Kamiak High School English teacher Riley Degamo is one of four teachers who sought to forbid teaching"To Kill a Mockingbird" in their liberal Washington district. MUST CREDIT: Melina Mara/The Washington Post
“The kid looked at every Black person - there’s three Black people in that class - and smiled,” the student said, according to meeting records and her memory. “And the plot is not even good.” Their objection was a drop in the enormous wave of school book challenges cresting nationwide. Objections to texts broke records in 2021 and 2022, according to the American Library Association, which has tracked such challenges for more than two decades. The majority of filings targeted books by and about LGBTQ individuals or people of color, per aof 2,500 pages of school book challenges filed nationally in the 2021-22 academic year.
“Any time you restrict access to students, it’s unfair,” said Stephanie Wilson, a Mariner teacher-librarian. “This was, to me, a form of censoring.” The Black hosts of the show joked that “Mockingbird” ranked with Confederate monuments as something painful to Black people, but which White people adored. Johnson, who grew up loving “Mockingbird,” identifying with White protagonist Scout, felt shaken - and guilty.
By chance, Freeman-Miller and Johnson had been elected co-chairs of the English department. The foursome decided to do something - starting with an email to the principal. Like the American public, students attending Mukilteo over the years had strong, divided reactions to the novel - feelings that lingered long after they read it as freshmen.
Dyonte Law, a Black man who graduated from Mariner in 2015, wrote in an email that the book made him realize why he’d grown up being treated differently by White peers. “I thought it was all in my mind, Harper Lee allowed me to put into perspective the idea of inherent bias,” he wrote, “and how an entire community can be unaware of the fact that they even held a bias” - referring to the way many White adults in the novel condemn Robinson without a second thought.
The book could and should be replaced by titles such as “All American Boys” and “The Hate U Give,” both of which have Black authors or co-authors and wrestle with 21st-century racism in America.
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