"I don’t think that White authors and White characters should tell the narratives of African American people. The usefulness of the book has run its course."

Said English teacher Verena Kuzmany, quoted in "Students hated ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Their teachers tried to dump it. Four progressive teachers in Washington’s Mukilteo School District wanted to protect students from a book they saw as outdated and harmful. The blowback was fierce" (WaPo).

"'Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people,' said Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, her book about writing."

"'It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life . . .' But it’s not a choice, really. I am sure that whatever stopped Harper Lee from writing a second book, she’d have preferred the impediment not to be there. And Salinger, in that pitiful late-snatched photograph, didn’t look like a man who was enjoying his royalty checks and a few rounds of golf. Nor could the problem have been resolved by stern self-admonishment and a determination to let things go next time around. Any perfectionist needs to stop being who they are, and that’s hard. I understand Prince and Dickens better than I understand the perfectionists."

Writes Nick Hornby, in "Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius" (Amazon).

"Brett Vogelsinger, who teaches 9th grade English in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, invited his students to use ChatGPT as an aid — not a substitute — for writing an essay about 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'"

"Only four took him up on it, and two dropped out, saying ChatGPT's responses weren't 'long enough or deep enough or interesting enough,' Vogelsinger said. For the others, it did 'a good job of pointing out what parts of the text they should be thinking of.' With ChatGPT, students have 'this little AI friend who is going to bat around ideas with them — that's how I look at it,' Vogelsinger told Axios."

From "Friend or foe? Teachers debate ChatGPT" (Axios).

The teachers are going to have to find a way to make AI a "friend," because it can't go away. I'm afraid young people will stop learning to write. They will only learn to interact with machines. There's no way to keep the machine in the position of "little friend" who is going to bat around ideas with me. But the teachers — some of them — are going to try to keep AI in the the "little friend" position.

"So if the class is reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and the teacher is reading the book out loud and it gets to the part where the N-word is, the teacher gets fired?"

"It has nothing to do with context, but it has everything to do with the actual word," said Marlon Anderson, quoted in "School Security Assistant Fired for Repeating Racial Slur Aimed at Him/Marlon Anderson told the student to stop referring to him by a racial epithet, which officials at a Wisconsin high school said violated a zero-tolerance policy on offensive language," a Madison, Wisconsin story reported in The New York Times,

Anderson said "n-word" when posing his question, but elsewhere in the article The New York Times spells it out.

Here's the statement from the school board president, Gloria Reyes: "We’ve taken a tough stance on racial slurs, and we believe that language has no place in schools. We have also heard from the community about the complexity involved — and our duty to examine it. As a board, we plan to review our approach, the underlying policies, and examine them with a racial equity lens understanding that universal policies can often deepen inequities. We will ask the community for help in that process. I have requested that this item be placed on our board agenda as soon as possible."

The NYT doesn't print the whole text of Reyes's statement, so I was surprised when I saw this additional material at the University of Wisconsin student newspaper (The Cardinal):

Although Reyes agrees with the district’s decision to follow protocol and use “best-practices” to remove Anderson, she sees this incident as an opportunity for the board to look more closely at the implications of existing policies, especially regarding cultural context.

“It is different when a white person says this term than an African American,” Reyes said. “This is an opportunity to move forward aggressively on what's the best way to deal with this.”

How can you have a policy that varies according to the race of the speaker?! It may be well understood in American society that black people have a special privilege to use this particular word, but the school is a government workplace. Picture the lawsuit from the white teacher who gets fired for reading that "To Kill a Mockingbird" passage out loud.

Also from The Cardinal:

Students who protested explained they did not necessarily want to abolish the zero-tolerance policy regarding the use of racial slurs on campus, but rather add steps to it, allowing the administration to look at all parts of a situation before making a final decision.

It's not zero tolerance if you add steps to it!

Elsewhere — "Wisconsin students walk out to protest racial slur firing" (WaPo) — I'm seeing that the high school students who protested were chanting "Hey-hey, hey-ho, zero tolerance has got to go!"

Here's an idea: Teach everyone, including the students, about the "use/mention distinction" and have the consequence for violating the zero tolerance policy depend on whether it was a use or a mention. You could still outlaw the word in the workplace, but make the penalty for mentioning it minimal.

