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hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia

Memphis Trace wrote:

For the record, my opinion of Atticus—on reading To Kill a Mockingbird a second time after having lived through years of Southern violence against blacks—was not that he was racist in the story...

I have absolutely no doubt that Atticus is a racist. He expresses that fact over and again.

Your surety from a partial reading of To Kill a Mockingbird as an adult that Atticus is shown to be a racist has piqued my interest as an aspiring critical reader enough that I intend to read it again. I've read it end to end twice and came away with the exact opposite opinion: that he was half again too good to be believed as a Southern-educated white man in Alabama in 1933. He qualified as a saint for me.

I very much think the issue concerning our conflicting opinions may be caused by the definition of the word 'Racist'.

After my last post in this thread, that we may define racist differently flashed through my mind, but I forgot to mention it. I am glad you thought to mention it. In most of the disputes I've had with men of good will in my life, it often comes down to having a different meaning for some of the words in the discussion.

Who knew? If you Google the following words; Racist definition ...then several definitive variations are found and some published definitions vary immensely.

Definition 1: a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another.

The example you gave “Atticus says cheatin‘ a colored man is ten times worse than cheatin’ a white man,” I muttered. “Says it’s the worst thing you can do.” is the utterance of a racially sensitive saint by the definition of racist.

I think it is the utterance to his children of a man who recognizes how massively the system had always been stacked against blacks in the South, and for a person to cheat a black was really the moral equivalent of kicking a man you stood by and watched be bound and gagged.

Definition 2 : holding a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.

There is nothing I see in the statement “Atticus says cheatin‘ a colored man is ten times worse than cheatin’ a white man,” I muttered. “Says it’s the worst thing you can do.” that suggests Atticus believes blacks are inherently inferior or that whites have a right to dominate blacks. Indeed he suggests that cheating blacks is the worst thing you can do. I believe it is a statement that condemns the racist system that blacks were faced with.

Definition 3:   a person who directs prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior:

I think by this definition, Atticus comes out as a racial saint in To Kill a Mockingbird. Although he recognized that the system had exalted whites to a superior position, he was never antagonistic toward blacks. And in my memory, he did not discriminate nor was he prejudiced against blacks. I thought he bent over frontwards to discriminate for blacks. I will be most interested on my third reading of the story to see chinks in his armor that I didn't see on my first two readings.

So Atticus is definitely a racist according to definition one; he may be or maybe not be racist according to definition two, but is definitely not a racist according to definition three.

In my two readings of To Kill a Mockingbird, I found it the story of a man who was fighting against the state-imposed circumstances that put blacks at an insurmountable disadvantage. I never believed he was beset with the widespread Southern fundamentalist-Christian belief at that time that blacks were cursed by God: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham 

An excerpt:
The story's original objective was to justify the subjection of the Canaanites to the Israelites,[4] but in later centuries, the narrative was interpreted by some Jews, Christians, and Muslims as an explanation for black skin, as well as slavery.[5]

I've always assumed (based my judgment upon) definition 1: And Atticus certainly believes there are differentials in terms of superiority between the races. He feels these differences because they appear to be self-evident within his society. To me he acts like a Veterinarian who cares very deeply for the animals that he treats but at the same time doesn't consider the dog he is treating to be on the same intellectual level as he, the Vet.

I believe To Kill a Mockingbird shows Atticus to believe the differences between the races to be Founding Fathers' codification of a system of slavery and Southern reconstruction laws http://www.history.com/topics/american- … nstruction meant to restrict freed blacks and ensure their availabilty as a labor force.

Atticus doesn't consider the colored-folk to be his equal; hell, he doesn't even consider white women to be equal to the intellect of white men.

Atticus certainly doesn't consider colored-folk to have equal access and protection to the systems he has access to. As a lawyer, he would have been acutely aware of the legal doctrine in US constitutional law that justified racial segregation. It was a doctrine firmly adhered to in Alabama right up to and through the Brown v. Board of Education decided some 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird took place.

Atticus is clearly an elitist and clearly a racist if judged by definition 1:   

Here is a link to a wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal that may give you a bit of a look through my eyes; and a sense of why I didn't consider Atticus's recognition of blacks' unequal access to the protections of the law to be a result of their inferior intellect or morals.

