How Harper Lee helped Canadians ignore racism in our own backyard – Hill

Lawrence Hill makes valid points regarding the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird in Canadian schools:

However, the rote and ongoing use of To Kill a Mockingbird in the classroom points to our very Canadian-ness, and to our collective disinclination in Canada to examine racism and black history in our own backyard. How utterly convenient it is for Canadian children and adults from Dawson City to St. John’s to read about racism in the Deep South of the United States in the Great Depression, and to avoid discussions about slavery, segregation, other forms of racial injustice as well as the civil-rights movement in Canada itself.

In my experience, one of the unfortunate offshoots of the success of To Kill a Mockingbird and its hold on our psyche has nothing to do with the author or the book, but rather, how we have allowed it to dominate our meditations – especially in school – about racial injustice in Canada.

Harper Lee cannot be blamed for her own success. She is not at fault for our own collective disinclination to look beyond her novel and acknowledge the existence and eventual rooting out of slavery in the Maritimes and present-day Quebec and Ontario.

We have only ourselves and our own reticence to confront history to blame for the fact that many Canadians to this day are more familiar with the American Civil War and with the life of Martin Luther King Jr. than they are with the struggle to eradicate racial segregation in Southwest Ontario and in Nova Scotia; the movement of the black Loyalists from New York to Nova Scotia in 1783 and then, for many, back to Africa a decade later; the movement of 600 blacks from California onto Vancouver and Salt Spring Island in the mid-19th century; the settlement of blacks from Oklahoma and Texas in the Canadian prairies at the outset of the 20th century; the waves of immigrants coming to Canada from Caribbean nations starting in the late 1960s, and the simultaneous bulldozing of Africville in the north end of Halifax.

Black history in Canada is as complex and varied as the history of any racial or ethnic group, but we have lost sight of that, partly as a result of our obsession with evil in another era and another country.

Although it richly written and wonderfully drawn, To Kill a Mockingbirdemploys a narrative approach that has been used time and time again to address racism in North America. Racism and injustice is perceived through the eyes of benevolent whites, and the stories feature white characters over black. Indeed, in To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as in Harper Lee’s follow-up novel Go Set a Watchman, published in the last year of her life, black characters are minimally sketched. With the exception of Calpurnia, a black woman who works in the house of Atticus Finch, Harper Lee presents to her readers racism and evil, minus dimensional black characters.

Source: How Harper Lee helped Canadians ignore racism in our own backyard – The Globe and Mail