"In a novel, we accept the worldview of the narrator, however limited or objectionable."

"Scout, who is barely 6 at the start of the story, can use words in print that would make her instantly unsympathetic onstage. We also accept that a first-person portrait of a white child’s moral awakening to racism will primarily focus on how it affects the white people around her. But onstage, a work about racial injustice in which its principal black characters have no agency would be intolerable, so Mr. Sorkin makes a series of adjustments. With Scout’s point of view subordinated, we see Atticus through our own eyes instead of hers, making him the firm center of the story.... It’s what happens in the gap between the old and new storytelling styles, as Mr. Sorkin tries to kill two mockingbirds with one stone, that gives me pause. His play, with its emphasis on the trial, is about justice, and is thus a bright-line tragedy. The novel is about something much murkier: accommodation. Atticus — who was based to some extent on Lee’s father — despises racism as a form of incivility but insists that any man, even Bob Ewell, can be understood if you walk in his shoes or crawl around in his skin. It’s hardly a comedy but is nevertheless hopeful to the extent that it clears some space for a future. These are two worthy ideas, if contradictory. In light of racial injustice, accommodation seems to be a white luxury; in light of accommodation, justice seems hopelessly naïve."

From "Review: A Broadway ‘Mockingbird,’ Elegiac and Effective" (NYT).

"If our defense rests on my ability to explain what a play is without sounding condescending, we’re completely screwed."

Said Aaron Sorkin, as quoted by Aaron Sorkin, writing about the litigation that almost thwarted his stage adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird" (The Vulture).

I thanked [Tonja Carter, the executor of Harper Lee’s estate]... and told her how honored I was to be working on the material. I told her she was going to be part of a thrilling night in the theater. Then I told her that drama has rules, no less strict than the rules of music — 4/4 time requires four beats to a measure, the key of C-major prohibits sharps and flats, and a piece of music has to end on the tonic or the dominant. “The rules of drama,” I said, “were written down by Aristotle in the Poetics in 350 BC. These rules are four centuries older than Christianity. A protagonist— ” Yeah, we got nowhere.

Tonja Carter said to [the producer Scott Rudin] and me, “I think you both hate To Kill a Mockingbird” (which would explain the three years we spent working on it), and we faced the scary possibility that we weren’t going to be able to do the play. It’s not that we thought we were going to lose the case — the lawyers were confident we would win — it’s that Scott and his investors couldn’t go into a production under a cloud of litigation, and with every passing day we were getting closer to losing our theater to another show. Was it possible that a person could win a lawsuit just by filing it?

A faux naive question!

At one point Sorkin exclaims, “The play can’t be written by a team of lawyers." And though Sorkin kind of "wished we’d gone to court so I could hear a federal judge decide what imaginary people would and wouldn’t do," there wasn't money-wasting time for that, and the case was settled:

... I finally said, “If Tom Robinson and Calpurnia are taken off the table as issues, I’ll cut ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘Goddamit,’ Atticus won’t have a rifle in his closet, and he won’t drink a glass of whiskey after the trial.”

I'm glad I didn't get around to blogging about the Shorewood School District reversing its decision to cancel the high school theater production of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Because now they've reversed the reversal and are back at cancellation.

An email from Shorewood superintendent Bryan Davis said that there would be no public performance of "To Kill A Mockingbird," which was scheduled to be performed at 7 p.m. Wednesday, "due to mental and emotional health of our entire student body related to the production."

There will be a "dress rehearsal" with only the family of the cast and crew in the audience. There will also be a press conference:

"It's going to be an opportunity for us to talk to all press about the context of the play. Also, we're going to have our students from our Youth Rising Up organization, some of those kids that spoke last night (Oct. 16 at the community conversation on race) so they can have their perspective and their voice in the conversation. So we felt that that was important to do," Davis' email said.

"Youth Rising Up" gets priority over Youth Who Worked Hard to Put Together a Play. The play was chosen by the faculty, not the students. The students worked in reliance on the faculty's support. The faculty caved. The learned lines of a classic story will not be heard so that those who've managed to get the performance blocked can once again have "their voice" heard. Why doesn't Youth Rising Up find/write a play that gives their perspective and learn that play and work hard on a production that an audience would show up for? What do they have to say — anything about courage? Because the Shorewood school authorities could use some.