However, although he is quietly confident of his racial superiority, Atticus never directs prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism against those of a different race. In fact the is opposed to those actions, and as such is clearly not a racist according to definition 3:

It is most interesting to me that you and others see Atticus's racial superiority in To Kill a Mockingbird where I didn't see it until Go Set a Watchman. I plead guilty to your accusation of being a skim reader. Both times.

Both times I read it, I became so immersed that I never saw any indication that Atticus felt he was inherently superior to blacks. ¿Maybe, as the boys down at the pool hall say, third time will be a charm for me?

And another thing I never thought about Atticus, until you raised it in this discussion, was that he was a sexist. I think you base this in part on "In Mockingbird. Atticus lets his young daughter run around in overalls; he doesn’t force her into dresses, because he is a good dad. He understands that she’s a serious person, but when Scout voices her indignation that women aren’t allowed to serve on juries, Atticus says, “I doubt if we’d ever get a complete case tried—the ladies’d be interrupting to ask questions.” He’s a good dad, a good patriarch—but he’s raising Scout into another version of permanent childhood. He doesn’t think a woman has the moral capacity of a man." Quote from link above.

We lost another great one. Pat Conroy, author of "The Prince of Tides," "The Lords of Discipline." "The Great Santini," "Beach Music," and others has died at age 70. RIP, Pat Conroy. You turned what made you the man you became into wonderful stories.

When saying that act A is a worse moral violation than Act B, you may be saying any or all of three different things.

You may be saying that A does more harm than B.  You may be saying that A shows greater moral depravity than B.  You may be saying that A leads the actor to deeper moral depravity than B.

You may be saying two of them, or three.  Does their badness add?  Does it multiply?

I suppose you can chide Atticus for using an arithmetic metaphor where it cannot literally hold, or be held to.  But his error is no worse than that of the little Friar in =The Bridge of San Luis Rey=, and much less considered.

Misinterpretation of the 3/5ths compromise is one of the most insidious half-truths of our age.  The 3/5ths clause did not take representation from blacks.  It reduced the degree to which the =slaveowners= could count their =slaves= as bodies to gain representation.

What I said was >>> I'm not sure if it mentions that Negroes were counted as 3/5s of a man by the Constitution, the founding law of America. How did I misinterpret it within the context of my discussion about the value the Southern white man's system placed on the lives of black men?

I should have written that Atticus takes the world as he finds it AS THE WORLD HE LIVES IN.  He tries to change it AFTER assessing it clearly and accurately.

j p lundstrom wrote:

A respectful pause for the death of a gifted human being.

.....I'd wager a guess that it even seems condescending to some people. How insulting in modern times to say that a whole race is unable to solve their problems without the benevolence of one white man!

Condescending indeed.

A quote from the text....

“Atticus says cheatin‘ a colored man is ten times worse than cheatin’ a white man,” I muttered. “Says it’s the worst thing you can do.”

Condescending, patronizing, discriminatory, elitist, demeaning, superior, belittling, downright hypocritical from the man who also spouts that all men should be treated equally. The very opposite of equality, Atticus treats a colored man with condescension but is so self-absorbed that he thinks it kindness.

This book is making me squirm on several levels.

corra wrote:

njc wrote:

Spot and correct the error, or be liable for "fifty lashes with a wet noodle."

Toe the line?

Got it in one!

njc wrote:

Dill Carver wrote:

I know that my teacher was frustrated about having to tow the line. In the after-school book club he could go off-piste and introduced us to some wonderful literature.

Wet noodle time, Dill. You do see your error, don't you ?

Memphis Trace wrote:

I bought a 50th Anniversary copy of the book about 5 years ago as part of my program to see how much the classics I've liked at first reading have improved as I've learned to read better. I was stunned about how I could no longer suspend my disbelief about Atticus. He came across as a cardboard character. It made me wish I wasn't such a great judge of a story.

I couldn't buy into Atticus either. A cardboard stooge, a puppet of the book's agenda.

As a young man when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird and before I learned how nasty the white folks in the Deep South were toward blacks, just about the time we were passing the Civil Rights Act, and Freedom Riders were being killed, and churches bombed, Atticus was a bigger than life hero for me.

When the Supreme Court overturned Virginia's anti-miscegenation in 1967 and there followed increases in interracial marriages, I thought it might be the product of educated, well-placed brave men in small southern who were in the vanguard of the fight for human decency.

