Would To Kill a Mockingbird still be a "classic" if Tom Robinson's daughter told the story? ©

I can’t remember when my disdain for To Kill a Mockingbird began, but I suspect it was early in the assault against literature. This time coincided with graduate school — the beginning of my journey into applied psychology and the field of mental health counseling, where conversations about cultural competence and aversive racism took shape. Graduate school professors had me questioning everything — whose voice was being centered, and whose comfort was being protected. That lens reshaped how I looked at To Kill a Mockingbird. I realized it wasn’t just a story; it had been enshrined as a “classic” because it allowed white readers to explore racism without ever losing their comfort. “Classic” is just another way of saying untouchable — protected from critique. In my opinion, the loyalty to Mockingbird said more about whose stories America was willing to hear than about the story itself.

I had also greatly valued the work of Attorney Bryan Stevenson, and To Kill a Mockingbird is mentioned in the movie based on his career. In Just Mercy, the irony of Monroeville, Alabama — hometown of Harper Lee — is not lost. As Bryan Stevenson drives in, a sign proudly declares it the “Home of To Kill a Mockingbird.” Later, a courthouse clerk urges him to visit the Mockingbird Museum, where he could “stand right where Atticus Finch once stood.” The references are almost surreal. Here was a town that lionized a fictional white lawyer for defending a Black man, while in the same courthouse an actual Black man, Walter McMillian, was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. The film forces us to ask: what does it mean when we protect the mythology of Mockingbird more fiercely than the living, breathing Black men still trapped by the very injustices the book claimed to expose?

To Kill a Mockingbird was also a staple in my children’s former middle school. I watched as it was held up as the cornerstone text for teaching about race and justice, stamped a “classic” of American literature. That recurring tension between what was uplifted and what was silenced is what made me begin to question why this book — and why it held such a privileged place in classrooms.

This classic……contains the word nigger over 40 times, yet is still defended as appropriate for classrooms.…is enshrined while books by Black authors telling our truth are banned or pushed aside.…frames racism through the eyes of a white child, softening the brutality instead of centering the harm.…is protected by loyalty to tradition, even when that loyalty retraumatizes Black students and silences other voices.

Even now, whenever I hear the title mentioned, I feel a wave of discontent. My first instinct is to question the motives of those so determined to keep it in constant rotation in their classrooms — what exactly do they want students to learn from it, and at whose expense?

Tom Robinson’s humanity is reduced to a courtroom symbol before he is killed off. Calpurnia, though devoted to the Finch family, is never granted equal complexity or interiority. And the narrative keeps circling back to Atticus Finch as the moral hero — a white savior who protects white comfort while Black pain is backgrounded. Superman of the courtroom.

Atticus Finch is spoken of as the noble small-town lawyer who defends an innocent Black man against false charges. He is portrayed as a devoted father teaching his children about morality, fairness, and empathy. However, the truth is that Atticus defends Tom Robinson knowing the trial is hopeless. In essence, he’s preserving his own moral reputation in the town more than protecting Tom’s life.

The story is told through the eyes of Scout, Atticus Finch’s daughter, who is between six and eight years old during the events of the novel. Of course, her father will be the hero of the story. I would expect nothing less. Even though she’s a child, Scout is still witness to the realities of the era. In fact, Scout interrupts a group of men planning to lynch Tom Robinson, and she hears Cecil Jacobs and others call Atticus a “nigger-lover.”

And then we have Tom Robinson. How can one be a main character and then not at all? We do not enter his home, hear his private thoughts or his conversations with his family, or feel the depth of his family’s grief. Instead, his entire story is filtered through the eyes of Scout and the voice of Atticus, leaving him central to the narrative but also silenced within it. However, for the author, more important than Tom’s character development is preserving a story white readers could tolerate.

My question: Would To Kill a Mockingbird be considered a “classic” had the story been told by Tom Robinson’s daughter? The book doesn’t go any further than mentioning Tom’s wife Helen, who is only briefly mentioned. However, imagine if the story had been told by Tom’s daughter.

Instead of Scout’s nostalgic recollections of a sleepy Southern town, we would have heard the story of a Black girl navigating the grief of losing her father to lies and racial violence. Instead of centering Atticus Finch’s quiet heroism, we would have witnessed a family that is loving but now torn apart by systemic cruelty in the very same town that celebrates its “justice.”