Here's my post from last week reacting to the original cancellation. Excerpt:

Imagine letting students learn all the lines of a play, rehearse their parts, get all nervous and excited about the performance and then just cancelling it on them — cancelling it on them not because of anything they did wrong or anything that was wrong but because other people talked about protesting it. What kind of lesson is the school teaching?! What's the point of working hard and doing something worthwhile that you believe in and build with other people if the authorities won't support you but will take the "safest option" and side with the people who see an opportunity for protest and disruption.

"Just hours before the curtain was to go up, Shorewood High School has canceled its production of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' in response to a planned protest over its use of the n-word."

"News of a planned protest had circulated on social media early Thursday. And by early afternoon, Superintendent Bryan Davis pulled the plug, saying the district should have done a better job engaging the community 'about the sensitivity of this performance. We’ve concluded that the safest option is to cancel the play,' Davis said in a statement."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Imagine letting students learn all the lines of a play, rehearse their parts, get all nervous and excited about the performance and then just cancelling it on them — cancelling it on them not because of anything they did wrong or anything that was wrong but because other people talked about protesting it. What kind of lesson is the school teaching?! What's the point of working hard and doing something worthwhile that you believe in and build with other people if the authorities won't support you but will take the "safest option" and side with the people who see an opportunity for protest and disruption.

I see the protesters don't like the "n-word" in the show. It would be so easy to modify the script to take out one word. But I guess cancelling is the "safest" thing to do. It's practically telling the students who worked peaceably on their theater project that they should be less well-behaved, so that ruining their work won't seem "safe."

***

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what." - Atticus Finch.

ADDED: I have drawn a line through one sentence because I now believe the licensing agreement forbids making any change to the script. My son John linked to this post at Facebook, and someone there made that point. My response there:

I'm sorry if my blog post makes it seem as though my first choice is to take out the word or if anyone thinks I'd support the cancellation if the word could not be taken out. I think the school authorities saw fit to make that play the one the students should do and the students committed a lot of work and dedication to a project in reliance on the school's choice. It is a terrible betrayal of the students who trusted the school. I was in school plays in high school, and I remember how deeply emotionally important they become to the students. Here's a play with very serious subject matter, and the subject is specifically courage in the face of ignorant opposition.

Harper Lee's estate is suing over Aaron Sorkin's script for the stage version of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

The NYT reports.

In a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Alabama, the estate argued that Mr. Sorkin’s adaptation deviates too much from the novel, and violates a contract, between Ms. Lee and the producers, which stipulates that the characters and plot must remain faithful to the spirit of the book.

A chief dispute in the complaint is the assertion that Mr. Sorkin’s portrayal of the much beloved Atticus Finch, the crusading lawyer who represents a black man unjustly accused of rape, presents him as a man who begins the drama as a naïve apologist for the racial status quo, a depiction at odds with his purely heroic image in the novel....

“I can’t and won’t present a play that feels like it was written in the year the book was written in terms of its racial politics: It wouldn’t be of interest,” [said the producer of the play, Scott Rudin]. “The world has changed since then.”...

"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.

At last night's canceled Trump rally, why did individual protesters, asked on camera what they were protesting, say "I choose not to answer"?

In the comments to the first post of the day, sane_voter said:

Lots of Mexican flags at the riot, with the folks holding them flipping the bird and shouting profanity. Just doing the jobs that many Americans won't do.

Original Mike said "I saw that" and added:

Fox had reporters going through the crowd later in the evening. When asked why they were protesting, several protesters said "I choose not to answer". WTF kind of protester is that?

I'm making a separate post out of that because I believe the question is easy to answer. I know the answer from thousands of history lessons and Hollywood movies, like that one where the child disperses a lynch mob by talking to one individual and calling him by name.



There are the things people do in groups, where the individual is merged with the feeling of the whole group, where the group activity deafens the individual's access to conscience...



... and the way the conscience can snap back when the individual is singled out, confronted squarely, and asked to speak — to bring forward thoughts from his own mind. In the movies, that individual stares silently, then turns and goes away. On television, with a microphone aimed at his face, he says: "I choose not to answer."

