To Make A Mockery: Harper Lee hasn't been cancelled despite the British media's latest pretend panic
They fear change and want you to fear... well... everything.
The vision of cultural commissars marching through schools and universities ‘cancelling’ beloved books beneath their brutal boots is one of the British press’ favourite scary stories. It tells it practically every day but like tales of a hook-handed man on the roof of your car or the call coming from inside the house, the details rarely stack up.
In today’s Daily Telegraph, Laura Freeman conjures up a warning that To cancel a Mockingbird is to kill the past, balancing her claim that the book is to banished from reading lists on the decision of a single school.
After opening with L.P Hartley’s well-worn quote (“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”), a move that should automatically trigger a rewrite on the grounds of hackiness, she writes:
The English department at James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh has cancelled Atticus Finch. As part of an effort to decolonise the curriculum, the school has said no more To Kill a Mockingbird, no more Of Mice and Men. Allan Crosbie, the school’s curriculum leader for English, outlined the issues to the EIS teaching union:
“Their lead characters are not people of colour. The representation of people of colour is dated, and the use of the N-word and the use of the white saviour motif in Mockingbird, these have led us as a department to decide that these really are not texts we want to be teaching third year any more.”
… Is the once admired Atticus Finch now irredeemable? A case so problematic, no lawyer could defend it in court? Is there nothing to be learned from this washed-up “white saviour”, a white man in the deepest Deep South who represents Tom, an African-American, at his trial and protects him from a lynching?
Freeman’s using a familiar comment writer’s tactic: Take a quote from someone then extrapolate your own conclusions from it, ramping up the emotion and ridiculousness until the situation you present is far more heightened than any words in the original comment would suggest.
So while the teacher simply said that the novel’s presentation of people of colour is now dated — undeniably true — and his department has decided to teach other books, Freeman acts as though he’s claimed there’s not one word worth reading in To Kill A Mockingbird and challenged the ghost of Gregory Peck to a scrap in the playground.
And the newspaper stories have got talk radio ranters like the ever hard-of-thinking Ian Collins going:
Inevitably, The Sun went even further than The Telegraph. Its headline screamed HARPING ON To Kill a Mockingbird BANNED at a secondary school after fears it promotes ‘white saviour’ narrative and the copy continued:
A TOP school has scrapped teaching classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird because of its "dated" approach to race.
James Gillespie's High School in Edinburgh fear the seminal book by Harper Lee promotes a "white saviour" narrative.
Allan Crosbie, the curriculum leader for English at the school, is also banning Of Mice and Men as part of a bid to "decolonise" the syllabus.
He slammed the use of the N-word in To Kill a Mockingbird and believes third-year students shouldn't be taught using the classics.
But the same story includes a longer quote from Allan Crosbie’s comments at the EIS meeting, which belies the claims that he “slammed” the book or believes students “shouldn’t be taught using the classics”:
Mr Crosbie told the annual meeting of the EIS teaching union: “Probably like every English department in the country, we still have Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird [on] the shelves.
"They are now taught less frequently because those novels are dated and problematical in terms of decolonising the curriculum.
"Their lead characters are not people of colour. The representation of people of colour is dated, and the use of the N-word and the use of the white saviour motif in Mockingbird, these have led us as a department to decide that these really are not texts we want to be teaching third year any more.”
Having books on the shelves but suggesting that others novels might be better suited to a modern curriculum is not ‘banning’ or ‘censorship’. Still, that didn’t stop The Sun rolling out some Tory rent-a-quotes to be horrified:
Oliver Mundell, of the Scottish Conservatives, said children should not be denied access to specific works of literature.
He said: "I believe that completely removing certain works from the syllabus would be a mistake.
"Before imposing any form of censorship, we should have a meaningful debate about what the policy for excluding specific books should be…”
… Former MSP Ruth Davidson said: "Surely the point made by AF defending (and failing) Tom Robinson, isn't about being a white saviour. It's about showing the entrenched disparity in 30s South, where a black man can't get a fair hearing - no matter what the evidence or who pleads his case?"
Invevitably the paper also turns to TalkRadio/LBC/GB News/upturned soapbox in the high street stalwart and gob-on-a-stick Calvin Robinson who uses one of his three pre-prepared quotes about ‘wokeism’:
Calvin Robinson, a former school governor and policy adviser to the Department of Education, said: “We can contextualise them. Teachers are not just reading the books, they are teaching English literature.
“We can talk about the use of the N-word and why it is not appropriate for anyone to use. I think it’s ridiculous to cancel the books because of it.
“It’s very sad we are scraping through old texts and judging them by today’s standards rather than teaching them for their literary value."
The Independent, Joe and the division sowing dipshits at RT are united in their use of the word “cancelled” in their headlines, while The Daily Express opted for “banned”, The Times said the books are being ‘scrapped’, and The Daily Mail was surprisingly restrained in its headline at least (Top school will stop teaching To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men in a bid to 'decolonise' the curriculum claiming the literary classics have a 'dated' approach to race and 'white saviour motif).
