I hear you're a racist now, Atticus....

Boring username

FANS of To Kill A Mockingbird have been warned of "disturbing" reading in Harper Lee's much-anticipated follow-up novel, as its hero lawyer Atticus Finch is shockingly portrayed as a racist "bigot" who went to a Ku Klux Klan meeting.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/590494/To-Kill-A-Mockingbird-Harper-Lee-Atticus-Finch-racist


There have been allegations that 89 year old Harper Lee has been coerced into releasing this book by unscrupulous advisors and shady legal personnel who can smell the scent of dollar bills. Sad if true.

But then again, maybe this is what the world needs. There are no heroes. There never has been. Everyone is a little bit racist, especially those who claim they aren't. So maybe it's only right that the biggest hero of 20th century literature is shown up to be a regular man with flaws, just like you and me.

We all know that holier than thou crusader who preaches tolerance and diversity on facebook, but opposes the proposed methadone clinic down the street, and lobbies against moving the immigrants in next door. In fact, Rev. Al Sharpton says the depiction rings true of his interactions with some 'liberals' who were racist behind closed doors:

The Rev Al Sharpton, veteran civil rights activist and Baptist minister, told the Observer that the portrayal of Atticus in Watchman chimed with his own experience of some postwar American liberals. “To Kill A Mockingbird has always been the standard we talked about in American literature in dealing with the question of race and racial justice,” said Sharpton. “Now to find out that Atticus Finch was not this statesmanlike racial hero, but was in fact portrayed at first by Harper Lee as racist in many ways, reflects the burden we’ve had in real life of the northern liberal who ended up being racist.

“When I was a kid and Dr King was dealing with raw racism in the south, the northern liberals supported him. But when I came of age and started fighting racism in the north, some of the liberals who supported the generation before me were the ones I had to fight in police brutality cases … Finch reflects the reality of finding out that a lot of those we thought were on our side harboured some personal different feelings.”

Sharpton added: “I think the irony of this revelation is it reflects much of the reality of what I’ve seen in the civil rights movement in the 21st century.”

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/11/atticus-finch-racist-go-set-watchman

Do you think this is a more realistic portrayal of Finch, and humanity in general?

NachoBusiness

What's next? Oscar Schindler only saved Jewish people cause he was worried about the gas bill.

biko

How about we read it and judge for ourselves?

Is he a bigot because of other things or because he attended a KKK riot?

Menas

biko wrote: »

How about we read it and judge for ourselves?

Much better to just get a good old racism car crash thread going.

strelok

i just hope it doesn't convince anyone to shoot paul simon

suicide_circus

The Rev Al Sharpton is a charlatan

fatknacker

Maybe it was all an elaborate plan to stage a COUP KLUX KLAN!

Heh?

tritium

Stuff like this kind of shows how much words like racist have been devalued by the ease and frequency with which they're thrown about by certain individuals and groups to raise their own profile or further their own agenda.

Gatling

So we're complaining about a fictional character in a work of fiction that nobody has read .



Some people hey !

branie2

Gregory Peck (who played Atticus Finch in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird) must be turning in his grave.

cloud493

Gatling wrote: »

So we're complaining about a fictional character in a work of fiction that nobody has read .



Some people hey !

This is the internet, where you can be offended by things nobody read that don't even exist!

osarusan

Boring username wrote: »

There have been allegations that 89 year old Harper Lee has been coerced into writing this sequel by unscrupulous advisors and shady legal personnel who can smell the scent of dollar bills. Sad if true.

Go Set A Watchman was written before she wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, just never published.

What is being published is that original text (which Harper Lee believed had been lost) with no revisions.

Boring username

fatknacker wrote: »

Maybe it was all an elaborate plan to stage a COUP KLUX KLAN!

Heh?

You deserve far more likes for that

Boring username

osarusan wrote: »

Go Set A Watchman was written before she wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, just never published.

What is being published is that original text (which Harper Lee believed had been lost) with no revisions.

Yes I was inaccurate in my reporting. But there have been concerns that Lee was being pressured into releasing it:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/go-set-a-watchman-concerns-that-harper-lee-was-pressured-into-publishing-new-book-10024615.html

osarusan

Boring username wrote: »

Yes I was inaccurate in my reporting.

It was mentioned in the link you provided in the OP:

Lee has previously said she completed Go Set A Watchman in the mid-1950s, which features Scout as an adult woman.

Boring username wrote: »

But there have been concerns that Lee was being pressured into releasing it:

Yeah, that was also mentioned in your own link in the OP:

News of the new book's publication stunned the literary world earlier this year and concerns were raised about the extent of Lee's involvement in the project.
Her agent was forced to respond to reports suggesting the 88-year-old was being taken advantage of over the publication of the book.
Authorities in her native Alabama closed their investigation into the issue saying the reclusive writer had "made it quite clear" she wanted the book published.

justchecked

But that would mean that there could be other people out there who act all right on just for public approval.

Boring username

suicide_circus wrote: »

The Rev Al Sharpton is a charlatan

He is certainly guilty of race baiting and stoking racial tensions at times. But he has a point about hypocritical liberals too.

suicide_circus

Boring username wrote: »

He is certainly guilty of race baiting and stoking racial tensions at times. But he has a point about hypocritical liberals too.

