“Remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
March 15, 2016 7:02 PM   Subscribe

The Mass-Market Edition of To Kill a Mockingbird Is Dead by Alex Shephard [The New Republic] Harper Lee’s estate will no longer allow publication of the inexpensive paperback edition that was popular with schools. On Monday, February 29, a judge in Monroe County, Alabama sealed Harper Lee’s will from public view. The motion was filed by the Birmingham law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, which was acting on behalf of Tonja Carter, Lee’s lawyer and the executor of her estate.
“Why does this matter? Mass-market books are significantly cheaper than their trade paperback counterparts. Hachette’s mass-market paperback of TKAM retails for $8.99, while the trade paperbacks published by Hachette’s rival HarperCollins go for $14.99 and $16.99. Unsurprisingly, the more accessible mass-market paperback sells significantly more copies than the trade paperback: According to Nielsen BookScan, the mass-market paperback edition of To Kill a Mockingbird has sold 55,376 copies since January 1, 2016, while HarperCollins’s trade paperback editions have sold 22,554 copies over the same period. (BookScan tracks most, but not all, physical book sales in the U.S. and often lags by a week or more, which means that the actual numbers are almost certainly greater.)”
posted by Fizz (98 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's been 56 years since To Kill a Mockingbird was published. If we had sane copyright laws, the book would be free (or near-free if you want print) to every teacher and student.
posted by zachlipton at 7:10 PM on March 15, 2016 [97 favorites]


Yeah, but then how would Harper Lee be incentivized to write more books?
posted by miyabo at 7:11 PM on March 15, 2016 [219 favorites]


While this is a terrible decision, I can't help but think that perhaps there might just be a book written in the last fifty plus years that also deals with racism in America.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 7:13 PM on March 15, 2016 [68 favorites]


Yeah, but does it star wholesome white people?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:15 PM on March 15, 2016 [52 favorites]


Wow, way to shoot the mule at the head of your gravy train. This book probably would have kept its ~75% school penetration for decades if they kept it cheap. Lose that advantage and people will start looking at other options.
posted by Mitheral at 7:17 PM on March 15, 2016 [29 favorites]


Yeah. My first thought was, "Do they want to stop people from reading it?" This is idiotic, if the goal is to make money by charging rent on Harper Lee's legacy (which would be disgusting, but not surprising). I can't think why else they would do this though, except as an inexplicable attempt to stop To Kill a Mockingbird from being read in schools.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:27 PM on March 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


Wait, what? My daughter is currently reading a school issued mass-market edition of TKAM and her class is shortly going to see it in play form. She's in 8th grade. It's really the introduction to racial issues for pre-high school (white) children. It's the gateway to higher understanding, IMO. There are other options, of course, but it's also a big deal. My kid goes to an affluent, mostly white school. Wholesome white people is where you start. Ta-Nehesi Coates isn't where you start in this demographic.
posted by Ruki at 7:33 PM on March 15, 2016 [16 favorites]


My kid goes to an affluent, mostly white school. Wholesome white people is where you start. Ta-Nehesi Coates isn't where you start in this demographic.

Are you seriously suggesting that white children do not have the capacity to understand or comprehend a non-white author when it comes to the subject of race or bigotry? I mean wow...just wow.
posted by Fizz at 7:50 PM on March 15, 2016 [35 favorites]


I'm reminded of the copyright issues around MLK's "I have a dream" speech and the PBS civil rights documentary series Eyes On The Prize. The recognized rights holders probably mean well but it's not clear that the actual outcome is for the best.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 7:53 PM on March 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


I think given what we know about the people surrounding Ms. Lee at the end of her life we don't have to assume they mean well.

I guess this will boost the secondary and e-book market for the copies that are out there. Most likely schools will just go with something cheaper.

Odd as it is, I never read TKAM, only saw the movie. I don't think there were any books that really made me think about racism at that age; movies yes, songs yes, some TV shows, essays, but for whatever reason literature was not explicitly one of the things that spoke to that issue for me.
posted by emjaybee at 8:02 PM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


It's really the introduction to racial issues for pre-high school (white) children. It's the gateway to higher understanding, IMO.

It certainly doesn't have to be. I read Roots on my own in fifth grade after watching the miniseries on TV. It's an intense, adult book and I'm not recommending it as a replacement for school curricula in the 8th grade, but surely white kids don't have to read about wholesome white families to start learning about racism? Especially since the 8th grade seems awfully late for that.
posted by oneirodynia at 8:03 PM on March 15, 2016 [14 favorites]


And inside the goose was nothing but goose.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:10 PM on March 15, 2016 [23 favorites]


Buy it used. There are millions of copies out there. Your local used bookseller, charity shop, or library sale is a more deserving cause than Harper Lee's exploiters.
posted by grounded at 8:12 PM on March 15, 2016 [19 favorites]


Sadly, Harper Lee's people have previously made it very clear that they are not going to leave any money on the table
posted by knoyers at 8:14 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Under the copyright law in effect when Mockingbird was published in 1960, copyright was granted for a maximum of 56 years.
posted by Warren Terra at 8:18 PM on March 15, 2016 [11 favorites]


Are you seriously suggesting that white children do not have the capacity to understand or comprehend a non-white author when it comes to the subject of race or bigotry? I mean wow...just wow.

That straw man was growling and foaming at the mouth in the street, threatening the neighborhood, but you sure shot it dead.
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:22 PM on March 15, 2016 [106 favorites]


There's something that's a bit buried in the article: "many American classics, including The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath no longer have mass-market editions."That's very not-good. If the publishers are thinking that public libraries will have to buy as many copies of the trade paperbacks as they did the mass-markets, sorry, but library budgets don't work that way--they'll simply have fewer copies, with lowered circulation stats to match, and the publishers won't have an increase in gross sales receipts. And then, I imagine, they'll bitch about ebook piracy.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:24 PM on March 15, 2016 [13 favorites]


Ta-Nehesi Coates isn't where you start in this demographic.

I dunno, Black Panther is coming out next month.

Mockingbird was challenging for its time, but maybe today's kids can handle something a little more direct. MLK's Stride Toward Freedom is a good story; so is Black Like Me. The Color Purple would work. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is fantastic but maybe it would scare some parents.
posted by zompist at 8:26 PM on March 15, 2016 [10 favorites]


I don't know if this is true for all students in our district, or just for the kids in the advanced classes, but we parents have to buy the books for mancub's class because they use books besides what is assigned as regular curriculum. So, for seventh grade we had to get the Maus books, and Anne Frank, and Hiroshima and another couple I've forgotten. next year, the focus will be on the civil rights era, and has a list of authors of color, and also includes tkam.