And, of course, Hovis ad delivery boy cosplayer and relentless idiotic opinion-haver Darren Grimes was drafted in by GB News to give his ‘view’ on the story:
Not one of the stories on the so-called cancellation mentions a previous controversy in which it was suggested that then-Education Secretary Michael Gove was booting …Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and other American classics out of the curriculum.
In 2014, when the OCR exam board dropped To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and The Crucible from its GCSE English Literature syllabus, Gove was blamed for the move following the publication of new guidelines on the subject in December 2013.
The DfE said at the time that its guidance “[didn’t] ban any authors, books, or genres” despite Labour claims that the changes were “ideological” and “backward-looking”. OCR said it dropped the US authors because of the DfE’s desire for the exam to be “more focused on tradition”.
Writing for The Daily Telegraph in a piece which has since been memory-holed but that’s still retrievable from the Wayback Machine, Gove said:
Newspapers breathlessly reported the “fact” that I have banned Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird from the nation’s classrooms. I have apparently decreed that only literature written by true-born Englishmen (copyright Daniel Defoe) can be read by our children. And without waiting to do anything as mundane as checking the facts, a host of culture warriors have taken to Twitter to denounce this literary isolationism.
… Do I think Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird are bad books? Of course not. I read and loved them all as a child. And I want children in the future to be able to read them all. But sometimes a rogue meme can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on. Just because one chap at one exam board claimed I didn’t like Of Mice and Men, the myth took hold that it – and every other pesky American author – had been banned.
There are, in reality, four exam boards that can offer GCSE English literature and there are no rules requiring them to exclude or marginalise any writer. If they wish to include Steinbeck – whether it’s Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath – no one would be more delighted than me, because I want children to read more widely and range more freely intellectually in every subject. In English literature, I want young people to encounter as many books as possible from different cultures. I want pupils to grow up able to empathise with Jane Eyre as well as Lennie, to admire Elizabeth Bennet as much as Scout Finch.
To Kill A Mockingbird wasn’t banned then and it isn’t banned now. If it’s not included on your child’s English syllabus, there’s a good chance it’ll still be in their school library and if not you can always pop to a bookshop and buy it for them. Unless, of course, you’re one of sentient bin bag ‘Iron’ Mike Graham’s listeners. They’ll no doubt believe that Harper Lee has been erased from the catalogue:
The arguments for keeping Lee’s novel on the syllabus are as strong as those for opting for more modern books that cover racial injustice such as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give which is mentioned as an alternative in most of the stories. In 2016, Olamiju Fajemisin wrote a powerful piece for Gal-dem on the experience of studying To Kill A Mockingbird at school:
I along with generations of students studied To Kill a Mockingbird as part of GCSE English two years ago. This text remains one of my favourites simply because it provoked discussion. It allowed us to use the classroom as a safe space to discuss the issues surrounding blackness.
There was no fear of offending when analysing this text and we were able to have truly thought provoking conversation about issues still affecting the African diaspora 55 years after the death of character Tom Robinson.
Most refreshingly, we didn’t study this text exclusively as part of Black History Month, it was simply the book we had to read as part of the course. Openly conversing about the issues it presented helped to partially dispel the negative stigma attached to discussing institutionalised racism, and destroy the myth of ‘playing the race card’.
There’s an interesting conversation to be had but the same newspapers that “breathlessly reported” that Gove was gunning for Harper Lee in 2014 are now aiming their fire at one teacher, in one department, in one school. And where the Gove of 2014 used the term “culture warriors” disparagingly, the Gove of 2021 is part of a government that uses culture war stories endlessly.
When the ‘Gove wants Harper Lee gone’ story was raging in 2014, The Guardian had its own version of today’s Telegraph piece from Laura Freeman. Under the headline, Michael Gove should not kill the Mockingbird, Anna Hartnell wrote:
As Scout opens her narrative she reveals that her family can trace its lineage back to Simon Finch, a man from Cornwall who was persecuted as a Methodist and duly left England for the New World. There he acquired slaves, thus substituting one form of oppression for another. This knotty and discomforting genealogy that binds Englishness to empire and slavery and their fractious legacies of racism and inequality seems to be too thought-provoking for Gove's deeply conservative vision of English literature. Our children should not be prevented from discovering it.
So centre-left and very-very-right-of-centre alike can agree on the merits of To Kill A Mockingbird but that does not mean it has to forever have a place on every school’s curriculum. What it does mean, however — thanks to its iconic status, racial themes, and the fact that most columnists read it at school — is that whenever the question of including it or not comes up, there’ll be a rash of columns about ‘censorship’.
Novels go in for nuance, but newspapers and their columnists seldom do.