“To Kill a Mockingbird is a text that requires deep knowledge of anti-oppression pedagogy so that educators can create learning spaces for students to interrogate the theme of racism as well as biases, assumptions and stereotypes around Black peoples within history and contemporary contexts.”Harper Lee, who knew a thing or two about words, would never have written such a sentence.The late author was not a pedagogue nor a polemicist.Instead, she produced a classic novel about racism in the American South and a small-town Alabama lawyer who defends a poor Black man falsely accused of raping a white-trash woman.The book, for which Lee was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1961, has never ceased to draw controversy. At first the objections arose from accusations of immorality and “filthy” content. More recently, To Kill a Mockingbird has been condemned for its racial slurs — the N-word is mentioned 19 times — the purported harm it causes to racialized students when taught in schools and employing a “white saviour trope,” making Atticus Finch the hero of a story told through the eyes of his daughter Scout, as both a child witness and adult narrator.In one of the earlier ban-the-book decisions by a Virginia school board, Harper herself responded with a saucy young letter to her local newspaper: “Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board’s activities, and what I’ve heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.”I wonder the same thing about Poleen Grewal, associate director of instructional and equity support services at Peel District School Board.All these years after its publication, a seminal moment in fiction for its sympathy towards Black people, its stinging rebuke of a racist justice system and a clarity of moral thinking, a righteous pedant has taken up the anti-Mockingbird crusade again, dancing on the head of a didactic pin.The core fault of the nov ...
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