Because schools want kids to all be reading from the same edition, they can't use copies we already own, so, just like college, we have to buy new editions of a work that has not changed in my lifetime, and the price is now 70% higher. And if tkam gets away with this without serious blowback, other publishers will do the same thing. Just like the prices for university books are insanely inflated and re-editioned for no good reason.

It's rapacious, it's wrong, and the estate and publisher should be ashamed.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 8:26 PM on March 15, 2016 [22 favorites]


SASP, is there really much difference in your edition of TKAM and the school's? If they say "read chapter 5" what difference would it make? It's not like you need the right translation!

I'd risk letting your kid read your copy if you have one. Don't give the vultures any more money.
posted by emjaybee at 8:37 PM on March 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


These people are such vultures.
posted by latkes at 8:42 PM on March 15, 2016


A lot of teachers want everyone using the exact same edition so the page numbers line up, the better to say "turn to page 73 and discuss this line." Whether or not the teacher is that strict about it depends a lot on the teacher.
posted by zachlipton at 8:43 PM on March 15, 2016 [13 favorites]


They don't say "Read chapter 5" they say "Read page 10 paragraph 2"
posted by I-Write-Essays at 8:46 PM on March 15, 2016 [10 favorites]


SASP, is there really much difference in your edition of TKAM and the school's? If they say "read chapter 5" what difference would it make? It's not like you need the right translation!
I mean, that's true if you only approach the book at the level of plot. But if you actually want to engage carefully with the text, you need to be able to point to particular passages, which is a lot easier if you're all using the same edition.

I understand why TKAM is such a popular book, because a lot of kids love it and it's also serious while being short enough and age-appropriate for junior high school students, but I really am not sure that I think it's the best choice, and I don't think it would be a tragedy if schools replaced it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:50 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Even if you think To Kill a Mockingbird is no longer (or never was) a good way to introduce middle-school kids to a way of talking about race and class issues in the US, can you at least concede that the estate of the author prohibiting the publication of an affordable edition is not the best way to encourage the adoption of OTHER texts? That it might be a really shitty way to exercise the power of copyright?
posted by rtha at 8:54 PM on March 15, 2016 [16 favorites]


(The "you" in my comment is a general "you", not aimed at any particular person, btw.)
posted by rtha at 8:55 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


In all sincerity, and I do apologize if I'm showing my ass here, but I am specifically talking about children who have not had much exposure to POC. This is the reality of my daughter's school. Many white adults in the US are not capable of critical thinking about race. Why would I hold children to a higher standard? Small steps lead to the greater good. I apologize for causing offense.
posted by Ruki at 8:56 PM on March 15, 2016 [26 favorites]


Why would I hold children to a higher standard?

Well, school is a great place to expose children to voices and points of view that they might otherwise never seek out.

But I think it's the parents, and not the children, that you really have to worry about. Children are a lot more open-minded than they're given credit for. They're not a very socially aware, critical group, but they also don't have the same defensive walls that many adults do.

Coddling white children's white fragility by, for example, not assigning them works that address racism from the point of view of POC, seems like a great way to reinforce those walls, though. It also seems like a great way to perpetuate the idea that these points of view are "radical."

I guess what I'm saying is, white children are not necessarily going to perceive POC points of view as an attack, but we can teach them to perceive them that way.

Not that I have a firm opinion of TKAM, but I think it's a poor argument for keeping POC points of view out of schools!
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:14 PM on March 15, 2016 [21 favorites]


As a teacher who has used Mockingbird in the classroom, I think not printing the mass market paperback is a terrible decision.

However, most schools that teach Mockingbird HAVE it already. And while some books get lost or ruined each year, very few have to be replaced. In the three years I taught it, I think we lost/destroyed 1-2 copies. That's with 400-500 students reading it, just in my classes alone. And while we had the "mass market paperback" edition, we had to buy special ones with hard covers that were hard to deface or destroy.

I also taught novels where kids bought their own books. And trying to coordinate with 35 15-year-olds so that we're all looking at the same line in 10 different versions of the text...that's another circle of hell right there.

Many schools are also moving away from class novels in English (personally, a welcome change for me!) so this may not have a huge impact on schools. We'll see.
posted by guster4lovers at 9:15 PM on March 15, 2016 [8 favorites]


fwiw, and I don't know if this is what Ruki was meaning to get at or not, but I don't think the barrier towards teaching better introductions to racial inequality is the kids. I'm pretty sure it's the parents. and I think that's why, unfortunately, Mockingbird is currently the most-used and possibly best option many schools have to start that conversation, because something stronger and better might "cause offense"

I'm not saying that's cool, good, or acceptable, I'm just saying that generally speaking any real barrier you come across with issues like this isn't an issue with the kids, it's an issue with the parents. kids typically adapt just fine as long as adults aren't freaking the hell out about it

or on preview, what Kutsuwamushi said.
posted by suddenly, and without warning, at 9:35 PM on March 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


Well, in Canada it will be public domain in 2066....
posted by Canageek at 9:42 PM on March 15, 2016


FWIW as a white upper middle class 13 year old I had a very positive reaction to TKAM and a negative one to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Looking back, no, that says nothing good about me. And I understand the weariness with books about racism where the key agents are all white. But I can't imagine replacing books it with books that are 'better' or 'more challenging' will evoke the desired reaction in everyone. Better to keep a variety and hope some stand out, and doubly so if the teachers and parents will have trouble engaging as well. Could you imagine David Brooks' 13 year old asking his dad about Ta-Neishi Coates?

I mostly came to post about how disgusting it was to make this decision that Harper Lee never made while alive, while her body is barely cold. But after reading the article everything about this seems so opaque I have no clue who's benefiting or what Lee might have thought.
posted by mark k at 9:43 PM on March 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


Honestly, the older I get and the more time passes, the more I think we need to do away with To Kill A Mockingbird, not because of the family it showcases, but because it makes its point about racism by making a shittier sexist point about rape accusers. Atticus discredits Mayella's testimony by showing how Tom wasn't physically strong, by saying "why didn't anyone hear you scream", by saying "didn't you fight back." And this is all supposed to be a ringing vindication. There's a lot of talk about how Mayella looks like the ideal of Southern womanhood on the stand but is really poor white trash, and just my memory of it makes me want to throw it across the room.
posted by corb at 9:44 PM on March 15, 2016 [29 favorites]


In all sincerity, and I do apologize if I'm showing my ass here, but I am specifically talking about children who have not had much exposure to POC.

