February 16, 2016
Times Square, New York
Source: Shutterstock
To Kill a Mockingbird taught generations of white people that black people are, if not quite “Magic Negros,” then certainly noble but timid angels incapable of sin. How many liberal judges, juries, and parole boards have freed (or ignored) African-Americans guilty of black-on-white crime because they had a sentence or two of Harper Lee’s stuck in their heads?
How many of those black criminals went on to rape and kill again? Hence my comparison of Lee to Rachel Carson: another liberal female hero whose own book”this time, about the “dangers” of DDT”has quite possibly killed more blacks than slavery.
The real villains, according to the Mockingbird worldview (as Charles Murray has documented), are white trash, who, having finally gotten the message (those morons!), are duly killing themselves in disgust.
And when real white villains can”t readily be found, one of those Atticus Finch wannabes will happily conjure some up. (I”m willing to bet $10,000 that you”d easily find an old copy of Mockingbird in Mike Nifong‘s house, and maybe even a treasured first edition…)
As I”ve written here before, the reality of black life (and crime and punishment and persecution) in the South was orders of magnitude more complex (and, frankly, inspiring) than the narrative presented in Mockingbird and other “civil rights” talismans. It’s a shame Aaron Sorkin (God help us) is poised to bring the novel to Broadway next year. Fans are justifiably worried that Sorkin will West Wing Lee’s dialogue. Everyone else should brace themselves for the inevitable wave of brand-new liberal white knights and paternalistic do-gooders that production will unleash, as surely as babies follow blackouts.
