school curricula because we don’t like the words?  How can we accurately describe blacks’ present conditions if we refuse to engage with texts that help delineate the history of racism in America because the words are impolite?  Doing so seems as useful as changing the names of schools.  For example, not calling it Jefferson Davis High School does not magically make the curriculum taught in the school less racist or even better.  It’s best to learn why it was called Jefferson Davis High School in the first place. Perhaps that conversation inevitably reveals why students in the school are being under-educated.


The second issue with TKAM is that Atticus Finch is Maycomb, Alabama’s resident white savior.  I wonder: Whom does Atticus save?  As my white savior primer informed you many months ago, a white savior has to save somebody, namely a downtrodden black person.  Atticus fails, and his failure results in the death of a black man.  Again, I think the idea of Atticus as hero lies in the reception of the novel.  Lawyers love to talk about how Atticus Finch/Gregory Peck made them want to become lawyers.  Yet (my interpretation of) the text shows otherwise.  Recalling the scene, Atticus takes the case for many reasons, “The main one is, if [he] didn’t [he] couldn’t hold [his] head up in town […] [and he] couldn’t even tell [Scout] or Jem not to do something again.”  Atticus’ motives aren’t articulated as anti-racist, or even an effort to make a claim about Maycomb and the South’s ways or the criminal (in)justice system.  In fact, Atticus links his no-win situation to the Confederacy’s chances at winning the Civil War:  just because you can’t win doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, which we all know is a troubling association, considering the effects of trying to win.  Atticus, who readily admits to Scout that he will lose this case, in effect intends to do his job because he has been charged to do it, not because he wants to make a proclamation about racism or shame his neighbors.  He quite likes his neighbors.   Atticus’ motives and his actions are complicated, not heroic.

Third, black people are marginal characters who exhibit no agency.  I think when making this claim it’s important to recall that the story is filtered through the eyes of a young white girl who associates with very few blacks outside of Calpurnia, the maid.  Furthermore, it’s 1930s Alabama I know we desire black people from the past to be noble and heroic and spit in Jim Crow’s face, but frankly, that’s not what happened all the time.  Not even most of the time.  I’m not sure how many of us can fully appreciate what it’s like to live a life where anywhere, at anytime you can be terrorized and your life can be threatened and/or taken.  Nor can many of us understand what it’s like to try to live as simply and quietly as possible under those conditions.    Where does one expect the black characters to voice protest in a novel about a little white girl and her big brother?  In the courtroom?  Furthermore, why is there no acknowledgment of Calpurnia, particularly the scene where Scout and Jem go to church with her?  To her credit, Lee created a scene where the Finch children actually witnessed Cal as something beyond a domestic.  To add, Jem, Scout, and Dill secretly watch the trial from the colored balcony, thereby (beginning to) understand the trial and justice from that perspective.  (My friend Rachel wrote a really good paper on this very scene.)  If one has issue with that narrative move, so be it.  Yet, I think it important to note that, however limited, the presence of blacks is pivotal nonetheless.


**As a bit of a coda, I’d like to say something about Mrs. DuBose, another marginal character whose very presence in the novel speaks more volumes than many of us recognize.  A subplot that, curiously, is not in the film, the episode between Jem and his curmudgeonly neighbor has always seemed to me (one of) the key(s) to the novel.  One afternoon not long after Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose said that Atticus should be in jail for defending Tom Robinson, or “niggers” as she puts it, an enraged Jem cuts off the heads of Mrs. Dubose’s camellias, the state flower of Alabama, in response.  Jem, of course, is caught, and as a punishment is required to read Ivanhoe to Mrs. Dubose on afternoons.  There he learns that Mrs. Dubose is addicted to morphine, and has been struggling to end her habit, wanting to die having conquered her dependence on the drug.


And now, for some Noisettes: