The public school district in Biloxi, Miss., did not specify which words, exactly, in “To Kill a Mockingbird” are so objectionable that the book was yanked from an eighth-grade reading list last week, 57 years after it published.
“There is some language in the book that makes people uncomfortable,” school board vice president Kenny Holloway vaguely told the Sun Herald.
That is: the n-word, which Harper Lee pointedly did not when she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about racism in the United States.
The n-word appears nearly 50 other times throughout “Mockingbird” almost always in dialogue. The novel won its author a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and “made the values of the civil rights movement particularly a feeling for the god-awful unfairness of segregation real for millions.
Many would be unhappy with that.
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