Since you said you are talking about the US, it's hard for me to imagine children who haven't had much exposure to POC unless they don't watch televsion, see movies or listen to music.
posted by layceepee at 9:44 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm a person of color who grew up in a mostly non-white-majority culture in the US but I had very little exposure to the dominant race narrative of these United States, and TKAM was very much a window and door to that aspect of our nation.

Our country is still very segregated. That Kids Today can see a lot more people of color on TV or hear them on the radio now than was possible when I was a kid doesn't actually mean they are exposed in a meaningful way to the issues that people of color, black people especially, face in a daily way that is not mediated by mass media.
posted by rtha at 9:54 PM on March 15, 2016 [31 favorites]


Since you said you are talking about the US, it's hard for me to imagine children who haven't had much exposure to POC unless they don't watch televsion, see movies or listen to music.

I am sure I'm undeniably a huge outlier here but in the 4 towns that were consolidated for grade school thru high school that I attended there was literally not a single minority student, teacher, coach, etc. and I know this was true for the surrounding towns as well. I essentially went the entirety of the first 18 years of my life without engaging with any POC in any meaningful way, as in like, beyond anything like asking for directions, save for a single Native American family with whom just... nothing really came up, ever, about it.

Getting out into the real world in a relatively large city was... interesting. I had a lot to learn and still do. The default for too much of my life was 'colorblind' racism and that persists in my hometown and surrounding towns.

It was surprisingly easy where I grew up to have almost no exposure to POC via tv, movies. But I do understand that this was a different time and things too literal years to reach us from the 'outside world'--that said, any exposure I had then was super shallow, and I would believe that if kids didn't put any effort into exposing themselves to these things on anything more than the most shallow level they wouldn't necessarily get much out of what exposure they do have. And the parents would be my generation, who I'm sure in my area are still coasting along on that 'colorblind' path.

I just think it's still very easy to be exposed to POC via tv, music, movies etc. without ever actually engaging with them beyond 'they exist' and definitely not getting into the topic of racism on any meaningful level. So the brief parts in Social Studies/History we got on slavery and the Trail of Tears and such and To Kill a Mockingbird were about all we got. I can say they were definitely insufficient.

Not saying it's common, just saying it does happen, and I could see that still being the case in fairly closed off communities today. There still aren't a lot of POC on television, at least on the most popular shows, and most shows still don't address racism when POC are there. A lot of the shows that do deal with that are tucked away on their own network. I think that's gotten a lot better in the past 2 years even, but still.
posted by suddenly, and without warning, at 10:12 PM on March 15, 2016 [12 favorites]


While this is a terrible decision, I can't help but think that perhaps there might just be a book written in the last fifty plus years that also deals with racism in America.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 10:13 PM on March 15


I was never a fan, actually. I preferred Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Also, for books by/about white people - Black Like Me.
posted by jb at 10:57 PM on March 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


A multiracial classmate read this for US lit and didn't like that Griffin took it lightly when he was called n*; that he considered it being said only to his skin. DJ made it clear that when he heard it used toward him the word was never just about his skin.
posted by brujita at 11:31 PM on March 15, 2016


The current Amazon price for new paperbacks of Octavia Butler's Kindred is now slightly below the list price of the TKAM mass market quoted in the article.

Schools and parent groups, take note!
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 11:47 PM on March 15, 2016 [13 favorites]


Many white adults in the US are not capable of critical thinking about race. Why would I hold children to a higher standard? Small steps lead to the greater good. I apologize for causing offense.

You didn't offend me. But I do think you underestimate what a child or a student is capable of learning. I've never read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. But I've read quite a bit ABOUT the book. My undergrad was in English Literature and I have been a life long fan of books and reading. I wish I had been exposed to more non-white canonical authors growing up. There are so many wonderful books written by persons of colour that tackle race and bigotry:

- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
- A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson
- Obasan by Joy Kogawa
- Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine by Bebe Moore Campbell
- 47 by Walter Mosley
- Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery by John Gregory Brown
posted by Fizz at 11:57 PM on March 15, 2016 [16 favorites]


Canageek: "Well, in Canada it will be public domain in 2066...."

TPP might change that.
posted by Mitheral at 12:20 AM on March 16, 2016 [3 favorites]


Jack Metzgar (quoting the work of Patricia Turner and Nadine Hubbs) is quite compelling on why To Kill a Mockingbird is actually somewhat pernicious on race, and enables middle-class and professional whites to project the blame for racism onto a stigmatised lower-class White other:
Nadine Hubbs ... shows how an educated white “narrating class” tends to see working-class whites are “ground zero for America’s most virulent social ills: racism, sexism, and homophobia.” Hubbs traces this to a Southern tradition of “white elites placing the blame for racial violence on poor whites as early as the turn of the twentieth century.” Hubbs quotes Patricia Turner, who has dubbed it “the fallacy of To Kill a Mockingbird”, which is the “notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens.”
posted by Sonny Jim at 1:53 AM on March 16, 2016 [11 favorites]


While this is a terrible decision, I can't help but think that perhaps there might just be a book written in the last fifty plus years that also deals with racism in America.

Sure, Crippled America was published less than 5 months ago.
posted by fairmettle at 3:06 AM on March 16, 2016


As much as I appreciate Native Son, I don't know if it's the best book to replace TKAM in middle schools. The story is devastating, and it might be more appropriate for 11th or 12th graders. Not knocking it, just pointing out its appropriate audience.
posted by pxe2000 at 3:36 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


In addition to the distribution of assets, the will may reveal where Ms. Lee decided to donate her papers, a literary treasure trove. A number of institutions are thought to be interested, but several people close to Ms. Lee have said they think she intended the papers to end up with the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, where she studied.

The sealed will means Lee's lawyer pal can now start a bidding war for her papers, too, without any questions about where Lee really wanted them to go. The whole thing, from the announcement of Watchmen to its false marketing as a sequel to this, feels so sleazy it makes me want a shower.
posted by mediareport at 3:50 AM on March 16, 2016 [8 favorites]


My kids' school has them reading Lord Of The Flies (I had to sign a permission slip).

