President Obama and his speechwriters apparently haven’t read Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, the sort-of sequel to her much-loved To Kill a Mockingbird.
In his farewell speech Tuesday evening, Obama cited Atticus Finch, the white lawyer whose defense of an innocent African-American man serves as the engine that drives the main themes of To Kill a Mockingbird.
“[I]f our democracy is to work the way it should in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction, Atticus Finch, who said ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it,'” Obama said.
The president added:
For blacks and other minority groups, that means tying our own very real struggles for justice to the challenges that a lot of people in this country face … For white Americans, it means acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the ’60s; that when minority groups voice discontent, they’re not just engaging in reverse racism or practicing political correctness …
That’s a good passage, but I’m still stuck on the Atticus Finch bit.
It was a big deal a few years ago when HarperCollins published Go Set a Watchman, which takes place after the events of To Kill a Mockingbird — not only because the world had waited decades for a second installment to Lee’s story, but also because a lot of people were caught off guard by the revelation that Atticus Finch was maybe-kinda-sorta racist.
To put it simply, the book reveals Finch, who had spent the night guarding the lockup in order to prevent the lynching of his client, to be against desegregation.
The Wall Street Journal’s review explains its neatly when it sets up the moral dilemma faced by the main character, Jean Louise:
[Her] visit takes place shortly after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision—”the Supreme Court’s bid for immortality,” as Atticus sarcastically calls it—and, like most of the South, the town is in upheaval over the prospect of enforced integration. Jean Louise thinks little of it until she sees Henry and her father attending a meeting of the Maycomb County Citizens’ Council, where local whites convene to spew racist bile and organize resistance to the federal government.
Jean Louise is appalled by the possibility that the men she most admires could belong to such a group, but when she confronts Atticus, he defends the council as a necessary reaction to the overreach of the government and the meddling of the NAACP. Blacks have “made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways,” he grants, but they’re not at all ready for full civil rights: “Do you want your children going to a school that’s been dragged down to accommodate Negro children?”
Again, the passage from Obama’s farewell address that included Finch is pretty great — it’s eloquent and helps him prove his point. Still, it’s maybe not the best quote to use now, all things considered.
