Episode 1: To Teach or To Kill a Mockingbird

Elizabeth Denevi and Jenna Chandler-Ward: Today's episode was underwritten by the Eastern Educational Resource Collaborative. East Ed is a nonprofit group dedicated to increasing equity in schools and higher ed. For more information, go to www.easted.org. You are listening to Teaching While White, where whiteness intersects with anti-racist teaching and learning. I am Elizabeth Denevi, and I am Jenna Chandler-Ward. Over 80 percent of teachers in the U.S. are white, but most don't know that their whiteness matters. Teaching While White seeks to move the conversation forward on how to be consciously, intentionally anti-racist in the classroom. Because white does not mean a blank slate. It is a set of assumptions that is the baseline from which everything is judged. It is what passes for normal. Which means if you are not white or don't adhere to those assumptions, you are abnormal or less than. We want to have conversations about those assumptions, what they are, how they impact our students, and how we can confront our assumptions to promote racial literacy. You are listening to Teaching While White. 

Jenna: To Kill a Mockingbird was ranked by the Association of British Librarians on a list of books that everyone should read before they die as number one. The Bible is second. If you've not read it, the story by Harper Lee follows Atticus Finch, a respected lawyer who defends a black man accused of assaulting a white woman in the deep south of America during The Depression. The 1960s classics sold well over 30 million copies worldwide and later went on to become an Oscar award winning film. It has been translated into 40 languages and more importantly, it is the number one taught book in grades nine through twelve in the United States. I did not read the book until college. At my freshman orientation, they showed the film, and I sat riveted. I quickly got a copy of the book, and I never put it down. I understood Scout; she did not want to act like a lady; I grew up in Virginia in overalls, and I had to put on a dress for church, but more than that, it was Atticus. My father died when I was fourteen. Atticus was the father figure I longed for. He stood up for what was right, even admits to his own single parenting struggles, and I adored him. I taught it many times to middle schoolers. I thought it was the perfect book. It was the perfect vehicle for discussing everything I thought was important: integrity, equality, empathy. But over the years, I began to question more and more if this was the dream text for my students the way that it was for me. One time I taught it, a student of mine, a black girl, asked if she could leave the room as I discussed the historical context of the N-word, she looked at me trembling. And when I asked her if she was okay, she told me she just felt a little uncomfortable and ran out of the room. It stopped me in my tracks, and I owe this inquiry to her. This book has had a lot of press over the years, every year: comparisons to Atticus and current day

events, the publishing of the controversial Go Set a Watchman, even President Obama in his final presidential speech, asserting the need for both political and social change as a requirement to fighting racism and bigotry. 

(Excerpt from Barack Obama’s Speech): “But laws alone won’t be enough. Hearts must change. It won't change overnight; social attitudes oftentimes take generations to change. But if our democracy is to work the way it should in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction: Atticus Finch. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around.” 

Jenna: I was buzzing from head to toe, listening to my president, a black man, quote Atticus Finch, a white man, about the need for racial empathy. Both men, the epitome of integrity, strength and courage. Perfect father figures. I knew I could not do a story on To Kill a Mockingbird without speaking to Brendan. Brendon and I taught together at the same school for many years, and he is now the headmaster of an independent school in the suburbs of Boston. He identifies as a white male. Brendan can tell you the chapter, if not the exact page, of any quote. He's the only person I've ever met who felt as strongly about Mockingbird as I did. And my daughter's name is Harper. I love this book. In some ways, I feel like this book is sort of responsible for our friendship in a way. 

Brendan: No doubt. 

Jenna: So we've had a connection around this text for a really long time. What do you think Harper Lee wrote this book for? 

Brendan: I think she wrote it for her father, in part. I think the optimist in me believes that she wrote it for the American people in the middle of a significant movement in our history, deeply rooted in race and in class, and wanted to effect positive change in that effort. But those would be--I think she wrote it for me, also probably. 

Jenna: And also me. 

Brendan: Yeah. Right. 

Jenna: What strikes me recently is that I feel like she wrote it for white people.

