Could you agree that maybe school curriculum would benefit from the addition of a book about racism from the perspectives of people who have experienced it? Because that’s really the argument here. In general people don’t deride To Kill a Mockingbird for white supremacy, they just take issue with the fact that voices of actual black Americans are absent. And I, a white person, can’t disagree with that argument.

I believe that reading fiction is necessary for empathy. There were and are black voices writing about these issues, maybe TKaM should be read in addition to works by black Americans like Hurston, Angelou, Baldwin (though can you imagine the outrage at presenting a homosexual black man to high school students), Wright, Morrison, Petry. I know plenty of them are taught in American lit, but maybe, just maybe, they should be considered the standard for the black experience?