The greatest mob break-up in the history of cinema came, I believe, in the 1927 silent film "King of Kings," discussed a few years ago on this blog, here. The mob is about to stone a woman to death for the sin of adultery, and Jesus goes one by one to individuals and writes in the sand, for each, the name of a sin. Each individual, on seeing the name of his sin, turns and walks away.

Harper Lee has died.

The much-read, much-loved author was 89.

ADDED: A look back: "Attacking Atticus Finch for not taking rape seriously... is nothing new.."

"I live knowing that whatever my blackness means to me can be at odds with what it means to certain white observers, at any moment."

"So I live with two identities: mine and others’ perceptions of it. So much of blackness evolving has been limited to whiteness allowing it to evolve, without white people accepting that they are in the position of granting permission. Allowing. If that symbiotic dynamic is going to change, white people will need to become more conscious that they, too, can be perceived."

So writes Wesley Morris in a long New York Times Magazine article "The Year We ObsessedOver Identity" with the long subtle: "2015's headlines and cultural events have confronted us with the malleability of racial, gender, sexual and reputational lines. Who do we think we are?" The article has some topics that I've covered on this blog over the year — Rachel Dolezal, Atticus Finch — but the reason I wanted to blog this is that it ends talking about a book that I happened to notice for the first time yesterday, "Far From the Tree," by Andrew Solomon. Here's how Wesley Morris uses that book:

It could be that... it’s... in our natures to keep trying to change, to discover ourselves. In ‘‘Far From the Tree,’’ Andrew Solomon’s landmark 2012 book about parenting and how children differentiate themselves, he makes a distinction between vertical and horizontal identity. The former is defined by traits you share with your parents, through genes and norms; the latter is defined by traits and values you don’t share with them, sometimes because of genetic mutation, sometimes through the choice of a different social world. The emotional tension in the book’s scores of stories arises from the absence of love for or empathy toward someone with a pronounced or extreme horizontal identity — homosexuality or autism or severe disability. Solomon is writing about the struggle to overcome intolerance and estrangement, and to better understand disgust; about our comfort with fixed, established identity and our distress over its unfixed or unstable counterpart.

Everyone seems to be mulling over the darker tone of "Go Set a Watchman," but...

... I'm reading an article — "Betrayed – Harper Lee wrote the great American novel. She doesn’t deserve this/'Go Set a Watchman' is Boo Radley. Like that key character from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, it was meant to stay inside, locked away, hidden from the world. It was never supposed to be published" — and I see something I hadn't noticed in any of the other discussions of the new book, something that is far brighter than "Mockingbird."

Spoiler alert:

"So the idea that Atticus, in this book, 'becomes' the bigot he was not in 'Mockingbird' entirely misses Harper Lee’s point—that this is exactly the kind of bigot that Atticus has been all along."

"The particular kind of racial rhetoric that Atticus embraces (and that he and Jean Louise are careful to distinguish from low-rent, white-trash bigotry) is a complex and, in its own estimation, 'liberal' ideology: there is no contradiction between Atticus defending an innocent black man accused of rape in 'Mockingbird' and Atticus mistrusting civil rights twenty years later. Both are part of a paternal effort to help a minority that, in this view, cannot yet entirely help itself. Atticus is simply being faithful to one set of high ideals in the South of his time. 'Jean Louise,' Atticus says in the midst of their argument, 'have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?'"

Writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

"She said, 'It’s coruscating, Nicholas!'... I nodded sagely and had no idea what she meant."

"After she finished her second martini, I had to run home and looked the word up myself."

She = Therese von Hohoff Torrey, AKA Tay Hohoff, the editor responsible for turning "Go Set a Watchman" into "To Kill a Mockingbird."

I = Nicholas Delbanco, whose novel "Grasse 3/23/66" was cut by Hohoff from 500 pages to 200.

From "The Invisible Hand Behind Harper Lee’s 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'"

Atticus Finch said "The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people."

Michiko Kakutani reveals in her NYT review of "Go Set a Watchman," discussed in an earlier post, where I wonder about the discussion Harper Lee had with her publishers that led to the rewrite of the story, making Atticus Finch an idealize father and lawyer.

Let me guess, Lee and/or her publishers said Americans are still in their childhood as a people. This needs to be a children's book.