Brendan: She might have. For good or ill. Yeah. Yeah, she might have. All of the people I listed, I think I had white people in mind. 

Jenna: So what about the criticism of the fact that none of the black characters are fully formed? 

Brendan: I think that's totally legit? I think that is a valid literary criticism of the novel. I think everyone is fully entitled to hold her accountable as an author for creating a flat character in a book that should be more dynamic than that. And that could very well come back to: this was written for a white audience. This was written for an audience that we understood and that audience was a white audience. 

Jenna: But I guess the question is, should it then be taught if young, impressionable youth are reading this book, and it's meant to be a reflection of some piece of their country's history or a part of their story in some way, or there's something that they're supposed to connect to. 

Brendan: Totally fair question. Knowing how biased I am about the novel, that answer is going to be yes to me, until I hear the case and maybe, maybe that case will come out of this podcast. But to me, the answer to that is yes. And the reason that the answer to that is yes is, again, I try really hard to sort of go back to the context in which it was written to say, how much latitude did Lee have culturally in the writing of this novel to send a message as clearly as I feel she sent it around equality, around justice… to an audience that was probably less ready than the audience in 2016, to hear that message--if that makes sense. And so a big part of my teaching of it has always been recognizing the context in which it's written and recognizing the ways in which the message continues to resonate, so that the historical context unit actually featured Ferguson, Missouri, two years ago or, you know… that, to me, speaks to its continued resonance in our history. To me the question you're asking actually becomes, ‘Why are you teaching it?’--like not whether, but yeah, what is your goal in teaching it? Because if you're aiming to teach excellent writing by teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, first of all, I think you could make a hell of a case that you could do it. I find myself there (*snaps fingers*) in an instant. Right down to like the flick of the shutter from the Radley’s. Like everything about it, I just think it's beautiful. And I write it because I think if nothing else, I think it forces the conversation and provides a debate--for what it's worth--but it forces the conversation of race into a middle school English classroom. And it does so in a way that allows that conversation to come authentically, naturally, and as a byproduct of reading an excellent novel--which may actually, at the end of the day, make me not a great teacher, that I need that text to necessarily force that conversation right? Like if

that conversation matters to me, I could theoretically find it in Shakespeare, I could find it wherever I wanted to. It happens that that text really makes that conversation easy--easy to bring up, that's never an easy conversation, I don't think--and necessary, like you can't read that text without having that conversation. 

Jenna: And does that conversation come at the expense of people of color, do you think? Or kids of color? 

Brendan: I think it can. I mean, I think if you don't have eyes open to that conversation, if you have, as I think a lot of teachers out there have had, a single student of color in the classroom when that conversation comes; I think if you insensitively don't anticipate the impact that that moment could have, I think it could be hugely detrimental and really, really bad for the child, for the class, for the lessons learned moving forward from that moment. Yeah, I mean, I think the times when I feel it is most successfully taught is when there are multiple voices addressing the kids, when there are multiple adult voices in the conversation. In my earliest years teaching it, I like--I was so proud of myself. I printed out a handout for the kids that I called the “Etymology of Racism”. I was so psyched. We looked at the N-word and where it derived historically and how it inherited all of the negative attributes that it carries today. And I remember feeling--there's few worst feelings as a teacher, when you're like, this is going to kill it, what a great lesson I planned, and it was as though like the second I put the piece of paper in front of kids, I was like, no, something--I have missed something very human about this conversation by intellectualizing it, by turning it into a handout. And so that changed. Like the conversation around, ‘No, this word has a history to it. No, this word has its own etymology to it that we need to look at and explore,’ is real, and I think effective--and I think the conversation we've had in teaching it. It needs context, it needs more warmth, it needs more humanity behind its instruction than a sheet of paper. 

Jenna: Have you ever taught To Kill a Mockingbird teaching race? Teaching whiteness? I mean talk about the Ewell’s and class and whiteness and how that plays into this whole-- 

Brendan: Which is another reason, depending on the safety of your classroom environment, I love this novel because there's no absence of rich discussion. There's no absence of meaning or purpose behind the text, like, there are conversations to be had. Again, if you want to talk about the richness of a text that deserves to be taught, like, come on dude.

