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People of color are more than "uncomfortable" living with racism every day. Those of us who are white can cope with the trauma of reading a book about it, and it SHOULD make us uncomfortable because we are still repeating the same horrible atrocities in 2017. Unarmed black people are being murdered by police, neo-Nazis are marching in the streets, and our “president” is a white supremacist apologist.
We’re supposed to be more than uncomfortable with racism. It should make us sick. It is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. People would know that if we actually read and studied and discussed books like “To Kill a Mockingbird” not to mention modern books that deal with the issue like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me.” That is how we learn and grow. Sometimes awareness has to hurt so we can make changes. We are in the second era of the civil rights movement because we didn’t do enough to teach about the first one. Suppressing education is irresponsible and dangerous.
It's the discriminatory laws against whites (affirmative action) that should be making people uncomfortable. But equality isn't what the movement was all about. It's about revenge against whites for what (a small % of) their distant ancestors MAY have done.
You know, I totally agree with what you say, but what later occurred to me was: Considering this is junior high, is it possibly inappropriate to have a book that was intended for adults, where a rape is a central part of the plot?
You know, I totally agree with what you say, but what later occurred to me was: Considering this is junior high, is it possibly inappropriate to have a book that was intended for adults, where a rape is a central part of the plot?
The complaints were over language...not themes/plots.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" was banned because it contains the "N-word"... exactly who do you suppose was "uncomfortable"?
I suspect it is mostly white people who are trying to make themselves feel better by pretending to protect black people from hearing the N word. I can't speak for black people but the black people I've spoken to about it feel like banning it is patronizing. They hear the N word every day. Reading about it in this context in classic literature is not the problem--living with systemic racism is. That is the point of the book. People who've read it know this.
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