A teacher who wants to limit students’ minds and close off their horizons is a vile person. To Kill a Mockingbird is a powerful, moving novel about racial injustice in the South. It presents a world that’s different from today’s America and presents the suffering and hope of the people who suffered and tried to correct its injustices. A man defends the target of a false criminal accusation at great personal cost. For this reason, four progressive teachers in the state of Washington wanted to keep their students from reading it. A Washington Post article tells the tale.

In their formal challenge to the book in the Mukilteo School District, the teachers claimed, “To Kill A Mockingbird centers on whiteness. … It presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.” Three of the four are white, just by the way. Claiming that the novel “centers on whiteness” shows either gross ignorance of the book or gross dishonesty. In normal use, the Civil Rights Era began in the 1950s, and the novel is set during the Depression. It’s true that it doesn’t celebrate what it was like to be black in Alabama in those days.

The book-banning effort sparked broad outrage: “The fight over ‘Mockingbird’ would spark a rare moment of national political unity, with right-wing critics alleging the district wanted to censor a classic in service of a ‘woke’ agenda — while left-wing detractors insisted teachers were erasing the reality of racism.” Both objections were valid, and they’re closer to each other than they may seem.

To Kill a Mockingbird makes people uncomfortable. I wrote a blog post about the book last year. The American Library Association listed it in the 10 most challenged books of 2009, 2011, 2017, and 2020.

One of the teachers, Verena Kuzmany, took an openly racist position:

Kuzmany had studied Black American writers and 19th-century slave narratives while earning a graduate degree in comparative literature from the University of Washington in 2014. After talking to Johnson and Degamo about “Mockingbird,” she began to wonder why Kamiak couldn’t teach literature by Black authors instead.
 
“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.”

There was a time when black characters were conspicuously absent from the works of most (white) American authors. Kuzmany misses the good old days.

The book-banners won a partial success. They were unable to get the novel banned from the approved-novels list, which would have disqualified it from being assigned in classrooms, but they got it removed from the required reading list. That’s not a particularly bad outcome in itself — required reading lists change all the time — but the main point is that they wanted to stop students from seeing the book at all.

The four teachers remain disappointed that students can still read the book. According to the article, “Each said they think students will be harmed because the book remains as a teaching option.” “Harmed” is the key. These teachers claim that reading the book is harmful. To what, exactly? To the teachers’ ability to control them. Students with a perspective on history understand that the past was different from the present, and the future will be different as well. People who know this recognize that change and improvement are possible, and they may stop playing the role of helpless victims which feeds the “progressive teachers'” sense of power. They might work to dismantle racist structures instead of playing the role of helpless victims.

Some student comments mentioned in the article suggest that these teachers have been hard at work closing off their horizons.

One Black teen said the book misrepresented him and other African Americans, according to meeting records reviewed by The Washington Post. Another complained the novel did not move her, because it wasn’t written about her — or for her.

Kids don’t naturally think that every book is supposed to be about them. They’re curious about lots of things, at least if they aren’t repeatedly told that reading about forbidden topics will “harm” them. If they expected to be “represented” in a novel set almost a century ago, it’s because someone has been pushing the notion that any literature that isn’t about them personally is dangerous to read. Once they’re taught that, they’re easy to manipulate. Ayn Rand once compared teachers who twist and manipulate children’s minds to the Comprachicos described in Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, who abducted children and molded them into grotesque shapes for entertainment.

A teacher who claims expanding one’s reading horizons is dangerous shouldn’t be a teacher.

Stylistic note: The Washington Post article capitalizes all skin-color terms, and I’ve retained that usage in the quotations. I’ve followed my usual style in my own words by not capitalizing them. Any apparent inconsistencies in capitalization are because of this difference unless they’re typos.