Just bought a few MM TKAMB and Kindred. Our homeschool booster school will not lack. (We do trad school plus homeschool extra stuff) so I'll also get what books are on Fizz's list we don't already have to round out summer reading.
posted by tilde at 4:00 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Not to defend Harper Lee's erstwhile selfless caregiver, but honestly the mass markets of pretty much every book on the school lists have been being quietly phased out for a while now. I run the fiction section of a large mostly used bookstore and a big part of my job is making sure we have copies, used or new, of everything that is or might be on a school reading list. Used ones go fast, by the way, if the whole 8th grade is reading it, so we order new. Brave New World, Grapes of Wrath, Things Fall Apart, even Fahrenheit 451, are just not around in mass market anymore . No, parents have to shell out $15 for a trade. And it adds up, because here anyway it is kind of stunning how many books aren't supplied by the schools anymore.
posted by mygothlaundry at 4:36 AM on March 16, 2016 [17 favorites]


This settles any lingering doubts about whether the "discovery" and publication of Go, Set a Watchman was a wholly cynical, money-grabbing move.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 4:57 AM on March 16, 2016 [9 favorites]


OTOH, millions of children will not have to suffer a vocab/spelling list that contains the word chiffarobe.
posted by valkane at 5:03 AM on March 16, 2016 [13 favorites]


Publishers have been cutting the life support on the mass market paperback for awhile now in favor of trade paperbacks. The only thing that seems to come out new in mass market anymore are cozy mysteries, rugged SEAL TEAM 1000 masculit, and series romance - at least until the author becomes popular and then everything gets upsized. Heck, even wizard detectives/tribal back tattoo books come out in trade now - as do previously deep niche genres like Amish romance, self published stories about why everything was better when I was a kid, and books based on video/tabletop games.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:49 AM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


The current Amazon price for new paperbacks of Octavia Butler's Kindred is now slightly below the list price of the TKAM mass market quoted in the article.

I love Kindred. But it is a lot more violent and dark than TKAM.

But - then again - I read TKAM in about grade 10 or 11, and I had already read The Gate to Women's Country (which has the same violence as Kindred). I handled it just fine.
posted by jb at 5:53 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


I didn't like TKAM that much, but there weren't many school assigned books that I did like. I usually had better luck picking something out on my own.

I do think that a novel by a white lady about white people helping a black man may not be the best book to help children begin to learn about race relations in this country. I am loving all these book recommendations though!
posted by LizBoBiz at 6:14 AM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


This whole white-authors-vs.-POC-authors conflict is the sort of thing only MetaFilter could manufacture.

I read To Kill a Mockingbird... along with Native Son and Invisible Man. At public school. In Mississippi. In the early nineties. All were required reading. I find it hard to believe that TKAM is the only book kids are reading about racism.
posted by echocollate at 6:23 AM on March 16, 2016 [8 favorites]


I've never read TKAM. It was never assigned to me in school, and it got shoved to the background of my thoughts as I grew older.

My 14 year old son's English class started reading it a few weeks ago. He's not much of a reader, but he LOVED it. Absolutely loved it. Loved the characters, loved the setting, loved the story. Hated that his teacher told the class not to read ahead, hated that his teacher told them to skip certain chapters because they "weren't important".

He's now reading it aloud to me, a chapter a night.

So for that, I'm very thankful the book exists.
posted by Lucinda at 6:37 AM on March 16, 2016 [21 favorites]


While this is a terrible decision, I can't help but think that perhaps there might just be a book written in the last fifty plus years that also deals with racism in America.

I am sure we can find a few that are more curr not written by those who experienced it firsthand, too. What a great opportunity for having diversity of voices where it counts.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 6:38 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Among the books I read on my own and in elementary/middle school that has a significant impact on my understanding of race in the US were Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (and all the other Mildred Taylor books), Yolanda's Genius, The Skin I'm In, Monster, Fallen Angels, and The Watsons Go To Birmingham 1963 and Bud Not Buddy, by Christopher Paul Curtis. All with black authors and black protagonists who experienced racism and the effects of being black in the US first hand. And they all stuck with me more vividly and opened my mind to other people's differences in experience more effectively and indelibly than Mockingbird.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:41 AM on March 16, 2016 [9 favorites]


Ruki: In all sincerity, and I do apologize if I'm showing my ass here, but I am specifically talking about children who have not had much exposure to POC. This is the reality of my daughter's school.

Two of my kids go to the same school as Ruki's awesome daughter. If I may, my friend...? :7)

layceepee: Since you said you are talking about the US, it's hard for me to imagine children who haven't had much exposure to POC unless they don't watch televsion, see movies or listen to music.

Our 36,000-person New England town is very class-stratified: the northern end is butt-white and richer, and south of the freeway it's poorer and browner. (Sorry, but some bluntness is required here, because it shows up clearly in the schools.) There is a middle school in each part of town, and two or three elementary schools in each "half."

The middle school where our kids go is quite white, in keeping with the neighborhood's demographics. (My parish, for example, has one black family that I am aware of. One!) I can't recall seeing any black faces on the town council, the middle school faculty, or even the elementary school where my kids went.

So with all that milky paleness on offer, the only contact that many of these kids have with POC is movies, music, and TV -- plus also visiting sports teams -- but not much deep engagement in the flesh with real lives, real voices, or real issues.

Now, I believe that a good way to change minds starts with meeting people where they are, and then leading them somewhere better. And the town's reading lists (thanks to buying outright some New York State Common Core curricula that NYS already dropped) move rapidly from approachable stuff like TKaM into much better texts. The reading lists are used across a lot of academic programs, so they can start with something that doesn't blow kids' minds and then move immediately into more modern texts that are farther and farther out of their previous experience, simultaneously in different subjects.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:53 AM on March 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


(Oh my gosh, suddenly, and without warning, my post is pretty much a jinx with yours...only much later. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 6:54 AM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


White kids, even sheltered white kids, don't need to read about white person help a black person deal with racism in order to grasp what is going on. But even if you think that white kids need a sympathetic white avatar in a book about black experiences, To Kill A Mockingbird isn't the only option. My fourth grade teacher read Mildred Taylor's book Mississippi Bridge to us - it focuses on a black family who are kicked off of a bus in 1930s Mississippi, which goes on to crash and kill all the passengers, but it is told from the perspective of a sympathetic ten-year old white boy. It's been 20 years since I read that book, but I distinctly remember it (and it's a prequel to Roll of Thunder, which does have black protagonists and narrators).
posted by ChuraChura at 7:12 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Thanks to everyone who explained what I was trying to say better than I originally did. I monitor my daughter's social media, and I've seen rich white kids (not my daughter, she knows better) call each other the n-word. They have zero understanding of race relations. TKAM is not the only book, but I really doubt if some of these kids could identify with better books right now.
posted by Ruki at 7:16 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:29 AM on March 16, 2016


