Atticus Finch Is Still a Decent Man

John Howard Griffin in reply to LeeEsq says:

Ummmmm, no. It’s actually a fairly common reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_a_Mockingbird#Social_commentary_and_challenges

With a shift of attitudes about race in the 1970s, To Kill a Mockingbird faced challenges of a different sort: the treatment of racism in Maycomb was not condemned harshly enough. This has led to disparate perceptions that the novel has a generally positive impact on race relations for white readers, but a more ambiguous reception by black readers. In one high-profile case outside the U.S., school districts in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia attempted to have the book removed from standard teaching curricula in the 1990s,[note 3] stating:

The terminology in this novel subjects students to humiliating experiences that rob them of their self-respect and the respect of their peers. The word ‘Nigger’ is used 48 times [in] the novel … We believe that the English Language Arts curriculum in Nova Scotia must enable all students to feel comfortable with ideas, feelings and experiences presented without fear of humiliation … To Kill a Mockingbird is clearly a book that no longer meets these goals and therefore must no longer be used for classroom instruction.[112]

Furthermore, despite the novel’s thematic focus on racial injustice, its black characters are not fully examined.[75] In its use of racial epithets, stereotyped depictions of superstitious blacks, and Calpurnia, who to some critics is an updated version of the “contented slave” motif and to others simply unexplored, the book is viewed as marginalizing black characters.[113][114] One writer asserts that the use of Scout’s narration serves as a convenient mechanism for readers to be innocent and detached from the racial conflict. Scout’s voice “functions as the not-me which allows the rest of us—black and white, male and female—to find our relative position in society”.[75] A teaching guide for the novel published by The English Journal cautions, “what seems wonderful or powerful to one group of students may seem degrading to another”.[115] A Canadian language arts consultant found that the novel resonated well with white students, but that black students found it “demoralizing”.[116] Another criticism, articulated by Michael Lind, is that the novel indulges in classist stereotyping and demonization of poor rural “white trash”.[117]

The novel is cited as a factor in the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, however, in that it “arrived at the right moment to help the South and the nation grapple with the racial tensions (of) the accelerating civil rights movement”.[118] Its publication is so closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement that many studies of the book and biographies of Harper Lee include descriptions of important moments in the movement, despite the fact that she had no direct involvement in any of them.[119][120][121] Civil Rights leader Andrew Young comments that part of the book’s effectiveness is that it “inspires hope in the midst of chaos and confusion” and by using racial epithets portrays the reality of the times in which it was set. Young views the novel as “an act of humanity” in showing the possibility of people rising above their prejudices.[122] Alabama author Mark Childress compares it to the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that is popularly implicated in starting the U.S. Civil War. Childress states the novel “gives white Southerners a way to understand the racism that they’ve been brought up with and to find another way. And most white people in the South were good people. Most white people in the South were not throwing bombs and causing havoc … I think the book really helped them come to understand what was wrong with the system in the way that any number of treatises could never do, because it was popular art, because it was told from a child’s point of view.” [123]

Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Birmingham civil rights campaign, asserts that To Kill a Mockingbird condemns racism instead of racists, and states that every child in the South has moments of racial cognitive dissonance when they are faced with the harsh reality of inequality. This feeling causes them to question the beliefs with which they have been raised, which for many children is what the novel does. McWhorter writes of Lee, “for a white person from the South to write a book like this in the late 1950s is really unusual—by its very existence an act of protest.”[124][note 4] Author James McBride calls Lee brilliant but stops short of calling her brave: “I think by calling Harper Lee brave you kind of absolve yourself of your own racism … She certainly set the standards in terms of how these issues need to be discussed, but in many ways I feel … the moral bar’s been lowered. And that’s really distressing. We need a thousand Atticus Finches.” McBride, however, defends the book’s sentimentality, and the way Lee approaches the story with “honesty and integrity”.[125]

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