Harper Lee’s just-released novel Go Set a Watchman continues the story of Jean Louise (“Scout”)
Finch and her father, Atticus. In Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), set in
Alabama in the 1930s, Atticus was a heroic lawyer who stood up to the local
rednecks by representing a young black man who was falsely accused of rape. (The
book’s popularity was soon ensured by the movie, starring beloved actor Gregory
Peck as Atticus.) In the new book Jean Louise and the readers see an older,
flawed Atticus who joins a local citizens’ council that opposes the NAACP in
the fifties, toward the beginning of the civil rights era.
Many readers who have loved To Kill a Mockingbird for half
a century, and revered Atticus, have been horrified. (Reviews of the new book have been mixed, but the quality of the writing is another issue.) Online and in print, comments
like “Atticus was a racist” have appeared. In the novel, the adult Jean Louise
herself reacted violently when she came home from living in New York and
realized what her father was doing. Her love and respect for Atticus were
severely threatened. It seems likely that Lee’s relationship with her own
father, on whom Atticus was presumably based, was endangered also.
Though I never confronted my own father as sharply as Jean
Louise did, during the sixties and seventies we had some prickly disagreements
about civil rights. Like Atticus, he was an intelligent, fair-minded man who
treated all people equally, but his background and education simply doomed him
to an intolerant outlook. Born in 1908 and growing up in a conservative, mainly
white, area of the Midwest, he never was exposed to other races and religions as
a child. Though college-educated, he never accepted the sameness of blacks and
whites, or of Jews and Gentiles. I feel sure that if he had not died in the
seventies, he would have become much more liberal. (My mother, who was also
born in 1908 and died only a few years ago, had become nearly as liberal as I
am by the time she died.) This is not just wishful thinking on my part: my
father was anti-Semitic also, but when I married a Jew, his attitude changed
quickly. Simple exposure can work wonders.
It is easy to judge people who lived in the past by current
standards. History textbooks today are more judgmental about George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson, for example, than they once were. However, individuals
and groups of people are continually changing. In the fifties, many
well-intentioned people had attitudes about race, homosexuality, marriage, and
other issues that would seem quaint, if not actually evil, today. We need to
try to understand them as products of their environment.
There is a genetic aspect, also: Though in some circles it
is politically incorrect to state it, it is obvious from sociobiology that we
have some inborn prejudices. Cleaving to the group that resembles us must have
had adaptive advantages early in human evolution; so, try as we may, it is hard
for those of every race not to distrust or even fear other groups. Understanding
prejudices must not lead to agreeing with them, of course. It is important to
recognize our prejudices and to strive to overcome them rather than denying
they exist. As different groups intermingle and intermarry, tolerance seems to
be increasing, but complete acceptance will still take a long time. In the meantime,
we need to use education and legislation to lessen ignorance and to protect
minorities.