We’ll name her Faith. Faith Robinson, the name and character that Harper Lee thought insignificant. For the sake of this writing, Faith is the same age as Scout. As vantage points go, Scout and Faith could not be more different. Scout tells her story from a place of safety — curious about the world but always protected by her father’s name. Faith would have told her lived experiences from the shadows, where innocence doesn’t last and safety is never promised. Scout’s story gave white readers a gentle way to talk about racism. Faith’s story would have shown them the fear, the loss, and the daily fight of a Black family whose truth was never considered important enough to put on the page. However, Faith’s desire to protect her father’s name is equally as important to her.

Faith would say:

This morning, I woke up like I do every morning since they took my Daddy to jail. Fear was already waiting at the door. It even sat at the table with us as we tried to eat, a silence that Mama never named but I could hear in the way her fork scraped across the plate.

Mama makes sure that I eat breakfast every morning before school. I go to school and Mama goes to work. Mama does domestic work. She cleans white folks’ houses. Just like my Daddy, Mama is strong. Every job Mama finds means more walking — miles in the hot sun — and at every step she braces herself for the men who might spit in her path or tell her to “go on back where she belonged.”

School is no escape. Our building is half falling, the windows cracked, our books handed down from the white school across town. You can still see their names scribbled inside the covers — pages missing, spines broken — but we make do because we have to.

On the way to school, the white children yelled my Daddy’s name like it was a curse. We get yelled at every day. By the time we began primary school, most of us were used to the hatred from the white children. By third grade, we’d been called nigger more times than we could count. We never provoke it. We walk to school and back home in groups for safety. I don’t understand, at six years old, why people hate our Black skin, but it’s our reality.

Children my age call us nigger because they can, they think it’s funny, and because they learn this hate from their parents. Since they took Daddy away, the whole town makes sure I remember what they believe: that my Daddy is a criminal. Today is Friday; tomorrow I can stay home with Mama, and I don’t have to worry about the mean names they call us — unless Mama has to go into town.

At church this Sunday, we prayed harder than most, but even there the whispers followed. I don’t really understand what’s going on. Some folks hugged Mama tight; others kept their distance, like they were afraid to be caught too close to us. I had heard the word rape whispered in corners, but I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. The adults always stopped talking the moment I walked into the room. That silence told me it was something ugly, something I wasn’t meant to learn about. But the way people’s eyes cut through me, the way they spat my Daddy’s name, I knew it was bad. Even if I didn’t know the meaning, I could feel the horror of it.

Our nights are worse than they’ve ever been. Every creak of the floorboards, every knock at the door, makes my heart beat faster because of what might be coming — a mob, a fire, or something scarier. Daddy is gone; would Mama be next? Sleep doesn’t come easy anymore. Fear lives in the dark with us, curled up in the corner of the room, reminding us we aren’t safe. My Daddy is everything to me. He is funny, a real jokester — always finding some way to make me and Mama laugh. He plays little tricks, tells stories in voices that make me giggle until my stomach hurts. Some days I know he’s tired, but he tries not to show it. The way he loves me and Mama is certain and steady, like the ground under our feet. To the world outside, they try to make him out to be something ugly, but in our house, he is safety, strength, laughter, and love.

All I know is that Daddy is gone and everyone whispers the word rape. Daddy wouldn’t harm a fly. Not my Daddy. I know we’re not supposed to call adults liars, but whatever bad things they’re saying about my Daddy can’t be true. So now, Mama says we have to go to court and prove that Daddy is innocent. Doesn’t make sense to me. Daddy has this lawyer. His name is Mr. Atticus Finch. I ain’t never known a white man to help a colored man, but Mama says that’s his job. I hope he can bring my Daddy home.

Tonight, after dinner, I heard my Mama let out a scream I’d never heard before. I froze. My heart fell straight through me. Tears welled up in my eyes before I even knew what had happened. I started crying because I knew that whatever made Mama scream like that couldn’t be good. Mama was hurting bad. They told her that Daddy was gone — that he’d been shot seventeen times by guards who claimed he was trying to escape the jail they had locked him in.

My heart is broken. I just don’t understand. Not my Daddy. My Daddy — the man who made us laugh, who held my hand with his good arm because the other had been useless since he was a boy — how could they say he tried to climb a fence? He couldn’t have hurt that woman, and he couldn’t have pulled himself over a fence if his life depended on it.