Agreed

Turtwig

It never ceases to amaze me how people want fictional characters to behave in certain ways. It's fiction characters don't have to be anything. The can be anything. They're characters. They shouldn't have to conform to our expectations and etiquette.

Also Atticus might originally have been racist. People change. Something in the real world we tend to ignore.

Qualitymark

Quotes from Atticus in Go Set a Watchman:

“The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.”

“Have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?”

“Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world? Do you want your children going to a school that’s been dragged down to accommodate Negro children?”

The first chapter is awkwardly written and dull; I'm not surprised that Harper Lee didn't want it published when she was in her prime. The beauty of To Kill a Mockingbird is that Atticus Finch, while very much a product of his class and society, is too noble and too intelligent a man to harbour such ideas. To have this earlier and not very impressive book stain his beauty is an awful pity.

Turtwig

Those quotes carry no context.

I like the idea of Atticus initially being racist and slowly changing his view.

Steve_Carella

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbud8rLejLM

osarusan

Turtwig wrote: »

I like the idea of Atticus initially being racist and slowly changing his view.

It would be the other way round I think, because this book, while written before To Kill A Mockingbird, is set some years later when Scout is an adult.

But mostly, I would not be sure it's a good idea to view these novels as kind of two parts in a series, and expect the characters to behave in much the same way, or expect one novel to lead into the other.


It isn't clear if that is what Harper Lee intended at all.

fatknacker

Boring username wrote: »

You deserve far more likes for that

I know, right?

Happyman42

TKAMB is set in the 30's
The new one is set in the 50's

Samaris

Going to reserve judgement until I actually read it. It may be taken out of context, or maybe it just is an early draft, and doesn't mesh with her classic TKAM. If it doesn't, I will quite happily ignore it from the context of the earlier book.

Or maybe there will be an explanation for it all in the book that will make sense.

branie2

Atticus could have been brainwashed into become a racist

kylith

Wasn't it written before TKAMB but never published? In that case she would have decided to go with a less racist Atticus meaning that Atticus in the new book is only a first draft.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Boring username wrote: »

. There are no heroes. There never has been.

Can't agree. Of course there are genuine heroes in life. Now in fiction of course heros can rise and fall at a whim.

Everyone is a little bit racist, especially those who claim they aren'

Where did you get that from?

We all know that holier than thou crusader who preaches tolerance and diversity on facebook, but opposes the proposed methadone clinic down the street, and lobbies against moving the immigrants in next door.

Ah, no we all don't.

I think I'll wait to read it before jumping to any conclusions.

Not a NSA agent

kylith wrote: »

Wasn't it written before TKAMB but never published? In that case she would have decided to go with a less racist Atticus meaning that Atticus in the new book is only a first draft.

This is what I was thinking. The book might have been written before but they dont have to be part of a series. It could have been one version but she decided to write TKAM, taking aspects of the characters but took a different path with them.

Qualitymark

The first couple of pages read like something out of the first, inexperienced days of a writing class: inward-looking, flashbacky, telling-rather-than-showing, self-indulgent.

Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires. She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose.
Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, but she decided to go by train from New York to Maycomb Junction on her fifth annual trip home. For one thing, she had the life scared out of her the last time she was on a plane: the pilot elected to fly through a tornado. For another thing, flying home meant her father rising at three in the morning, driving a hundred miles to meet her in Mobile, and doing a full day’s work afterwards: he was seventy-two now and this was no longer fair.

and so on. Read the full chapter here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2015/jul/10/go-set-a-watchman-read-the-first-chapter

When you compare it with the fabulously kinetic and vivid opening of To Kill a Mockingbird, it's tragic:

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

Now, admittedly this is also a flashback, but it's vivid, immediate, exact, direct, gripping.

There are a few pages of setup - more than you'd expect in a modern novel - and then it jumps straight into a living story, as we meet Scout and Jem's cousin Dill (based on Harper Lee's own cousin Truman Capote):

Early one morning as we were beginning our day's play in the back yard, Jem and I heard something next door in Miss Rachel Haverford's collard patch. We went to the wire fence to see if there was a puppy- Miss Rachel's rat terrier was expecting- instead we found someone sitting looking at us. Sitting down, he wasn't much higher than the collards. We stared at him until he spoke:
"Hey."
"Hey yourself," said Jem pleasantly.
"I'm Charles Baker Harris," he said. "I can read."
"So what?" I said.
"I just thought you'd like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin' I can do it...."
"How old are you," asked Jem, "four-and-a-half?"
"Goin' on seven."
"Shoot no wonder, then," said Jem, jerking his thumb at me. "Scout yonder's been readin' ever since she was born, and she ain't even started to school yet. You look right puny for goin' on seven."
"I'm little but I'm old," he said.

Boring username

Nataly Gorgeous Speakeasy wrote: »

Can't agree. Of course there are genuine heroes in life. Now in fiction of course heros can rise and fall at a whim.