Well that didn't take long. Harper Offering Schools Discounted 'Mockingbird'
posted by GhostintheMachine at 7:40 AM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


I guess that I think that TKaM is particularly pernicious for middle-class-and-above white kids who live in race and class-stratified places and who only have superficial dealings with PoC. It reinforces the idea, which those kids are probably already getting from their surroundings, that middle-class white people are subjects, while working-class white people and all people of color are objects. They may be objects who should be viewed sympathetically, but they are not the heroes of the plot. They are people who are observed and maybe helped by the heroes of the plot. I think it's really, really important that kids learn early that the world does not revolve around people like them, and that other people's perspectives are equally valid. It's not as much of a problem for kids growing up in diverse communities, who learn that lesson organically. For kids who don't get it organically, literature is a really good way to be introduced to the idea that people who are different from you also have subjectivity and also see themselves as heroes of their own lives.

And I just don't believe that kids need gateways. Did you? I eagerly read books about kids who were very different from me: I had very little in common with Laura Ingalls Wilder or the interwar British child actors of Noel Streatfeild's Shoes books. Lots of kids identify with protagonists who live on different planets or in fantasy worlds. Even for sheltered white kids, I don't think that black people are just a bridge too far.
I read To Kill a Mockingbird... along with Native Son and Invisible Man. At public school. In Mississippi. In the early nineties. All were required reading. I find it hard to believe that TKAM is the only book kids are reading about racism.
I think you lucked out and got an unusually good English education, to be honest. I have encountered college students who got through school without ever being assigned a novel in English class. The trend seems to be away from reading longer works of fiction and towards reading shorter literary works and a lot of non-fiction. The common core standards for English, for instance, really emphasize reading non-fiction for career readiness.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:40 AM on March 16, 2016 [14 favorites]


echocollate: This whole white-authors-vs.-POC-authors conflict is the sort of thing only MetaFilter could manufacture.

I read To Kill a Mockingbird... along with Native Son and Invisible Man. At public school. In Mississippi. In the early nineties. All were required reading. I find it hard to believe that TKAM is the only book kids are reading about racism


I don't think people are manufacturing it, so much as speaking from being a bit older than you and not having any experience of high school after, say, 1990. I'm in my mid-40's and other than TKAM, even in AP lit classes in southern California in the mid-80's, we read very few modern writers, much less modern American writers who were also people of color. This was true for a lot of my college friends who came from high schools in Texas, Virginia, Illinois and other states. We first read Richard Wright and Toni Morrison and Hurston and Ellison in college, or on our own. So it's not that we're manufacturing a conflict, just remembering an educational system that divided (segretgated, one might say) literature into "literature" and "literature not written by White Men"--you had English class in which you read books with special units for books written by women, or non-Europeans, or African-Americans, like the special units you had for poetry or plays, instead of novels.

Black history month was barely a decade-old when I was in high school (it was established in the US in 1976) and the notion that African-Americans were part of American history and culture--rather than the subject of the Civil War--was still pretty radical an idea in many public high schools in the US. And where it was not actively considered a radical idea to integrate the curriculum by presenting African-American authors as "normal" alongside white American authors, it was not considered at all. Public education was dominated by Old White Anglo-American privilege in every single possible way--it was the water and we fishies were not taught we were wet. You had special units on female writers or special units on non-European authors. We did not even cover the Civil Rights era in history class, except to note that Kennedy was shot and so was Martin Luther King.

We all "knew" that racism was bad, but we were in an education system that considered racism to be Jim Crow laws, lynching and refusing to hire someone who was black. It was a system that did not consider how racism included erasing the contributions to culture of African-Americans and included not listening to their perspectives and included not presenting their authors, scientists, and people as an integral part of the world. I think the 80's was when that was beginning to change, but you know the thing about fish not knowing that water is wet.

In 1984, in a 7th grade classroom in Alabama (where I lived before going to high school in California), I was the only student in the room studying To Kill a Mockingbird who understood that Tom Robinson was falsely accused. I remember the teacher pausing for a moment before just giving up and going on, and teaching us about themes of family and talking about Boo Radley. And I remember talking to my mother, who told me that some of the parents had not wanted us to read the book at all.

It sounds like I'm not much older than you honestly, but my two school systems for high schoole were very different than yours. I certainly think high school students (and junior high school students) should read authors from all sorts of backgrounds. And I suspect the value in teaching TKAM now includes discussing how for years and years, in order to be considered "great" literature, stories about black Americans had to be told by white people. But the gulf between Gen X and the post-internet world is really huge, That's the thing I think most often in these conversations: how a few years difference changes perspective so very much.
posted by crush-onastick at 7:45 AM on March 16, 2016 [8 favorites]


I think schools could look at this an an opportunity. There are many short stories, essays, and poems (widely available online) that could be an introduction to a discussion on race. Here's are a few ideas:

"On Friday Morning" By Langston Hughes (Racism at an integrated school)

"Liars Don’t Qualify" (Highlighting the necessity of the Voting Rights Act.)

"The Ballad of Rudolph Reed" Gwendolyn Brooks (Discrimination in Housing)

"What Goes Through Your Mind: on Nice Parties and Casual Racism"

And the necessary follow-up "On Race, Good Intentions, and the Benefit of the Doubt"

(These would be great for the 8th graders who haven't had to discuss race until now.)

The best part about the online resources is that you can start a discussion on race at home, without waiting for your school system to catch up. (I also express my support for Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. I read and loved that whole series.)
posted by CatastropheWaitress at 7:55 AM on March 16, 2016 [9 favorites]


A&C: And I just don't believe that kids need gateways. Did you?

Well, I did not, but I believe that I was/am not typical reader. (Lake Woebegone FTW!)

What I know of these particular kids -- who are Ruki's daughter's cohort -- comes from raising several of them, plus watching their friends, teaching them Boy Scout merit bages, watching their sports, listening to their chatter as I drive them around town, and talking to their teachers and parents. And what I know of them warns me that if I want to open their eyes and change their minds, I will need to do so one step at a time.