(Excerpt from the To Kill a Mockingbird film): 

Jem Finch: “How old were you when you got your first gun Atticus?” Atticus Finch: “Thirteen or fourteen. I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point at anything in the house and that he'd rather I shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much. And that I could shoot all the Blue Jays I wanted, if I could hit them. But to remember, it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.” 

Jem Finch: “Why?” 

Atticus Finch: “Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. Don’t eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corn cribs. They don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.” 

Jenna: Do you secretly want to be Atticus Finch? 

Brendan: I am the child of a lawyer, who is my dad. And so I think--I think for a long time I wanted to be my dad. And I think Atticus is cast in the ideal. And as I said, like I know that there are articles out there that suggest Atticus is a byproduct of his time, that can… -- 

Jenna: But for you. 

Brendan: But for me, like I--yeah, come on. But I think the courage it takes, right, like knowing that that gun isn't loaded when you walk into the street. Like I think--I think that's real. I mean, I place him in that, sort of, idyllic place, and I believe that he believes what he's saying to the core. The courage it takes to stand up in a small town, where in today's context, you're gonna have something spray-painted on your door, you're gonna have a rock thrown through, thrown through your window, and you're gonna have people threatening to do terrible, terrible things to you and your family, and you make that speech, and you stand by those beliefs… like, yeah, I wanna be Atticus Finch. 

Jenna: We just heard from Brendan. Jen Nabers is a white teacher who has been teaching middle school for over twenty years and currently is the English department chair at her school. I wanted to meet her because I had heard that she'd decided, as English chair, to take Mockingbird out of the curriculum. Before removing the book entirely, they tried moving it to a different grade level to see if it was a better fit. 

Jen: It's complicated. It ended up just moving to eighth grade English because that was, of course, where they were doing American history. So presumably, they would have a

little more background about Jim Crow, about the time period the book was set in, and therefore be a little more successful with reading it. But then this past year, after some parent questions, I think, that were valid, we--I, I guess, decided to remove it. I don't know if it'll be permanent, but at least for this year. And so it's been--as a teacher, I’ve had a really long journey with that book, I think. 

Jenna: Were you feeling responsible to teach all the historical background? 

Jen: Yes! Yeah, that was really a big sticking point for me. You always inherit books as an English teacher, right. And I inherited a bunch of books that I felt like really required a ton of historical background that my students didn't have. What I found is that kids didn't really know anything about Jim Crow and… But I also teach Anne Frank and the thing I say to people still--I still teach Anne Frank-- is every year the kids come in, and they all know about the Holocaust. None of them know about lynching. So, none of them know about Jim Crow, they know very little about slavery. So I am fascinated by it culturally. How is it that we've managed to give them the overview of a very terrible, upsetting historical incident in one area, and we've all figured out that this is important and we should do it, and the kids kind of know the basics. And in other areas, ones that are our own country, right, we refuse. We say that it's too upsetting--and we: I mean white teachers, white families--you know, we don't do that very well. We're uncomfortable with it. We think kids can't handle it. 

Jenna: So, which begs the question, right? Why remove it even more if we're not learning about our own history, and nobody's teaching it, and kids are coming in, unaware of Jim Crow? 

Jen: My concerns about Mockingbird are legion and multiple. So, I'm very, I was very concerned with the white savior narrative of Atticus, and paired with them not knowing anything about history, they were--we ended up replacing it, let me just start by saying, with kind of two things, with March by John Lewis and with excerpts from The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. And the reason for that is, both of those authors are black folks telling their own stories and--or telling the story of Jim Crow. So I don't think it's that we're losing something by teaching Mockingbird. I think we have replaced it with something better, that really tells the story. Even after reading Mockingbird, kids aren't learning really much about Jim Crow unless their teachers are making heroic efforts, right, to uncover that. 

Jenna: Right.

