Paul Sassone

It comes in many disguises.

This time it is cloaked in the excuse of protecting children.

But however disguised, censorship is a hand over humanity’s mouth. And that hand is no less suffocating because it is put there with the best of intentions

This time the target of censors is “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel that was made into an Academy Award-winning movie. Set in the 1930s South, the novel centers around the trial of a black man wrongly and tragically accused of sexually assaulting a white woman.

Citing use of the N word by some characters in the novel, the Biloxi, Miss. School Board has removed the book from the required reading list for eighth-grade students. The board issued a statement that the novel’s language made “people uncomfortable.”

Making people “uncomfortable” is one purpose for, and result of, great literature.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” makes people uncomfortable? Good. Why the novel makes people uncomfortable is the beginning of a good lesson plan for the Biloxi students.

Racism is. It exists. Pretending it doesn’t is wrong. Pretending the N word and the attitudes behind its use doesn’t exist is wrong. Rotten racist people use rotten racist language. A writer who cleans up language for racist characters is falsifying reality,

I imagine that eighth-graders in Mississippi already know this. What the school board is doing is not protecting students from the knowledge of evil, but denying them the opportunity to experience a great writer’s exploration and denunciation of the terrible effects of racism.

If students are disturbed by what is done to characters in the novel, good. It will and should make them think.

It might make parents and students talk to each other about something really important.

It is sad that members of a school board are dismissive of the opportunity “To Kill a Mockingbird” gives students, teachers and parents to explore one of the great issues facing this country.

Instead, the book banners just exacerbate the problem.

–Banning ‘Mockingbird’ misses opportunity to teach lesson–