To Ban a Mockingbird

Updating a mandatory reading list isn’t censorship. But banning a novel from the syllabus skates right over the edge.

At issue is a group of Washington teachers’ challenge to Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill A Mockingbird, showcased in a Nov. 3 Washington Post article. Four teachers, prompted by years of complaints from Black students about the novel’s use of racial slurs and its focus on white characters, sought to eliminate it from the district’s required-reading list for high-school freshmen.

That doesn’t raise a red flag for me. To Kill A Mockingbird is not the sole book that unveils racism. People on X seem very hung up on this point. Nostalgia is a powerful drug.

Just because you may have found it transformative doesn’t mean the children of today need to read it lest they turn into the Karens of tomorrow. And Mukilteo School District is far from the only place where parents and educators have criticized Lee’s book for harmful language and negative depictions of Black people.

But the Mukilteo teachers also wanted to make sure that TKAM remained permanently optional, and this is where their intentions went awry. They filed an official complaint against the book with the district, a move that over the past few years has overwhelmingly been the purview of far-right censors seeking to erase most mentions of non-white, non-straight people from their delicate children’s classroom shelves.

After hours of testimony, the district’s committee split its decision into two votes. Members first agreed to remove TKAM from the 9^th-grade required reading list. That’s fine. Curriculum should be updated over the years. If we never refresh assigned reading lists, students will continue to only read books that predominantly focus on white people and their experiences.

The second vote is key for anti-censorship advocates. The review committee voted to keep TKAM on the approved-novels list for the district. That means educators don’t have to teach it, but they also aren’t forbidden from assigning the novel or parts of it. The school board upheld both committee votes.

I firmly believe the teachers who challenged TKAM deserved a better way to both raise their concerns and spur district action. They shouldn’t have had to resort to a challenge. But context matters, and this can’t be a debate about one book. At a time when challenges are rising exponentially, banning a title from the classroom does the censors’ work for them.

I feel the same way about parents who try to flex on book-banners by challenging the Bible or Mein Kampf. Again, context matters. Does the Bible include some out-there sexual content? Yes. Can the Bible be taught from a literary perspective, helping students recognize allegory in other works? Also yes. Should elementary schoolers read Mein Kampf uncritically? Certainly not. Could excerpts be part of a high-school history class? Sure.

Taking TKAM off the must-read list forces a necessary debate about its perceived value and whose opinions about a text matter. Educators should be weighing every title they require as they consider who gets to see themselves in books and in what roles. But completely forbidding this novel in classrooms normalizes the idea that we should forbid all access to books we see as problems. No matter your political leanings, that’s not a position we should boost.