Amanda Light Dunbar, our guest blogger this week, is a first-year PhD student in Concordia University’s Department of Education. Her primary research focuses on students’ use of SparkNotes study guides for support with high school English Language Arts. Amanda’s work is informed by her interests in inclusive education, Universal Design for Learning, and social justice. Much of her understanding of systemic inequality comes from spending too much time on Twitter. Find her there at @ADunbot or email amanda.light.dunbar@gmail.com.
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In 2021, readers of the New York Times (NYT) Book Review voted To Kill a Mockingbird the best book of the past 125 years. This caught my attention because Mockingbird comes up frequently in my research on high school English Language Arts (ELA). I’m interested in what it means to “read” a school novel in a context where study guides and prefab essays are widely available, and I use Mockingbird as an example of how easy it is to learn about plot, characters, themes and literary devices without ever picking up the novel. Many people love To Kill a Mockingbird—it won Harper Lee the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1961 and just won the title of best book of the past 125 years—but I have also seen it described as “one of the most often not read” by high school ELA students (Broz, 2011, p. 15). Somewhere in this contrast is something to be learned about who English class is for, who is included and welcomed, and who is othered and excluded by teachers’ and school boards’ curricular choices.
One NYT reader who voted for Mockingbird wrote in their comments, “this book first exposed me to the cruelty of racism. I do believe it changed my life and made me a person who cares about social justice.” This is likely a common experience, not least because “To Kill a Mockingbird often is considered to be ‘the novel’ about racism that students read in secondary English classrooms” (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019, p. 85). Another NYT reader quoted Atticus, one of the novel’s main characters, when he said: “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”[i] Post-#BlackLivesMatter, it’s hard to imagine a student in Canada or the U.S. reaching high school without having considered the cruelty of racism, so contemporary readers are probably less likely to experience Mockingbird as their first exposure to this idea—but the comments raise an obvious question about the demographic characteristics of students whose first encounter with racism might be a novel they read in high school.
I, a white graduate student, am not the first to make this observation. Roxane Gay put it bluntly: “As for the story, I can take it or leave it. Perhaps I am ambivalent because I am black. I am not the target audience. I don’t need to read about a young white girl understanding the perniciousness of racism to actually understand the perniciousness of racism. I have ample firsthand experience” (2018, para. 4). Others have noted, “[i]t’s hard (for a white reader) not to like To Kill a Mockingbird” (Kaye, 2020, p. 71), possibly because the novel “gives voice to the collective and peculiar American delusion that… racism and racist violence, were perpetrated by a negligible number of Americans” (Ako-Adjei, 2017, p. 185). I realize that I am quoting liberally here; please know that this is intentional, as I am not sure I actually have much to add to this paragraph beyond collecting these ideas in one easily-accessible place. The point is—To Kill a Mockingbird is undeniably racialized, not only in the sense that it’s a story about race, but in the way it targets a specific (white) readership.
My own interest is in what we mean when we talk about “reading” in English class. My Master’s research indicated that about two-thirds of students don’t entirely read the books they are assigned in their high school ELA classes. Instead, they skip and skim sections, then rely on study guides like SparkNotes to fill in gaps in information and interpretation. They do this opportunistically, or to save time, or because they do not find the books engaging. I did not collect information about my participants’ racial identities, but given my data collection technique (snowballing—no pun intended), it seems likely that the majority were white. Now, I wonder whether a different sample—one that had included more racialized students—would have answered my questions differently. Specifically, I wonder whether any would have identified that they opted not to read books that were not for them.
It is possible to teach novels like Mockingbird in a way that does include racialized students, and that better educates white students about the realities of systemic and structural racism and their relationship to it. Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides devote a chapter to this in their handbook, Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students (2019). But a better option would be to consider in the first place how school novel choices do or do not actively welcome and include all students. It’s not just about representation, although that’s important too; it’s about demonstrating to students that they and their experiences are seen and valued above generations-old classroom traditions like reading To Kill a Mockingbird.
[i] Note that Atticus is not necessarily talking about race here. He says this in conversation with his young daughter, Scout, regarding Boo Radley, the mysterious (white) shut-in who lives next door.
References
Ako-Adjei, N. B. (2017). Why It’s Time Schools Stopped Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. Transition, 122(1), 182–200.
Borsheim-Black, C., & Sarigianides, S. T. (2019). Letting go of literary whiteness: Antiracist literature instruction for white students. Teachers College Press.
Broz, W. J. (2011). Not Reading: The 800-Pound Mockingbird in the Classroom. The English Journal, 100(5), 15–20. JSTOR.
Gay, R. (2018, June 18). Lots of People Love ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Roxane Gay Isn’t One of Them. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/books/review/tom-santopietro-why-to-kill-a-mockingbird-matters.html
Kaye, F. W. (2020). “I’ve Got This Vision of Justice”: Why To Kill a Mockingbird Is a Fraud. Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice, 11(1), 71–88.
Times, T. N. Y. (2021, December 29). What’s the Best Book of the Past 125 Years? We Asked Readers to Decide. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/28/books/best-book-winners.html