Everyone in town knew about his arm. Everyone. Even that lawyer who was supposed to save him. That’s how I know their story is a lie. Mama says don’t use that word “liar,” but them white folks ain’t tellin’ the truth about my Daddy. They didn’t kill him because he was trying to escape. They killed him because they can. Because he was Black. Just like how they call us niggers because they can. They filled my Daddy with bullets because they needed to make sure that he died with that white woman’s lies about him. I feel sick and my tears won’t stop. I want this to be a nightmare. I want to wake up and Daddy be at home loving us like he always does. This is a nightmare, but I’m wide awake, and now all I have left are memories — of his jokes, his laughter, and the way he loved me and Mama with everything he had, even with just one good arm.

Scene.

I believe it’s evident that one doesn’t sit with the same comfort listening to Faith as one might listening to Scout. Faith doesn’t offer warmth or a safe distance — she offers the reality of racism. Her vantage point would have forced readers to see the fear, the trauma, and the everyday weight of racism that her family carried long after the trial ended. Faith’s daddy doesn’t return home to his family. And maybe that is exactly why Harper Lee never wrote her, and why the story that was told became a “classic.” America was willing to elevate Scout’s innocence, but it was never ready to sit with Faith’s truth.

I don’t believe To Kill a Mockingbird should be taught in middle school. Most middle schoolers don’t yet have the critical thinking skills to process the weight of this book — or the reality of 1930s Alabama. Instead of gaining insight, many are left repeating racial slurs from its pages without understanding their history, or absorbing a softened version of racism filtered through Scout’s innocence. When a book requires adult-level analysis to see its flaws and limitations, it should not be handed to children as their first lesson on race and justice. Instead, it might be more fitting for an AP History or AP English class, where older students have the analytical tools to grapple with its racial language, its white-savior framing, and the silences it leaves unexamined. Without that level of maturity, the book risks doing more harm than good.

When these texts are introduced in middle school classrooms, another layer of concern emerges. Students are often asked to draw parallels between Tom Robinson’s trial and execution (let’s call it what it was) and contemporary events, such as police violence or the disproportionate incarceration of Black men. While intended to foster critical thinking, this practice frequently positions Black students in the uncomfortable role of cultural translators, expected to connect literary trauma to their lived realities. In doing so, classrooms risk reproducing the very dynamics bell hooks critiques — where Black suffering is mobilized for the moral education of others, while the psychological toll on Black children themselves is minimized. Rather than encouraging empathy, these parallels can normalize the expectation that Black students must continuously re-engage with racial violence, both historically and presently, as part of their academic development. By proximity, this framing places white students in the seats of racial voyeurism, where they are invited to observe Black pain as a lesson, rather than interrogate the structures that produce it.

I can only imagine the dialogue in an AP African American History classroom. Unlike the middle school English class treatment I’ve seen — where To Kill a Mockingbird is framed as a moral lesson on tolerance — students in this space would bring sharper questions, rooted in history, identity, and critical consciousness. They would not passively accept Harper Lee’s narrative as “the” story of race in America, but interrogate it: Whose voice is missing? Whose pain is centered? What stereotypes are being reproduced? And why has this novel, written through a white child’s gaze, been elevated as the authoritative lens through which we are all asked to see Black life?

It is here, in my reimagined classroom, that the real challenges would take place — not simply whether To Kill a Mockingbird addresses injustice, but whether its telling perpetuates racial voyeurism, silences Black voices, and conditions white students to equate Black existence with criminalization and death. In my reimagined classroom, students are quick to call out the hypocrisy — they watch what schools actually do, not just what they boast about in their mission statements.

Classroom Dialogue: To Kill a Mockingbird in AP African American History

Teacher: Today we’re looking at To Kill a Mockingbird not as the definitive story about racism, but as one artifact within a much larger archive of African American history and literature. Let’s start with Tom Robinson’s trial — what strikes you about how it’s told?

Student A: Why is the whole story filtered through Scout’s eyes? She’s a white child who can’t even understand the full weight of what’s happening. Doesn’t that mean Tom Robinson’s perspective is erased?

Student B: Yeah, and Helen Robinson doesn’t get to speak at all. In African American history, we study women like Ida B. Wells who directly challenged lynching. Why wouldn’t Harper Lee let Helen have a voice?Teacher: Excellent point — Lee’s choice of narrator shapes whose pain is visible, and whose is silenced.

Student C: I also want to push back on the way Atticus Finch is framed as the hero. In history, we know white lawyers sometimes defended Black clients. Isn’t this just another version of the “white savior” narrative? Atticus knew his town. He knew he wouldn’t win with an all-white jury — in Alabama — in 1930. Let’s be real.