After MLK and the Kennedys were killed, and I witnessed the burning of the Washington DC ghettos, I still thought it was the kind of heroism Atticus showed that helped along the fight for civil rights. After living through the failure of the states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and seeing how difficult it has been for Americans to embrace the whole concept of equal rights, and upon reading To Kill a Mockingbird again, Atticus felt like a prop created by a dreamer who hadn't yet seen how ingrained racism was in the fabric of American life. That is why I was unable to suspend my disbelief about Atticus.

On the other hand, when I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and studied it in the early 1980s, Huck's solitary heroic decision in Chapter 31 to go to hell rather than turn in Jim moved me greatly. I still count it as the greatest moral decision in American literature. It would be another 25+ years after studying Huck Finn before I would read To Kill a Mockingbird again and come to see Atticus as the unrealistic creation of a dreamer.

I remember spouting as much, give or take a word, when writing a synopsis of 'Mocking Bird' whilst at school.

Did you feel Atticus was a puppet of the book's agenda because you didn't support the agenda? I recognized and supported the agenda, but I came to believe as an old man with the experiences I'd had, that such a heroic character would not have survived doing what he did at that place at that time in America. I had become hardened and cynical and I wanted an explanation.

(How I used to make my English Literature teacher squirm and grimace, frown, grin and laugh with my opinions upon the literature he fed us. I was irreverent and vociferous, young and impetuous, filled with passion and arrogance. He is a kindly and learned man, a gentle soul. He taught my daughters, in turn too. He shared with them and their respective classes, some of my old work that he'd kept for a decade and a half. One of my finest moments (self-indulgent pride) was to find that something I'd written at aged 15 became an 'example piece' for an English Literature teacher who trooped it out at least once to every class he ever taught from the day I wrote it, until the day he retired).

I also was a load at that time in my life for teachers. It does not surprise me that the memories from which I build most of my stories come from that period in my life.

And now that I have read Go Set a Watchman, and Lee has fleshed out the real Atticus, I better understand that Lee's artistic decision to treat Atticus from the viewpoint of a child in To Kill a Mockingbird came from her need to create a hero at that time. I think if she'd written it as an older person, Atticus would have been less of a cardboard cutout and more the real thing.

I wonder how much she had Huck Finn's Chapter 31 dilemma in mind as she was writing To Kill a Mockingbird through Scout's POV?

https://americanliterature.com/author/m … chapter-31

flowing pencil wrote:

DANG.. I may get tarred and feathered as never was a fan of "To Kill A Mockingbird"   Perhaps if I read it now after so many years.. I might change my mind.

Patricia/Flo

Hello Flo and Dill,
In blue, with you two, I will interleave my experiences about loving To Kill a Mockingbird for most of my life as an aspiring reader and an aspiring writer, and now as I come into the end zone of a life, about my experience in trying to figure out what the big fuss was all about.

Whilst I do feel sympathy for the bereaved and respect for the recently passed author herself; bring on the those feathers and tar...

"To Kill A Mockingbird" ? I don't really get it. As childrens genre books go, it's okay I suppose...  but it never fired me like others that I've read and I never quite got what all the hype is about? I suppose that it was one of the first YA books and possibly defined the genre, although as a youngster growing-up in London, England I never really got the connotations from the inherent racial divisions within the deep south of the USA.  All I knew of America at the time was 'The Fonz' and 'Scooby Do'.  I thought that American teenagers were all forty year old sanitized rockers and that all cartoon mysteries shared the same plot and three punchlines.

I grew up in a remote Virginia town that had no transparent racial divisions because there were no blacks—no blacks, as in zero blacks—to segregate from or integrate with. I was pretty much an innocent, untrained bigot. The only experience I remember with a black man before I went away to university came at about 4 years old (1947). My father took me with him to some place of business in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and during his conduct of business I managed to wander away from him. When he found me, I was sitting across the street on a stone wall, helping a black man leaned against the wall eat a box of doughnuts. My father, scared white (from his usually rosy glow), caught up to me and shook me good before he hugged me with tears in his eyes and wanted to know what I was doing running off when he told me to stay put. I told him, I followed a blue man with a box of doughnuts.

It was enough to make him laugh, and to make the escapade memorable enough that he told the story—with my punchine—every time he got the chance. Otherwise, I think I would have forgotten it. I went through my formative years not knowing I was supposed to hate, fear, pity, feel intellectually superior to, and sexually inferior to blacks. When I strayed out into the educated parts of the South (1961), where the young people had grown up being taught how they should integrate with blacks, I was quickly uptrained about why I "was supposed to hate, fear, pity, feel intellectually superior to, and sexually inferior to blacks."