But that doesn't mean that there won't be a progression!

crush-onastick: I don't think people are manufacturing it, so much as speaking from being a bit older than you and not having any experience of high school after, say, 1990.

Totally! I graduated in 1990, and even with a progressive high school English teacher and a social justice-influenced religion program (at a Catholic school), there was still a limit on what we got from PoC writers. Getting the 1987 Toni Morrison book Beloved in 1989-90 was pretty cutting edge. :7) We also got Things Fall Apart and a selection (photocopied from an issue of Harper's) from Ben Hamper's book about working in a Michigan auto factory [available to Harper's web site users here], and a few other interesting things to go with our Shakespeare and Lord of the Flies.

So I won't look over the top of my glasses and say that Things Were Different In My Day, but...well, I am excited to see a broader selection of works offered to students, and I hope the trend will continue!
posted by wenestvedt at 7:56 AM on March 16, 2016


The sealed will means Lee's lawyer pal can now start a bidding war for her papers, too

Good luck with that one, skippy. Institutions able and willing to engage in a "bidding war" over any author's papers are about as rare as Boo Radley's dinner parties.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:00 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Hey, October Surprise, thank you for that list! I have already read one (the story "Liars Don't Qualify") which was new to me, and Ms. Chung's follow-up piece was also welcome.

I will read the other two today. Thanks again!
posted by wenestvedt at 8:09 AM on March 16, 2016


I don't think people are manufacturing it, so much as speaking from being a bit older than you and not having any experience of high school after, say, 1990. I'm in my mid-40's and other than TKAM, even in AP lit classes in southern California in the mid-80's, we read very few modern writers, much less modern American writers who were also people of color.

Ah, fair point. I believe (please, teachers, correct me if I'm wrong) that most public school curricula have been fairly well integrated since then. In addition to Wright and Ellison, I read Hurston, Hughes, Angelou, and Walker, and those are just the ones that have stuck in my head for 20+ years. If I remember correctly all but Hurston and Angelou were part of the required reading curriculum. The others were selections in an optional bunch of texts from which we could choose. We studied Hughes as part of the regular American poetry section of my 10th grade literature class.

They may be objects who should be viewed sympathetically, but they are not the heroes of the plot. They are people who are observed and maybe helped by the heroes of the plot. I think it's really, really important that kids learn early that the world does not revolve around people like them, and that other people's perspectives are equally valid. It's not as much of a problem for kids growing up in diverse communities, who learn that lesson organically.

There is no reason not to read texts about racism from a white perspective unless they're the only texts you're reading about racism. For one, TKAM is not exclusively about or valuable only for it's perspective on racism. Also, it's strange to see this argument made side-by-side with arguments that we shouldn't treat children as unsophisticated enough to read complex, even difficult books about racism from a POC perspective. If kids are sophisticated enough to read those books (and I believe, as a general rule, they are), then they're sophisticated enough to get more from TKAM than "white people save the day, yay white people!"
posted by echocollate at 8:09 AM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


I find it hard to believe that TKAM is the only book kids are reading about racism.

unfortunately I think you are severely underestimating just how low the standards are with regards to addressing race and racism in a lot of American schools :/

I think I got a pretty good education otherwise but in hindsight my education on anything other than white issues and perspectives was absolutely abysmal, and I was gonna say 'incomplete', but the reality is we basically never even got started
posted by suddenly, and without warning, at 8:10 AM on March 16, 2016 [4 favorites]


unfortunately I think you are severely underestimating just how low the standards are with regards to addressing race and racism in a lot of American schools :/

That would be very surprising to me, but I don't contest it. As I said, I read a wide and variable mix of black writers writing about the black experience at a Mississippi public school 25 years ago. Which would mean that my small town Southern school was extraordinarily progressive in its reading list by even today's standards.
posted by echocollate at 8:13 AM on March 16, 2016


Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The: My first thought was, "Do they want to stop people from reading it?"

You know, that's a great conspiracy theory in the making. Why else would they have also published Go Set A Watchmen which completely nullifies the main character of Mockingbird. Maybe her estate is controlled by a bunch of pissed off racists bent on revising history?
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 8:18 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Since that same MMPB edition of TKAM has been available for decades, there's zero problem with using used copies in a classroom. Page numbers are all the same, covers are all nearly identical (the color differs slightly over the years -- if you've got a class set that wasn't all purchased at once, you can tell!)

Anyway. I had a class set available to me when I was teaching middle school reading classes. It had been traditionally taught to the eighth-grade classes, but when I surveyed my students at the beginning of the year, nearly all of them had already read the book when an older sibling was in eighth grade. I bought twenty copies of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (and of several other titles) and went with those instead. I was lucky that my classes were small and I had a budget for book purchases that could cover a few new small class sets.

FWIW, my selection criteria were 1) is some kind of curriculum aid available for the title? 2) is it sufficiently different from the other titles I planned to assign the class that year? 3) can I get a lot of copies cheap? and 4) is it likely to traumatize the students or their parents too much? (I may have failed on that last point by assigning Eva.)

Back when I was being assigned books rather than the reverse, I usually just got the books from the library or a used bookstore if there wasn't one provided by the school. I was lucky there -- I didn't attend schools where edition-shaming was a thing, and also I would have fought anybody who tried to make it a thing. Probably literally. A well-used library card is not really a good tool for learning impulse control.
posted by asperity at 8:33 AM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


Since you said you are talking about the US, it's hard for me to imagine children who haven't had much exposure to POC unless they don't watch televsion, see movies or listen to music.

There's a really big difference between listening to Drake on the radio and sitting next to Drake in algebra class. It's actually a HUGE difference.
posted by hollygoheavy at 8:37 AM on March 16, 2016 [4 favorites]


Why else would they have also published Go Set A Watchmen which completely nullifies the main character of Mockingbird.

You know, I reread TKAM when Go Set A Watchman came out, and honestly Atticus doesn't come off looking too good to modern eyes even in that. From his dismissal that the KKK committed violence, to his making it a moral principle to talk about people hating black people in front of said black people, to just really everything about him. Remember also he didn't choose to defend Tom, and makes a point to say that - he just has principles and ethics about lawyering and the process of justice. He's a terrible anti-racist hero.
posted by corb at 8:41 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


asperity: FWIW, my selection criteria were 1) is some kind of curriculum aid available for the title?

