TKM Research paper
Chloe McClure
Schreiber TKM research rough draft.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is an american classic and favorite. People love the book most for the teachings and morals that can apply to anybody’s life. Despite this, all over the country “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee has been banned from schools. Reasons such as the book seemingly being “racist,” “Offensive,” “uncomfortable,” “Inappropriate,” and finally TKM “normalizes racism”. Does TKM really teach us all these things, or instead is it the parents fear of it happening that really takes the book off the shelves? “Last week a Biloxi, Mississippi, school district banned the book from its eighth-grade English Language Arts classes. “Complaints” that some language in
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We know the parents argument, but what is the schools’? “There were complaints about it,” school board’s Vice president Kenny Holloway told the Sun Herald. “There is some language in the book that makes people uncomfortable, and we can teach the same lesson with other books.” (Zorthian.) The School simply is banning the book because they don’t want to offend students who may have closer ties to racism. What makes this book so impactful is the realistic description of racism. In response to the racist aspect of TKM, an African American man named Garvey spoke out and said, ““To put it simple, I felt uncomfortable…. My mom did too” (Selk.) If you think about it, should it make you uncomfortable to read about the reality of racism back then? It would be the same as learning about it in history class. If to kill a mockingbird makes you uncomfortable you should probably be reading to kill a mockingbird. Callie Byrnes puts it like this, “Racism should make people uncomfortable, and teaching about it in any other way just softens the blow. We don’t want to teach our children that yes, racism was rampant back then, but it wasn’t so terrible. Stripping it down to anything less is irresponsible.