Student D: And if we think about real history, Tom Robinson reminds me of Emmett Till or the Scottsboro Boys. But when we read it in middle school, it was treated like a “lesson” for white students. For us, it’s real life.

Student E: It doesn’t feel like fiction at all to me. Tom Robinson makes me think about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or even Trayvon Martin — Black people whose lives were taken or criminalized in ways the system tried to justify. The fact that we’re still seeing this happen shows that racism isn’t just “history.” So why is this book taught like it’s a safe way to learn about injustice, instead of confronting the reality that it’s ongoing?

Teacher: That’s an important point. Lee’s novel is often framed as “historic,” but what happens when students read it alongside the headlines of today? How does it land with you? Does it still serve as a moral lesson — or does it expose the inaccuracies in how America wants to remember race?

Student F: Honestly, it feels like the book sanitizes racism. We talk about the injustice of Tom Robinson’s trial, but not the way police violence, mass incarceration, and systemic bias are still operating. It’s easier for white students to process a fictional Black man in the 1930s than to face how racism still plays out right now.

Student G: No wonder they’re banning books. If we continue reading Morrison, Baldwin, or even contemporary writers who tell the truth about racism today, people will have to face realities the system refuses to confront. To Kill a Mockingbird feels safer because it keeps racism in the past — and that’s exactly why it gets called a “classic.”

Student H: And let’s be honest — I mean, I can’t say for certain, but how many students go home to parents who are openly racist? For some kids, this is just an “assignment,” but for others, it’s a reflection of the things being reinforced at home. That makes classrooms dangerous when they don’t name that reality — because silence just protects the racism that’s already there.

Student I: No wonder they’re banning books. If we continue reading Morrison, Baldwin, or even contemporary writers who tell the truth about racism today, students would have to face reality. To Kill a Mockingbird feels safer because it keeps racism in the past — and that’s exactly why it gets called a “classic.”

Student J: Be so forreal—nobody’s putting white kids through that kind of discomfort. Meanwhile, we’re told to sit still while our peers say ‘nigger’ again and again.

Student K: I voted for Obama and I have Black friends… but I loveTo Kill a Mockingbird.  Make it make sense.

Class Laughs.

Teacher: That’s the heart of it. The fight over which books are banned and which are celebrated tells us everything about whose stories are considered safe, and whose truths are seen as threatening. When we keep circling back to To Kill a Mockingbird as the centerpiece of “race education,” we protect a narrative that feels manageable for white audiences while limiting the complexity, brilliance, and fullness of Black voices. If we truly believe in education as liberation, then we must push past what is comfortable and ask: whose humanity are we affirming, and whose are we still erasing?

Educational researchers such as Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) remind us that curriculum can reproduce deficit-based narratives when students are consistently asked to see Black characters only in contexts of victimization or criminalization. In this sense, discussions that center Tom Robinson as the “teachable moment” for white moral development risk reinscribing the very stereotypes they claim to dismantle. Instead of cultivating critical consciousness, these narratives can leave white students with simplified associations that normalize Black disposability in both literature and life.

It takes a special kind of educator to teach To Kill a Mockingbird — though not necessarily a Black one. The challenge lies not in the teacher’s racial identity, but in their ability to navigate the complexities of the text and its historical context. Teaching this book requires a commitment to asking hard questions, confronting uncomfortable truths, and guiding students through a critical examination of racial dynamics.

The educator must be willing to push against the traditional portrayal of the novel as a moral tale of white goodness and instead create space for deeper conversations about whose voices are centered, whose pain is overlooked, and how the novel perpetuates or challenges systemic racism. It’s not enough to merely teach the book as it has been enshrined in curricula; the teacher must actively work to deconstruct the narratives it upholds, creating an environment where Black experiences and voices are neither objectified nor relegated to the margins. Today, this person must be revolutionary.

Which leads me to the question: aren’t there any “classics” that affirm Black joy, imagination, and success? The traditional “great books” lists so often frame Blackness through narratives of pain, criminalization, and death that one begins to wonder whether joy, creativity, or triumph are deemed unworthy of being remembered as “universal.” Toni Morrison (1987) reminds us that the presence of Black life in literature need not always be mediated through suffering; it can also center beauty, love, and possibility. Yet when classrooms return again and again to To Kill a Mockingbird as the definitive “race classic,” the result is a narrowed understanding of Black existence — one that reaffirms stereotypes rather than expanding the archive of human experience.