Jen: It's entirely possible that many teachers don't, right, they're just reading that heroic Atticus story. So in that sense, I don't actually feel that we've--I think we've replaced it with something better. I don't--this is not a popular opinion, but I don't find it--I don't think it's such a great text that… I think we can skip it. I think it has its problems. I think the, you know, the strange narrative effect of a child who's not really a child telling a child’s story. And, you know, there's ways that it's complicated. The Boo Radley plot is bizarrely tacked on. I don't feel a huge sense that the writing of it is this--you know, I think the Power of Mockingbird is in its characters, not necessarily its writing. And so, you know, I think that when people talk about Mockingbird, they talk about their connection to Scout or to Atticus. I mean, you know, that's what really speaks to readers. And so yes, literary wise, I don't feel like we're losing anything, I'll be honest, I don't. 

Jenna: No, yeah, that’s good to know. And you said that this came about because of pushback from a family. Was it a white family, family of color? 

Jen: It was a family of color. And it was more, I would say, general concerns with the whole course worth of texts that use the N-word. And so in--it wasn't a call or a demand for removal, I mean, it was more just like, ‘What is the school doing, and is it the right thing? And can you evaluate?’ I found, our administration was incredibly supportive of that exploration. We talked to a lot of people. We talked to the family, we talked to my principal, we talked to the teachers, we talked to the kids. And more than anything, I think it really showed me the importance of those conversations, that you have to keep talking through those really thorny, difficult, hard conversations, when parents say, ‘I think my kid feels hurt at school.’ And I think part of it is what's going on in this classroom. It's so easy as teachers to feel, ‘We're trying to do the right thing.’ Right, you know. 

Jenna: I'm just curious for that kid, was he, was it a primarily white class that he was part of? 

Jen: It was. It was primarily a white class. And so then it was a feeling, I think, that other kids of color have reported is that, you know, that feeling that all eyes in the room then shift to them when these topics of racism come up, especially because, you know, again, to teach Mockingbird correctly, right, you have to explain to kids what lynching is, if they don't know. You have to talk about the history of that. It is entirely possible that the black kids in the room know what that is and that the white kids don't. And will they be called upon to explain? And so I do think in this case, it was a feeling that it was too much to bear. And that it was, it was just really hard. And that even though--it just

felt like it was painful for kids to walk into that room and know that potentially this was going to happen, right, like we’re going to talk about these things and that they would have to watch their classmates learn something they had already learned that was painful. 

Jenna: Does that not come up with the new texts? 

Jen: I think it will. I think it will. And this is the part where, as a teacher, I feel really unsure. Is it our job as teachers to put kids in a bubble? Maybe, right? Or, who--let me actually say that differently. As white teachers, right, it's our job to think about who gets to be in the bubble and who doesn’t, right. And I think that's something that we're having to think really carefully about, whereas--and I know this seems harsh, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who says it, like, when I meet people who tell me how much they love Atticus Finch, I think, ‘Well, of course, what's not to love about Atticus Finch? He's a flat, boring character, who, right--don't we all, don't all white people want to believe that we can grow up in a completely racist society and somehow, without any effort or work, just magically emerge, not a racist? That's what I think is appealing to people about Atticus Finch. 

Jenna: Wow, yeah. 

Jen: Right, like you can grow up in this country, in Alabama, in post-Reconstruction and somehow magically appear and be not racist. This is the story--this is white people--I don't know, I think this is the story of white people and race. Why wouldn't they? Because it means the same thing could be true of us. And I think that's incredibly damaging to present to kids without peeling back the curtain on that. So why do it? One of things I find very troubling is our discourse about who are kids are these days, and I don't mean my school, I mean like us, like us as parents, right, or us as a country right now, is this idea that to expose the world's suffering to children, harms them, that somehow they--kids, when they learn that there’s suffering in the world, feel bad, and that's not okay to make kids feel bad. And maybe that's just something white parents do, right, I don't know, but I've seen it, right, I've seen it in media. I've seen it, you know, in conversations with my friends who are parents. I've seen this before. And there's part of me that doesn't understand that. The world is full of suffering. How can we raise kids who will want to take on those challenges if we won’t, if we're not willing to let them know that, there is suffering, right? And we all carry a little. 