This occurred to me last night and I was wondering how true it is: I know that teachers are busy, and if someone smart has already created good lessons to accompany a text, why wouldn't you use it?

Also, not to shift the conversation, but the existence of state-wide testing means that many/most teachers will be very mindful of those tests, and may need to deliver lessons that prepare the kids for those tests. Does this happen?

(Feel free to ignore my curiosity in order to keep the thread on-topic.)
posted by wenestvedt at 8:43 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Well that didn't take long. Harper Offering Schools Discounted 'Mockingbird'

As I read it, schools will still be paying more, since group buys generally got pretty good discounts off the mass-market price. It also does nothing to help situations where families are given a booklist and expected to buy the books themselves, which is a fairly common situation nowadays.
posted by zachlipton at 9:26 AM on March 16, 2016 [3 favorites]


Remember also he didn't choose to defend Tom, and makes a point to say that - he just has principles and ethics about lawyering and the process of justice. He's a terrible anti-racist hero.

I think any book that makes a central point that justice and the rule of law should be equally afforded to all people, regardless of race, creed, or ethnicity, and in spite of common—even popular—prejudices is relevant and worth reading.
posted by echocollate at 9:36 AM on March 16, 2016 [4 favorites]


> hated that his teacher told them to skip certain chapters because they "weren't important".

Fuck that teacher.

Also, MetaFilter is a parody of itself sometimes. Is the fact that TKAM isn't the greatest book ever written, and there are other good books schoolkids could read, really the most important thing here? Post: "Newly evolved pest to destroy all corn crops!" MeFi: "Good! Corn is irresponsibly promoted by ill-thought-out incentive programs!"
posted by languagehat at 9:57 AM on March 16, 2016 [20 favorites]


I would teach Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry over TKAM in middle school any day. I went to a massively-minority public school system so I read most of the black classics recognized at the time in late middle school/early high school, but, among the YA books, Roll of Thunder was the one that wrecked me. The ending ("I cried for T.J. For T.J. and the land.") is seared in my memory. And, of course, black people are the actual subjects, making difficult decisions in a brutal system. If you're in the unfortunate situation where you're only going to focus on one such book in a year of middle school, you have to go with that one.
posted by praemunire at 11:13 AM on March 16, 2016 [7 favorites]


As books date, they become harder to explain to children, or rather, there's too much that needs to be explained. "Huckleberry Finn" is a great book, but you can't use it for a discussion on race before college because it now requires so much setting of context for the dialects, the vocabulary, the time. TKAM is beginning to enter that territory. The small-town South can't be assumed to be a universally understood default setting. The racism of a previous era is too easily repudiated. All of which is problematic in an official, sanctified book being taught in schools for the purpose of discussing racism.

There's also a problem with being an official, sanctified classroom book. When I was in middle school, I found a book in the library about a girl growing up in the ghetto that was too advanced for my age but was thrilling and terrifying and wouldn't have worked if a teacher had assigned it. When I was in college, there was a tattered copy of "The Color Purple" that got passed from hand to hand. We didn't think it was great literature, but we were incredibly excited by it.

And that's the great shame in the loss of a mass-market paperback: it's harder to pass trade paperbacks from hand-to-hand because they cost too much.
posted by acrasis at 5:12 PM on March 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


but the existence of state-wide testing means that many/most teachers will be very mindful of those tests, and may need to deliver lessons that prepare the kids for those tests. Does this happen?

As a daughter of a teacher, yes. The teachers don't know precisely what is on standardized tests in terms of precise content, but do know content types. Like, in the context of a literature/reading test, you may know that high school students will be asked to read a ~500-word passage from a novel and analyze it in an essay discussing tone, style, literary techniques like alliteration, assonance, etc., or elementary students will get a ~200-word passage from a newspaper article and multiple-choice questions assessing understanding of the content. Teachers don't know the exact thing the students will read, and this is OK-- it's not expected that students will have read the content before. Students should be taught how to understand *any* new text and analyze it to the required degree, or answer multiple-choice questions on content.

Teachers in general are very cognizant of required learning outcomes (such as "can answer multiple choice questions covering content of a newspaper story") when planning lessons. Some teachers adopt the outcomes required to be demonstrated on standardized tests as their preferred outcomes, and some schools mandate this (known as "teaching to the test"). Other teachers develop their own outcomes; the level to which these copy and parallel standardized tests is up to individuals. FYI, discussing adherence to standardized test outcomes vs. personally-developed outcomes with a group of teachers/educators is poking a hornets' nest!
posted by holyrood at 7:18 PM on March 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


acrasis: " it's harder to pass trade paperbacks from hand-to-hand because they cost too much."

Flip side is it is really easy to pass an epub.
posted by Mitheral at 7:57 PM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


MetaFilter: a parody of itself sometimes.
posted by homunculus at 8:22 PM on March 16, 2016


"Huckleberry Finn" is a great book, but you can't use it for a discussion on race before college because it now requires so much setting of context for the dialects, the vocabulary, the time.

That's a pretty low opinion of high school students, there. Also, given that the book was published in 1884 and is set in the antebellum South, if it became too dated in high school to read without extensive glossing, it would have done so so a hundred years or so ago, not recently. If one must teach an impact-of-racism-on-white-people book, Huckleberry Finn beats TKAM hands down: it's far better literature, far less treacly on the moral topic ("All right, then, I'll go to hell!"), and far more important in the English literary tradition. I don't hate TKAM or anything, but its means of executing its moral intentions look misguided now, and there are better books for accomplishing today's equivalent of Harper Lee's ends.
posted by praemunire at 12:47 AM on March 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


"- Native Son by Richard Wright"

Oh please no.

Richard Wright is an incredibly over-rated author, who is by turns ham- and heavy-handed.

Because of disjunctions between the regular school system and the magnet schools that I mostly went to, I had to read Black Boy three times (once in middle; twice in high school) and Native Son once (high school). He writes like a doctrinaire Communist, and his po'-faced caricatures are as two-dimensional as propaganda posters.