I learned about blacks in my early 20s in the early 1960s; about the same way I learned about girls in the early 60s: From other young people who knew even less about them than I did, but who had been taught to avoid them unless I was somehow using them for my purposes.

Having 3 sisters, I did not much see how it was right for me to use girls for my purposes, but the girls didn't always co-operate. I fell in love with most every one of them who'd give me a second glance without body slamming me.

Within a year or two of this, I read To Kill a Mockingbird. It was early in my aspirations to become a reader of good stories. I was attracted by the title, and probably recommendations, and I went into it with the burgeoning feeling that I liked words enough that someday I'd be able to write books that would win the Pulitzer Prize and make me rich and famous.   

"To Kill A Mockingbird" sells well because it is one of the mandatory childrens book titles within the schools English Lit curriculum (at least here in the UK) and has been for decades. As I mention, I'm not particularity enamored with it as a novel, but I've had to personally purchase three copies, one for each of my children in-turn as they traverse the school system. Lord knows what they do with book when they are done with it, but each requires a new copy when it is their time (along with the obligatory Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, of Mice and Men and Shakespeare Plays).

I'm guessing, without knowing anything about it, that a lot of copies of To Kill a Mockingbird were bought by the parents of high school students in the north of the U. S. of A. required to read it. I am guessing that a lot of copies were bought by students in the south of the U. S. of A. because it wasn't allowed to be taught in their schools. I'm also guessing that a lot of copies were bought by students because their parents and preachers and other guiding lights were condemning it as a nigger-loving, Communist plot to deflower Southern white girls. A perfect storm to make it a classic.

Thousands and thousands of parents buying these books year upon year as a course requirement for their disinterested student kids because some misguided intellectual soul feels that it is a mandatory classic.

I'm guessing there was more than one intellectual soul who decided it was something that should be read and discussed at the high school level. Just as, I'm guessing there was more than one intellectual soul who decided it should be banned at the high school level. Between them, these intellectual souls were unwittingly conspiring to create the classic it has become.

It's hardly a best-seller due to avid readers choosing the title from the bookstore after perusing the shelves looking for something interesting.

I'm guessing that you are right that all the controversy surrounding the story is a big driving force for why To Kill a Mockingbird continues to rival the Bible in sales, at least in the southern U. S. of A.

I remember my mum moaning about buying me copy when I was at school. Intensely studying a book that doesn’t interest you is an excruciating punishment for a young teenager and I think I lobbed it into a hedge the first chance I got.

Were you old enough to have an opinion about what constituted great prose when you were lobbing it into the hedge? When I read it I wasn't. It resonated with me for the same reason cowboy movies resonated with me. It drew a clear cut picture of a young person wanting to know about niggers for a young person who wanted to know about niggers. It drew a clear cut picture of a courageous parent charged with drawing that picture for her in a hostile environment. For me, it was the right story at the right time.

No doubt, my being ignorant of what constituted great prose at that stage of my aspirations to read great prose contributed to my deciding, and maintaining for 45 years, that it was my favorite book. I can't speak for the Pulitzer judges, nor do I know their criteria for selecting their prize winners.

My comments represent a personal opinion upon the book and fact as to why it it such a  big seller. I welcome a challenge and if anyone is willing to show me the error of my ways and extol the virtues of this novel in the form of a review, then pop over to 'the write club;' the creative writing and literature discussions group forum...

I bought a 50th Anniversary copy of the book about 5 years ago as part of my program to see how much the classics I've liked at first reading have improved as I've learned to read better. I was stunned about how I could no longer suspend my disbelief about Atticus. He came across as a cardboard character. It made me wish I wasn't such a great judge of a story.

Thankfully, I was able to forgive Ms. Lee when I read Go Set a Watchman and saw that Atticus was actually more heroic than I thought when I encountered him as a young and foolish dreamer, looking for a hero about race.

https://www.thenextbigwriter.com/forums … group.html

I still haven't read To Kill a Mockingbird for the purposes of judging the greatness of the prose. I can say, though, that each time I read it, it struck me as rich and efficient reading in which the writing did not detract from the reading.

...and we can debate the pros(e) and cons