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Partial cloudiness early, with scattered showers and thunderstorms overnight. A few storms may be severe. Low 66F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%..
Partial cloudiness early, with scattered showers and thunderstorms overnight. A few storms may be severe. Low 66F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%.
Updated: May 8, 2024 @ 9:11 pm
"To Kill a Mockingbird." It is Harper Lee’s undisputed classic American novel. Everyone knows it and loves it. But how well do we know it?
In chapter 22, Atticus Finch and his children — Jem and Scout — have returned home after the jury found Tom Robinson guilty of raping Mayella Ewell. The overprotective Aunt Alexandra wonders aloud if allowing Jem and Scout to witness the trial was correct.
Atticus snaps, “This is their home, sister. ... We’ve made it this way for them, they might as well learn to cope with it.”
Alexandra replies immediately, “But they don’t have to go to the courthouse and wallow in it.”
Atticus declares, “It’s just as much Maycomb County as missionary teas.”
Racism. That’s the implied meaning of the pronoun “it” in each instance, isn’t it?
Wait. Is Harper Lee a woolly-headed critical race theorist (CRT) whose left-wing ideology means to recruit unsuspecting readers into a new autocratic tyranny? In the Tom Robinson plotline, Lee weaves racial acrimony, poverty, both black and white, and an inequitable legal system into her tale.
Suspicious, right?
No, this is literature gleaned from our collective American history, a mirror held up to her time and place, which, unfortunately, reflects our own.
At our recent Board of Education meetings, a small cell of misinformed citizens hopes to gaslight ABSS stakeholders with their bad faith, trickle-down detritus of the Big Lie. Theirs is whack-a-mole logic: First, we will wear out CRT, move on to equity issues, then restorative justice. It’s destructive and divisive.
During the Civil Rights movement, many sought to ban Lee’s novel. She wrote, “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.”
What would Atticus do?
Have we in Alamance County “made it this way” for our citizens, black and white? Are we destined to “cope with it,” or will we move, clear-eyed and honestly, into an equitable future for all? I say, “Forward.”
ROBERT B. VELLANI, PhD
Burlington
ABSS Superintendent’s Equity and Diversity Committee
This article originally appeared on Times-News: Instead of coping with racism, we need to move forward: Letter