This thread, like some other conversations I had with former coworkers, especially when I was working on a bill about education here in California, have really made me appreciate how exceptional my multi-culty curricula were in Michigan public schools. In middle school, we read Black Boy, yeah, but also the Autobiography of Malcolm X (including a school field trip to see the movie) and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, along with Where the Red Fern Grows and Red Badge of Courage. In high school, through a combination of Freshman English (required), Intro to Lit, (required) and American Literature (restricted elective), I read some anthology of Langston Hughes, some anthology of Zora Neale Hurston, Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin, Black Boy (twice, ugh), Native Son, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, an anthology called Listen, White Man, I'm Bleeding, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (I feel kinda guilty about those, since the depth of the stories wasn't something I really picked up on, but I remember them being really brutal in a way that I'm unlikely to revisit), and Nigger by Dick Gregory. Aside from Listen, White Man, I'm Bleeding and Nigger, they were all directly assigned (those two were picks from a list of out-of-class books). This was along with the usual Most Dangerous Game, Catcher in the Rye, Grapes of Wrath and Hamlet, though I missed a lot of books people complain about having forced on them (Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Scarlet Letter, Ethan Frome, any Austen or Brontes). There were a handful of others that I remember (Woman Warrior, Lord of the Flies), but a significant chunk of my public school reading list was African-American authors, and I always had assumed that, yeah, other people only had to plow through Black Boy once, but you'd still get a smattering. Just like how it surprised me out here in California that we had to work to get Harvey Milk included in textbooks — I assumed everyone had learned about him in social studies and American history, since I had 20 years earlier in a more conservative state. And I was nonplussed when trying to explain how being gay could be a valuable thing to learn about an author — like, how could you teach Hughes, Wright, Baldwin, etc. without mentioning that? But if people had to read them at all, they apparently tuned it out.

And sure, there were huge gaps — off the top of my head, I can only think of a few Asian authors we had to read, Amy Tam being the stand-out. And I can't remember any Latino/Chicano authors, though it's possible we read some and I just don't remember them.

So it's weird to read some of this conversation where apparently there are large swaths of America where TKAM is the only race-related fiction they're going to get. I don't remember reading it in school, and it's been so long since I thought about it actively that I can't even tell you whether I read it or whether I just saw the movie at some point (second semester senior year, the American History teacher's marriage collapsed so we spent pretty much every class watching movies while she sobbed at her desk — which is why I had to take a test on Stargate as it relates to uh the Spanish-American War?).

And thinking back — so much of this was just pitched as "If you want to be conversant with American literature, this is what you read." Like, I was in high school when Song of Solomon won the Nobel Prize. Of course that was important to read. I vaguely regret not getting a better grounding in Shakespeare, since I don't think I'm ever going to actually get around to reading the historical plays, and my knowledge outside the big three is pretty shaky, but it seems vaguely criminal to have curricula so truncated as to not hit many, if not all, of these books. I recognize that I was lucky and that I can't imagine any teacher having the guts to put a book called Nigger on a reading list these days (it's a pretty great book, too — Dick Gregory is the Bill Cosby we should have had), but it's so weird to think how limited a lot of schools are on American lit — like, having only TKAM as a multi-cultural book dealing with racism is like thinking that the internet ends at Facebook.
posted by klangklangston at 12:55 AM on March 17, 2016 [5 favorites]


If you want a 1960's era, kids oriented text to discuss racism, no better than comics.

Golden Legacy is still publishing their 1960 s era history series, you can find it for $5 a pop at your local comic shop. real history, great action, exciting and compelling characters --who incidentally were real people escaping torture and lynching and / or negotiating on the national political stage. all for kids. the series was written for kids who are black, but whatever. Make sure you get the Harriet Tubman issue, there are not many issues about awesome ladies.

growing up as a white dude in the south, i have a real distaste for TKaM as a instruction manual for "race relations". The book is terribly patronizing, and other people in the thread have described it better than i. it's right up there with the Moynihan report as "liberal things from the 1960's that sound good but actually are rather insidious"
posted by eustatic at 7:23 AM on March 17, 2016


The publishers and lawyer seem to be in the carpetbagger mode. The splash line here is commercialism trumps pretty much anything else, or choose your executor carefully.

Anyhow, children don't need to learn how to be non-racist unless they first have learned to be racist. TKAMB might be an appropriate gate through the conversational wall that exists between children and their parents. Reading it certainly doesn't preclude reading the works of other authors. It seems to me that (especially in a classroom) works that deal with the white view of racism can meet works that deal with the black view, with productive results. What sort of synergy might be generated at that particular interface?

Wouldn't the resulting discussions depend on the demographic in the classroom?
posted by mule98J at 11:46 AM on March 17, 2016


Dang, klang, you definitely lucked out.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:43 PM on March 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


mule98J: ...children don't need to learn how to be non-racist unless they first have learned to be racist.

C.f. this short piece from Professor Hammerstein and Professor Rogers, who had almost exactly the same thought. [SLYT]
posted by wenestvedt at 12:45 PM on March 17, 2016


"Dang, klang, you definitely lucked out."

What can I say? It was the '90s, when the PC police took over and frogmarched everyone to mandatory Kwanzaas.

The Ann Arbor schools made a real push to value diversity, and I think that it was pretty effective overall. And the magnet schools definitely made an extra effort to include diversity in the curricula, which I think was worthwhile despite the fact that some years I probably read more books by black authors than I had black classmates. Another perverse thing about it was that so many of my black neighbors got slow-tracked that very few of them got to read this stuff that I imagine was orders of magnitude more relevant to their lives than Nathaniel Hawthorne — the lower English classes definitely leaned heavier on the "classic canon" which meant that they got Black Boy as the sum total of black authorship. Which, as previously mentioned, was pretty crap. But it's not like I was an exceptional student — lots of my classmates went through pretty much the same courses. And because it was essentially district-wide, I just assumed that everybody else got a comparable sample. NORMATIVE BIAS FOR THE WIN.
posted by klangklangston at 6:20 PM on March 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


...some years I probably read more books by black authors than I had black classmates.

Well, if you can't have the one, at least you had the other? Oh, Michigan... ....says the Minnesotan.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:22 PM on March 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Overrated.

Someone needed to say it.
posted by mrgrimm at 9:45 PM on March 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Many people have already said it in this thread.
posted by mediareport at 5:43 AM on March 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


Oh, one more from middle school: We also read the Epic of Sundiata, or whatever middle-school appropriate translation there was.
posted by klangklangston at 10:47 AM on March 18, 2016


Many people have already said it in this thread.

Not in so few words.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:21 PM on March 18, 2016


Many people have already said it in this thread.

Not in so few words.

Brevity is the soul of trolling.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:24 PM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Brevity is the troll of lolbutts
posted by klangklangston at 7:01 PM on March 19, 2016


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