I taught high school English for 13 years, starting in the late ‘90s, and I’ve been out of it for a little over a decade. I spent the front half of my career in a large, multicultural, comprehensive high school in Queens, and the back half at a smaller, specialized high school in Brooklyn, with a couple of unfortunate stops in-between.
As a teacher I dealt with a lot of nebulous denominated mandates that never really had a clear or practical definition, that administrators deemed incredibly important but couldn’t really define or explain in any meaningful, workable way. Things like, e.g., the “Developmental Lesson Plan,” “Student-Centered Learning,” and the last travesty to infect the schools before I left a little over a decade ago, “Differentiated Instruction.”
In my experience and observation, these nebulous concepts were just convenient buzz-phrases for unscrupulous administrators — and I had a few of those — to deploy in their effort and desire to control teachers and weed out the ones they didn’t like. The fact that, e.g., “Differentiated Instruction” was so poorly-defined and poorly-understood meant that an unscrupulous principal or supervisor could always accuse a teacher of failing to “differentiate” his or her instruction even if the teacher could affirmatively demonstrate, based on the guidance (s)he had been given, that the lesson was sufficiently “differentiated.”
Of course, having taught in New York City and not Texas, and having long since left the profession, I never had to deal with a mandate that I not teach, discuss, or mention “Critical Race Theory” or deal with an unscrupulous supervisor who might accuse me of doing that. Obviously I’m not talking about actual Critical Race Theory; I’m talking about … well, you know:
One of my favorite novels to teach, usually in 10th-grade English, was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a wonderful book with some wonderful vignettes, very easy to read, very easy to connect with, and very memorable; a lot of my students ended up using it for their “critical lens” essays on the New York ELA Regents Exam in 11th grade. Although I’m not here to discuss the novel per se, one little anecdote if you’ll indulge me:
When I taught English I would never show the students the movie version, if there was one, of whatever book we were reading; I would tell the students, “We are studying literature, not film.” What I would do, though, is after we finished the text and assessments and before moving on to the next unit I would take one day’s lesson and ask the students which parts of the book they would like to see played out in the film adaptation, which in the case of Mockingbird is excellent in its own right. But for this book, the parts the students most often wanted to see, are not in the movie; the part where Calpurnia takes the kids to church, the part where Atticus makes Jem read to the mean old lady down the street, Scout’s first day of school, &c. I always found that remarkable, and indicative of how the students had really connected with the novel.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this lately, and there was a diary up yesterday about Fox News trying to prove that “Critical Race Theory” is actually being taught in K-12 schools. As most of us know, the central plot of To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of a harmless, disabled Black man being falsely accused (by a white man) and convicted (by an all-white jury) of raping a white girl in 1930s Alabama, with all that that entails, and a father teaching his children to walk in others’ shoes before judging them. Would that be considered “Critical Race Theory” in, e.g., Texas, in 2021?
Author Harper Lee makes it almost implausibly obvious that the defendant, Tom Robinson, could not possibly have committed the alleged crime; inter alia, due to a childhood accident he has only one functioning arm. The accuser, Bob Ewell, father of the alleged victim Mayella, is to put it somewhat colloquially a real low-life; dirt-poor, uneducated, mean, abusive, and of course, racist. Mayella, for her part, is a simpleton whose behavior in the courtroom is erratic to say the least. The idea here, among many, is that an all-white jury in 1930s Alabama would have taken the word of the meanest, coarsest, most loathed, most despicable white man in the county over that of a Black man with neither the physical ability nor the demeanor to commit the crime of which he was accused.
So, To Kill a Mockingbird is really about injustice; social injustice as well as racial injustice. As villainous as their father is, and as despicable as Mayella is for her complicity, the novel still evokes empathy for the Ewell children, including Mayella, and one of the young sons who shows up on the first day of first grade shoeless, covered in filth and infested with head lice, bringing attention to the injustice of extreme poverty in the rural South that afflicted, and continues to afflict, both Black and white. The part about the mean old lady down the street that I mentioned above, that my students always found so affecting, evokes the injustices of addiction, old age, and mental illness.
Tom Robinson’s plight, though, is the novel’s central focus, and the fact that he is innocent is really beside the point; the reader is not supposed to ponder that question, but the question of whether the jury will heed Atticus’s advice and simply do the right thing. The author, through the eyes of the seven-year-old protagonist and her twelve-year-old brother, allows the reader to believe for just a moment that that could actually happen, but the reader quickly realizes what was clear from the beginning: that Tom Robinson never had a chance. And that’s a very hard lesson for such young children to learn.
Now that I’ve done what I said I wouldn’t do, by going on about this marvelous book for four paragraphs, I should probably get to the point. Would having 10th-grade English students read To Kill a Mockingbird and talk about it in these terms, exploring its themes including its central theme about injustice — enduring injustice, discovering injustice, and opposing injustice — get me fired for “teaching Critical Race Theory” in a public high school in a state where that has now been prohibited?
I really think it would.
Tom Robinson’s conviction, as portrayed in the novel, can only be the result of racial injustice, or systemic racism; he was convicted because he was Black and the jury, like the alleged victim, was White; period, full stop. Robinson and the Ewells were judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character. (N.B.: Mockingbird was published in 1960, three years before Dr. King made that speech.) And that’s precisely the kind of injustice that these anti-CRT crusaders don’t want kids to know about, that they insist will make little White children feel bad about themselves, go home and soil their parents’ nice clean “F*** YOUR FEELINGS” t-shirts with sad, sad tears. All I’ll say about that is this: If reading To Kill a Mockingbird makes you feel like an “evil” “oppressor,” then the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” is the least of your problems.
“To kill a mockingbird” is a poetic metaphor for injustice; “Critical Race Theory” is a non-poetic metaphor for White people’s discomfort with the knowledge, thought, and reality of the metaphorical killing of mockingbirds in the Good Ol’ U.S. of A. It won’t be long, I don’t think, before a teacher in Texas or Virginia is fired for teaching “Critical Race Theory” by having students read, discuss, interpret and appreciate this rich, timeless, wonderful novel.
I’ve always believed that reading and appreciating literature is just as important, if not more so, to one’s understanding of the world as reading history; those who don’t read literature have even less consciousness than those who don’t read history. And that’s exactly what these modern-day book-burners are after.