Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell makes a lot of good points in his essay. A lot of the lines he quoted from the book as being problematic had stood out to me too, like the part when Atticus tells Scout that it’s not ok to hate Hitler, or when he says that the Ku Klux Klan had no influence in Maycomb. While Atticus has good reasons to say both these things (hate blinds people with emotion and restricts reasonable thought, and the Klan did not have a direct physical influence in the town), they seem like missteps to our modern sensibilities. But I feel that, in a weird way, these missteps actually make this a better story. Atticus has always been held high on a pedestal as a symbol of the perfect father, a pillar of morality. But these statements bring him a little closer to Earth, and make him more human. Yes, he’s not a powerful civil rights crusader, but he is still a good father, and he still tried, in his own way, to change the lives of those less privileged than he was. That is a slightly different story from the one that has always been presented with this book, but it is still a worthwhile one.

Mockingbird is also the first book that made me reconsider my thoughts on censorship. Before taking this class, I would probably have said that censorship in all its forms should be fought against. But after listening to our class discussions about the use of the n-word in the book and the play, and after thinking about Asia’s naked man theory and Luke’s idea about sensitive censorship, I’m not so sure about my own stance on censorship. It is easy to make declarations about banning censorship when we are just talking about things academically, but when it concerns a topic that has emotional connotations, it’s a harder decision to make. For example, I liked the idea of censoring the n-word for the play when high school students were performing it. But at the same time, I recognize that this isn’t faithful to my initial ideas about censorship. What I understand most clearly though, is that censorship exists in so many ways and in so many different contexts that it’s dangerous to make widespread declarations without a considerable amount of thought.