Subhead: “Four progressive teachers in Washington’s Mukilteo School District wanted to protect students from a book they saw as outdated and harmful. The blowback was fierce.”

To begin with, read it all, and to the extent you can stand it, the comments. I included some trenchant quotes below, however.

Now the takeaways:

1. If there is a more vivid and depressing illustration of how far public education, teacher competence and race relations have declined since, oh, let’s say 2008, I don’t know what it could be.

2. The episode was triggered, a black student told the Post, when a white teen read “nigger” while reading “Mockingbird” to the class. The student disobeyed the teacher’s instructions to skip the slur, and “the kid looked at every Black person — there’s three Black people in that class — and smiled.” Well: a) Asking a student to read a passage of any book to the class when she feels part of the text must be skipped is incompetent. b) Of all the passages to have a student read from “Mockingbird,” choosing one that includes “nigger” smacks of deliberate sabotage. c) Presumed facial expression racism? At this rate, we should be back to “separate but equal” in no time.

3. “Freeman-Miller wondered: Did the school really have to teach Harper Lee’s classic but polarizing novel, as was mandatory for all freshmen?” There is no reason for any novel to be regarded as “polarizing,” except to those who regard literature as indoctrination tools. The educational process is to read the novel, discuss its literary merit, its context, its cultural significance, the ideas it communicates, and it why it works (or not) for a particular reader.

4. “”To Kill A Mockingbird'”‘ centers on whiteness,” the teachers wrote in their challenge, adding that “it presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.” Such a statement is racist by definition, and should disqualify the complaint from serious consideration and the complaining teachers from teaching. Criticizing a book for what it is not about is moronic as well as a sign of attempted agenda-driven government mind-control.

5. “[I]n Mukilteo, the progressive teachers who complained about the novel saw themselves as part of an urgent national reckoning with racism, a necessary reconsideration of what we value, teach and memorialize following the killing of George Floyd.” I wonder how many people today recall or understand that the “killing of George Floyd” has never been shown to have anything whatsoever to do with race, systemic racism, or discrimination. The fact that the mainstream media constantly repeats statements like this without clarification demonstrates the corruption of the field.

6. “The Black hosts of [a podcast] 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.” Thus Johnson proved herself to be a weak-minded sucker for woke propaganda in its most infantile and ignorant form. She lacked the critical thinking skills to know that comparing a work of literature with a statue of Robert E. Lee is cretinous, and not to be made to feel guilty by a nonsensical opinion. Why should any Post reader care what a teacher so handicapped thinks?

7. “Kamiak English [teacher]Riley Degamo began to question the book’s place in the curriculum…She will never forget one teen’s assessment, scrawled on a homework assignment: “This is [fucking bullshit].” So Kamiak public school students have not been instructed how to use civil language in their assignments and classroom discourse. No wonder the teachers’ don’t know how to teach “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

8. This….

“Kuzmany had studied Black American writers and 19th-century slave narratives while earning a graduate degree in comparative literature from the University of Washington in 2014. After talking to Johnson and Degamo about “Mockingbird,” she began to wonder why Kamiak couldn’t teach literature by Black authors instead.

“I don’t think that White authors and White characters should tell the narratives of African American people,” Kuzmany said. “The usefulness of the book has run its course.”

This offensive sentiment, which comes up more than once in the Post article, is an endorsement of literary apartheid. Only certain races and ethnicities can write about particular people and topics? To quote that eminent Kamiak literary critic, that’s “fucking bullshit.”

9. “Chaitna Deshmukh, a 2022 graduate who was still in school when teachers challenged the book, thinks the novel — while pertinent to the 1960s — fails to address the complex racial problems of the 21st century.” Again: the mentality that if literature doesn’t deal directly with 21st Century attitudes and issues is isn’t worth reading is redolant of programmed meat-headedness. It demonstrates a disastrous lack of comprehension regarding the importance of history and an inability to make vital cross-cultural comparisons.

10. “[T]he teachers pulled up a form headed “Citizen’s Request for Reconsideration.” Across five typed pages, nine neat paragraphs and 1,267 words, using impeccable grammar and citing their sources, they made their case.” Is the fact that it was neat and had impeccable grammar—they are teachers: it ought to have impeccable grammar!—the best the Post can do to legitimize their argument, which isn’t reprinted in the article? How did they “make their case”? The only passage quoted is:

That’s the best they could come up with? F. Again, the framing is racist: a book in which a white character defends a black victim is inherently objectionable. In contrast, all the so-called “Magic Negro” movies (almost any film starring Morgan Freeman or Will Smith, for example) in which an ultra-virtuous, brave and clever black individual rescues white victims presents no problems at all.

Now go back to Take-away #1.