Is centering white folks in the struggle against racism a bit cringey? Well, yeah — but it’s far more important that the message gets across that you can be born into a system that privileges you and still work against it.
TKAM is an amazing book — I don’t think it sugarcoats anything, or tries to let white people off the hook. If Atticus Finch is a “white savior,” he’s an imperfect one, since Tom Robinson is still convicted by an all-white jury, and is shot while attempting to flee prison. Atticus Finch & Scout are repeatedly placed in physical danger by mobs and racist fanatics and such, a demonstration of how fighting racism could imperil even white people (in history, the KKK lynched whites who resisted the Jim Crow system, too).
It’s not “Quentin Tarantino directs a film starring Jamie Foxx enacting revenge killings on all his white oppressors” (which might be better-received these days), but TKAM tells a plausible story of what resistance to racism would have looked like in 1930s Alabama, and the limits of what such resistance could have accomplished.
It’s not the anti-racist Bible, it should be taught alongside other works (including, obviously, books by African-American authors themselves), but it is definitely part of the anti-racist canon. It caused a huge stir when it was published, and should be studied as a period piece if nothing else.
If we’re tossing out TKAM for teaching anti-racism in the wrong way, even as racists are tossing out TKAM for teaching anti-racism at all, I think we’re being too clever by half.