Don't get me wrong, there are people on this planet who do incredible and dangerous jobs every day. But there is no such thing as a hero-that's just a word the media uses to sell papers. There are only ordinary people who do brave things. As any firefighter/nurse/paramedic/peacekeeper/rescue worker will be the first to admit. I've never heard anyone say 'I am a hero'. It's always others who label them one.

Nataly Gorgeous Speakeasy wrote: »

Where did you get that from?

There are multiple studies that indicate this, it's called unconscious bias. That's not to say you are a closet neo-Nazi, but you make different decisions when you see a person's skin colour, whether you realise it or not:

Everyone’s a little bit racist, posits the song from the musical Avenue Q. But it may not be your fault, according to research in the latest edition of the British Journal of Social Psychology. In looking for the culprit as to why people tend to display tinges of racism, sexism or ageism, even towards members of their own group, a research team, led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, found that our culture may be partially to blame.

While previous psychological studies have shown that racism, sexism and ageism tend to be universal, a new study led by Paul Verhaeghen, professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology, found that works in the American culture, namely literature, movies, TV, radio and the Internet, may contribute to the problem by exhibiting the same stereotypes that society works so hard to snuff out.

http://www.cos.gatech.edu/stories/Everyone-is-a-Little-Bit-Racist-but-It-May-Not-Be-Your-Fault-Study-Suggests

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-the-gap/201110/prime-and-prejudice-why-we-are-all-little-bit-racist-0

http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/may/29/racist-racism-study-uk

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-is-everyone-a-little-bit-racist.html?_r=0

Nataly Gorgeous Speakeasy wrote: »

Ah, no we all don't.I think I'll wait to read it before jumping to any conclusions.

Are you seriously telling me that not one of your friends, the ones who would condemn racism publicly, have never said anything negative against travellers, for example? Even in a fit or anger or rage that they regretted afterwards? I would be sceptical of any claims to the contrary. We even see it here on boards with supposedly right on people having a go at travellers sometimes.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Boring username wrote: »

Are you seriously telling me that not one of your friends, the ones who would condemn racism publicly, have never said anything negative against travellers, for example? Even in a fit or anger or rage that they regretted afterwards? I would be sceptical of any claims to the contrary. We even see it here on boards with supposedly right on people having a go at travellers sometimes.

Yes I am.
Take it back to what you posted-

We all know that holier than thou crusader who preaches tolerance and diversity on facebook, but opposes the proposed methadone clinic down the street, and lobbies against moving the immigrants in next door.

I don't know anybody on facebook, so no I we don't all know people who post with contrary values. Secondly, I have friends who would be unhappy about travelers but they are straight about it and would be honest about their racism too. I accept there must be people with double standards but it is incorrect to say we all know such people.
Anyway, back to the book.

Qualitymark

Boring username wrote: »

That's not to say you are a closet neo-Nazi, but you make different decisions when you see a person's skin colour, whether you realise it or not

But isn't that a question of current societal norms, rather than inherent bias? For instance, would you make different decisions if I had blue eyes rather than green? I doubt it.

Irish people's attitude to, say, Indians has changed radically in the last 20 years; they used to be 'other', but now they're just slightly different-looking; we've got used to them and know what to expect. Our attitude to Africans is moderating gradually, though they're newer to us so it hasn't happened as much yet.

As for the anti-Traveller bias, I suspect a lot of that comes from the criminals who are Travellers. Most of us aren't really aware that their main victims are other Travellers. I don't know what will happen if travelling people are declared an ethnic minority - whether it will make things better or worse between them and settled people.

catallus

Well, he might be a racist or he might not be, but it says an awful lot more about the people who like that book that they don't see anything wrong with killing birds.

Qualitymark

catallus wrote: »

Well, he might be a racist or he might not be, but it says an awful lot more about the people who like that book that they don't see anything wrong with killing birds.

Heh!

When he gave us our air-rifles Atticus wouldn't teach us to shoot. Uncle Jack instructed us in the rudiments thereof; he said Atticus wasn't interested in guns. Atticus said to Jem one day, "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
"Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

The 'mockingbird' in the story is Boo Radley, autistic, damaged, shy and - yes - heroic.

Eugene Norman

kylith wrote: »

Wasn't it written before TKAMB but never published? In that case she would have decided to go with a less racist Atticus meaning that Atticus in the new book is only a first draft.

Yes. However this is now canon.

Look a guy could change over his life. Or oppose brutality and bad law in certain circumstances but support segregation. Nowt so queer.

The Backwards Man

Ug; Things change
Charlie; So do people

Critters 4

kylith

Eugene Norman wrote: »

Yes. However this is now canon.

Look a guy could change over his life. Or oppose brutality and bad law in certain circumstances but support segregation. Nowt so queer.

I think calling it canon is a bit much. It was written before TKAMB, it's an unrefined text so it hasn't be rewritten and edited, it was never intended to be published, or to be a prequel to TKAMB.

Qualitymark

Watchman was written first. When it was rejected by publishers, Lee switched the viewpoint so that a child watches a conservative, decent country lawyer forced to go to bat for a man victimised by racism, and produced Mockingbird.