Jenna: That was Jen Nabers. Christine Saxman, as a white woman, high school teacher in a public school outside of Chicago, and someone I know thinks deeply about how and

what she teaches, Christine does a lot of equity work. In fact, she's on the faculty of SEED: Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity, a project that came out of the work of Peggy McIntosh and Emily Style. Christine complicates our inquiry as she adds an important intersection. While Mockingbird is certainly about whiteness, it is also about white women and their relationship to black men. This part of the story is rarely told in classrooms, and yet is essential to understanding how whiteness gets discussed. 

Christine: The thing that I remember being struck by is how complex, actually, the racial dynamics of the story are and the ways in which it intersects with rape and sexism and misogyny. And so that whole layer of the ways in which white women have been used to persecute black men, I just personally cannot imagine teaching in middle school, which is, in our area, where it gets taught. I do always want to attend to the social and emotional needs of my students, and what is actually appropriate for having conversations about race and sexism with them, racism and sexism with them, and what's not. And I'm definitely fully convinced it's not appropriate for middle school. I'd have to think more about whether I think it's appropriate for high school, because clearly I think we need to be really thoughtful and intentional about the ways we talk about sexual assault and rape and the way that we teach it to students, who are increasingly exposed to images of rape and sexual assault, via the internet, right. And so the ways in which we’re thinking about psychologically, what they're ready for, what they're already being exposed to, and the ways in which we're teaching a book in which a rape is so essential, I feel, to actually understanding the overall dynamic of the book in a way that makes the book as valuable as it can be as a teaching tool. That's the crux of it. 

Jenna: Even though it's not really a sexual assault or rape in that book, actually, it doesn't matter you’re saying. 

Christine: No, because-- 

Jenna: Because then you fold in race… 

Christine: I think understanding the trauma, actually, in this case, of the black man being accused of assaulting a white woman, right, even though the assault did not take place on her. But then understand the ways in which even the false accusation of an assault, the impact that has on black men, black lives, and black communities is. I don't understand how--and this is just my frame, but I don't understand how you can teach that book without having that conversation, and you can't have that conversation unless you talk about rape, and the reality of rape.

Jenna: Christine's point really stuck with me. There is a long history in this country of white women falsely accusing black men of sexual assault. And when we teach this novel without delving into that history, do we end up teaching young people another reason, another story, why women should not be believed when they say they have been sexually assaulted. Are we colluding in a kind of silence about what is really at stake? How many teachers are talking about this when they teach the book? Randolph is a black male educational consultant who has worked in schools on issues of equity and diversity for 30 years. As an activist, Randolph has raised questions about the portrayal of race in literature throughout his career. Randolph says he can walk into a school and feel the effects of teaching To Kill a Mockingbird on the students. 

Randolph: Often, when the book was taught, there seemed to be, kind of a, something cast over the school. You kind of feel it, that there was something that students were struggling with. And it became so familiar that I would often ask schools when I would go in, ‘Are you teaching To Kill a Mockingbird,’ just because the way the students seemed to be moving through the halls. 

Jenna: Students of color or all students? 

Randolph: Well, students of color and white students, because in some cases, as you know, the book was replete with the N-word, and it almost seemed to give students license to use that word, sometimes jokingly, sometimes just throwing it out. And it had a real impact on the children of color. The protagonist and his daughter were kind of--had this interesting relationship. And, as I mentioned, you know, particularly in my community, calling my dad by the first name wasn't even thought of. What was interesting was, oftentimes, conversations would come up where white children would have a nanny or a housekeeper who was a woman of color. And it seemed, again, to play out in these really interesting ways. 

Jenna: Oh, interesting. 

Randolph: Almost, ‘You remind me of my…’ you know, that kind of joke--you know, the jokes that aren't jokes kinds of things. I actually began to wonder what the value was of teaching this book, even though I know it's part of the canon--and this has nothing to do with Harper Lee, you know, her skill. It’s just, I still don't think necessarily as a society, we have addressed race issues to the extent that a book like that can really add to the educational experience.