I reread "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1999, when I was invited to respond to another law professor's critique of it. Steven Lubet focused on the way Atticus Finch cross-examined the purported rape victim. Could Mayella have been telling the truth? I objected to Lubet's revisionist view of Atticus Finch precisely because the book is written to be understood by children:

That Mayella’s injuries were on her right side, that her father is left handed, and that Tom’s left arm is so entirely useless it slips off the Bible as he is taking the oath, clearly establishes Harper Lee’s overeagerness to assure us that Tom is innocent and to squelch any speculation to the contrary. (Professor Lubet breaks free of the author’s firm hold.) The author’s decision to forgo the usual subtleties of the novelist’s art undermines attempts at assessing Atticus’s legal skills. Indeed, Lee’s cartoonishly overdone evidence generates its own difficulties: Tom’s left arm is an entire foot shorter than his right arm and it hangs “dead at his side” and dangles a hand so shrivelled that Scout detects its inutility from the balcony, yet Atticus is able to trap both Bob Ewell and Mayella into testifying in a way that would require Tom to have an effective left arm, as if they had never laid eyes on him. Given this glaring lapse in the evidence, it is not surprising that Professor Lubet can pry a number of holes in the evidence and construct an interpretation that Tom is guilty, but I would still maintain that Atticus can be credited with an absolute belief that Tom is innocent and that readers entering Lee’s simplified moral world are compelled to adopt this belief as well.

ADDED: Lubet's argument is discussed in this Malcolm Gladwell article from 2009, "The Courthouse Ring/Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism."

America's Dad — the fictional character — has a very bad week.

1. Bill Cosby.

2. Atticus Finch.

So Atticus Finch was a racist, and "Mockingbird" was a sweetened-up rewrite?

"Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, 'Go Set a Watchman' (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like 'The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.' Or asks his daughter: 'Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?'... Though 'Watchman' is being published for the first time now, it was essentially an early version of 'Mockingbird.' According to news accounts, 'Watchman' was submitted to publishers in the summer of 1957; after her editor asked for a rewrite focusing on Scout’s girlhood two decades earlier, Ms. Lee spent some two years reworking the story, which became 'Mockingbird.'"

Writes Michiko Kakutani in the NYT.

So there is a fascinating chronological sequence of stories, only some of which we can now see.

1. Harper Lee grew up in small-town Alabama, observing whatever happened, gathering her raw material.

2. "Go Set a Watchman," the original manuscript.

3. Lee's interaction with publishers. There are so many fascinating unknowns here. Why did they reject the story she decided to tell? How much did they pressure her to make the central character a hero and to tell an inspiring story of good versus evil? Did she agree with their idea of what would make a better/more marketable story and did she rewrite in sadness/anger/desperation?

4. "To Kill a Mockingbird," the published book.

5. The adoration of the book that was not the book Harper Lee, on her own, chose to write, and Harper Lee's experience of success on these terms, an experience that the public witnessed as only a failure to give us any other book.

6. The announcement of the future publication of "Go Set a Watchman" and the public's reaction to that, making it a best-seller before it is even seen.

7. The 89-year-old Harper Lee witnesses a new flood of intense "Mockingbird"-based love and decades of hunger for more — all the while knowing what happened growing up in Alabama and what is in the book the unsuspecting public will eventually — after all these years of repression — get to see.

8. The publication of "Go Set a Watchman."

9. Harper Lee finally gets to see the public's reaction, though it's a different public. It's more than half a century after she intended to tell us this story, and the readers are primed with "Mockingbird"-based expectations. Those who have been most interested in getting their hands on another Harper Lee book may feel that the book they are getting is much worse than no book at all, because it takes away what they most loved about "Mockingbird," that fine figure of a man, Atticus Finch.

10. For the next 100 years, America tries to understand this sequence of events, and the story of Harper Lee reveals its endless mythic depths.

"Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical."

"Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose. Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth annual trip home. For one thing, she had the life scared out of her the last time she was on a plane: the pilot elected to fly through a tornado. For another thing, flying home meant her father rising at three in the morning, driving a hundred miles to meet her in Mobile, and doing a full day’s work afterwards: he was seventy-two now and this was no longer fair...."

So begins Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman," the first chapter of which you can read here. You can buy the whole book here, at Amazon, where it is #1 on the best-selling list.