"Heavily peppered with racial slurs and featuring a white lawyer trying to exonerate a poor black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman..."

"... Harper’s book subjects students of color required to read it to racial insult, the Kameetas said, while its white-savior motif portrays black characters 'as mere spectators and bystanders in the struggle against their own exploitation and oppression.' A more modern novel could be chosen that deals with the same racial issues in a more contemporary way, rather than one 'reinforcing the systemic racism embedded in the school culture and society,' the Kameetas said."

From "Monona Grove parents' request to remove Harper Lee book denied" (Wisconsin State Journal). Don't let the headline confuse you: The request was to remove the book as a required reading in a 9th-grade class, not to remove it from the library.

I think the argument against selecting this book — of all books — as the go-to reading about race discrimination is, in fact, very strong. I understand that schools defend their own choices and are dug in here, but the Kameetas made an excellent argument (as far as I can tell from this summary). The black characters are basically "spectators and bystanders." I think the book is also a problem because:

1. It's a rape story where the woman lies about rape. Why should the first thing children learn about rape be about the woman lying?

2. Rape is a complex subject, difficult for 9th graders to understand, and yet this rape story is cartoonish, in which the man is absolutely, unquestionably innocent. Why present a book as literature when it deals with this important subject in an absurdly unsubtle way, thoroughly subordinated to another subject the author is bent on telling (the outrageous accusation against an innocent man)?

3. Racial discrimination is also a complex subject, especially as it persists today, but the racial injustice shown in the book is so exaggerated that it allows a present-day reader to feel smugly distanced. Nobody we know is that over-the-top racist, so weren't those people back then terrible? That's not how high-quality literature is supposed to work on readers. They should need to question their own simplistic preconceptions.

4. It's not a subtle telling of the story of how courts work and how they might carry racial prejudice forward. The evidence of the man's innocence is so utterly obvious that you have a complete breakdown of justice. That doesn't begin to enlighten students about how there could be racial disparities in the justice system today. It invites them to sit back and think people in the past were crazy.

5. There is blatant stereotyping of the poor white family, and their problems are not treated as perhaps a consequence of poverty. They're treated as genetically deficient. They are truly the irredeemable deplorables.

6. There is great sentimentality about this book in the older generation. Having reread this book very carefully and written about it (in the Michigan Law Review, here), I hold the informed opinion that it is not a very good book and the practice of imposing on the younger generations — with endless pressure to regard it as a great classic — deserves serious, vigorous questioning.