High school drops classic literary work due to ‘Whiteness’

Kamiak High School in Washington has dropped Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from its assigned reading list because it “centers on whiteness.”

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and centers on Atticus Finch, a White Southern attorney who defends a Black man falsely accused of raping a White woman. The story is told by Finch’s daughter, Scout, who is six-years-old at the beginning of the book. In the novel Finch and his daughter are subject to abuse for their defense of Black people — which include stopping lynchings — and are called “n***er-lovers.”

But because they are White, teachers at Kamiak High have made sure the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel will not be assigned to students for reading. A Black teacher at the school, Shanta Freeman-Miller, says her objection to the book came after Black students complained: one that the book did not “represent” him and one because “it wasn’t written about her—or for her,” reports the Washington Post. A third complained that White students were reading the word “n***er” in the book.

Freeman-Miller and three White English teachers took up the cause. One of the teachers, Rachel Johnson, said that although she grew up loving the book, she heard on a podcast once that Black people find the book “painful.” She reported feeling “guilty” and wrote to the school’s principal that students were suffering “racial trauma.”

“I understand the delicate politics here . . . the plan to remove TKM may backfire,” Johnson wrote. “I also know that the racial trauma our students of African Ancestry are dealing with is raw and real. . . . I will stand by you. I will take the angry phone calls.”

“I am asking you to allow teachers who choose to do so to skip teaching TKM this year,” she added, “while we work on the process to remove it entirely from the curriculum.”

Another teacher, Riley Degamo, said she heard from students that they did not like t

he book. On an assignment the students were given to assess the book, one teen wrote: “This is f****** bulls***.” Degamo cited this as a reason to remove the book from the reading list.

After speaking with Johnson and Degamo, Verena Kuzmany also backed the decision to drop the classic novel. 

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

“To Kill A Mockingbird centers on whiteness,” the teachers wrote in their joint challenge, adding that “it presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.”

To Kill a Mockingbird is only one of the educational sacrifices high school students are being forced to make for “racial equity.” Last month, Oregon’s State Board of Education again voted to suspend essential skills requirements so that students no longer have to demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, and math in order to graduate. The stated reason for the decision was “equity.”

In September it was reported that a Canadian school board purged its school libraries of all books written before 2008 to be “anti-racist” and “inclusive.”

Students and community members who visit school libraries in Ontario’s Peel District reported they could no longer find copies of Harry Potter, Hunger Games, or even more historical literature like Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. The Very Hungry Caterpillar was also removed, along with classics by Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway and others.