Educators often miss these points because schools and curricula have long been shaped by a Eurocentric lens that puts white comfort first. The educators who understand often can’t fight the system. In this system, the “N-word” is often defended as “authentic” or “historically accurate,” while the harm it causes Black students is brushed aside. The classroom becomes a stage of spectatorship — what bell hooks (1992) describes as the consumption of Black experiences for the benefit of white audiences — while the emotional toll on Black students is ignored.

Racial slurs are excused as “lessons” for non-Black students, but Black students are left to carry the weight of that trauma in silence. Funny how our so-called allies can quote bell hooks when it’s convenient, but go silent when her words demand accountability. I digress. Nonetheless, what some call authenticity is, in truth, the reproduction of domination that hooks warns against: a pedagogy that protects the text or tradition instead of the children in the room.

I’ll say it again. To defend a text as “classic” while ignoring the harm it does to Black students is not neutral — it is complicity. When Black pain is dismissed in the name of education, it becomes clear whose humanity is valued and whose is sacrificed.

There is an African proverb that says, “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” To Kill a Mockingbird is proof of that. We have Scout’s story — safe, nostalgic, palatable — but not Faith’s. We have Atticus Finch immortalized as a hero, while Tom Robinson’s truth and his family’s pain remain in the shadows. The literary establishment celebrates the hunter’s version, not the lion’s. Until we center the voices that have been silenced — the Faiths, the Helens, the untold stories of Black families erased from the page — we are not teaching justice. We are only supporting comfort.

Psychological Facts: These stories are not harmless.

We tend to treat these texts as if they live in a vacuum, but they don’t. Stories can shape stress responses. For Black students in particular, repeated classroom exposure to narratives that centralize Black pain is not a “neutral lesson” — it is a contact point with race-based traumatic stress (RBTS) and the cumulative wear of racial battle fatigue (RBF). The body remembers what the syllabus normalizes. Don’t believe me, read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, MD.

Psychological harm (RBTS & RBF). When a text repeatedly deploys racial slurs, depicts Black life through criminality or death, and requires students to “sit with it” without protection, Black students can experience hypervigilance, rumination, sleep disturbance, and somatic symptoms — classic markers of traumatic stress. Over time, the daily vigilance of anticipating harm (in class discussion, peer reactions, teacher framing) becomes fatigue. That is RBF: the ongoing physiological and cognitive toll of navigating racist environments.

Pedagogical harm (the hidden curriculum). When a book is framed as the safest way to “learn about racism,” the hidden lesson isn’t empathy — it’s who gets centered to learn and who must be mined to teach. Black students are drafted as cultural interpreters; white students are positioned as spectators. “Spectatorship.”

Social harm (classroom climate and discipline). Unprotected discussions of slurs and “debates” over Black humanity produce predictable outcomes: code-switching to survive, strategic silence, or justified pushback that can get misread as “defiance.” The “it’s in the music” deflection. A common move is: “Black students shouldn’t be offended; ‘nigga’ is in hip-hop and used among Black people.” Absolutely not:

• Context and power change meaning. A word’s impact depends on who says it, to whom, where, and with what historical weight. A teacher-assigned reading or peer recitation carries the force of the institution and the history it sits on.

• Consent and agency matter. Choosing to listen to a song is opt-in. Being required to hear or read a slur aloud in class is imposed exposure. One is elective; the other is compulsory and assessable.

• Pronunciation doesn’t sterilize history. The “-a” versus “-er” distinction does not erase the term’s lineage in racial terror, labor exploitation, and dehumanization — especially inside a school that evaluates, tracks, and punishes.

• Curriculum sets norms. When a syllabus normalizes the word under “historical accuracy,” it signals to non-Black peers that repetition is academically defensible, turning Black classmates into audience — and target.

If you are an educator and you disagree with my position, I urge you to ask yourself this: What exactly are students learning from this book, and at whose expense? If the lesson on racism is delivered through a white child’s eyes, while Black voices remain silenced, then the harm outweighs the “classic” label. We don’t get to hide behind tradition when that tradition retraumatizes Black children in the classroom and teaches white children a diluted version of truth. Education is supposed to illuminate, not protect comfort. And if that makes you uncomfortable, then perhaps it is the curriculum — not my critique — that needs reexamination.