Jenna: Randolph compares reading Mockingbird to the trauma he experienced during the desegregation of schools. In both instances, teachers hoping to advance education in spite of race instead of understanding the complexity of the role that race plays. The black and white characters are set down on the page next to each other, and that is supposed to be enough to solve our country's racial history? 

Randolph: Whenever I think of To Kill a Mockingbird, I go back to those experiences where teachers taught that book without even acknowledging it had an impact on the kids in the room. It was almost as though they weren't plugged into or connected with the kids they were teaching. So I, you know, I just offer that as some kind of insight. My own experience, when I integrated a public high school in Seattle, there was absolutely no training teachers got, nor the administrators. We were just dispersed to these schools all over the area and expected to, by virtue-- 

Jenna: You're talking about now when you were a student? 

Randolph: When I was a student myself--by virtue of sitting next to a white kid, that somehow we would solve the racial dynamics in our country. I think this was the kind of undergirding of school desegregation. And of course, while it was an interesting experiment, it did not confront the racial dynamics in our country. I was called the N-word everyday. Gradually I made friends, but, you know, we oftentimes don't think of the cost that educating kids places upon them. And many carry this burden well into adulthood and beyond, and maybe even intergenerationally. So I don't take this notion of whatever Harper Lee exposed in our society lightly, you know, it was very deep, but do we really know how to teach it? And do we know how to care for children who are kind of really caught in the crosshairs of this thing? We are just supposed to sit together and somehow overcome three-hundred years of institutional racism. I must say, some of us, we hung in there, some of us, and kind of slogged our way through it. But I think if we really want to educate, teach and learn, then we must be more conscious of what we're doing, more intentional of what we're doing, more structured in what we're doing, and realize that some of these experiences hurt, and they will for a long time, and is that the price we have to pay to overcome our history or contemporary society? But I think I'm left with, I think that there is something to that text that surfaces unacknowledged feelings in our society. For that reason, should we keep it on the shelf? But if we are going to teach volatile material like this, then I think teachers need to be trained in a kind of a anti-racist pedagogy. Parents need to be brought inm, and the children themselves need to continue to have conversations long after the book is closed, and you move on. So let's do the thing right, okay, let's look at the role of white supremacy. Let's look at the role of gender segregation. Let's look at all of that. I don't want to pull books

off the shelf and throw them away. But then if we're going to do that, let's be aware of our obligation to the truth and to how it impacts people. 

Jenna: Does it ultimately matter who Harper Lee intended this book for or why she wrote this novel? Or does the same philosophy of intent versus impact apply to literature? That is, does it matter how good the writing is or story or the characters or what Harper Lee's intent was when she wrote it if the impact of reading this book today can be negative, casts a pall on students, reinforces sexualized images of black men, and questions sexual assault as suspect. It is clear that many people have a connection to this book that is deeply personal. It asks the reader, are you a good person or a bad person? Atticus gives white people hope that it is simply a matter of character and perseverance to be a good white person in the face of racism, even if it ultimately changes nothing. Judge Taylor makes a statement during Tom Robinson's trial. He says, “People generally see what they look for and hear what they listen for.” Are we blind to the needs of our students even when we want to be good teachers? Are we listening to our students and asking ourselves enough questions to be able to guide them through such a complex story? Atticus Finch says not to ask questions we do not know the answers to. Yet, in teaching this novel, we are asking students to grapple with all sorts of things that we as teachers--at least I--don't have the answers to. The story editor for today's podcast is Kate Ellis. And it was edited and mixed by Lyra Smith. Our theme song was written and performed by Todd Bearson, and the original music in this episode was written and performed by Billy Hamilton. Thanks to our guests Brendan Largay, Jen Nabers, Christine, and Randolph Carter. Special thanks to Jonathan Schmid and Sean Cole. This is Jenna Chandler-Ward and this has been Teaching While White.