America is heartbroken.
Especially white America.
All of us who read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and who saw the movie starring Gregory Peck, let out a sigh of relief. According to Lee, there were in fact good white people who had the courage and the chutzpah to confront racism head on. Atticus Finch was a hero. He stood up to hatred and bigotry and fought for what was right. Black people loved him, or the idea of him ...and white people ...seemed relieved.
We lived vicariously, all of us black and white, through Atticus. We lived a concocted and contrived idealism, claiming a world where there was, in fact, genuine goodness, a world where all God's children had the capacity to bypass racism and treat all human beings as worthy of love, both from God and from people.
But Lee's new book, Go Set a Watchman, A Novel has apparently shattered the idealism. For some, this shattering is a new experience, but if the truth be told, many of the white heroes we have put in place were really not so noble when it came to race. This writer was in fact shattered years ago upon learning that Abraham Lincoln held racist beliefs and views. Yes, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but he didn't free the slaves in all of the states, but rather just those in states which were "rebelling against the Union" (http://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-lincoln-slavery-and-emancipation) Lincoln did not believe slavery was morally wrong, nor did he think slaves, of African-Americans in general, should be considered "equal" to whites. And the clincher: he really freed the slaves because the Union needed more soldiers.
I cried when I read that. I needed Lincoln to be an advocate for what I called righteousness. I needed for him to be different from people in history in high places who helped perpetuate racism, people like United States Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney who ruled, in the Dred Scott case, that "there were no rights of a black man that a white man is bound to respect." I needed there to be someone official, someone in power, to really understand and appreciate the presence and the contributions of African-Americans. All my life, I had believed Lincoln to be that hero, but he wasn't. I needed for there to be someone white who believed that "all God's children" mattered...and who understood and despised racism and the pain it has caused a whole race of people for far too long.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel and all of us should have remembered that. Novelists get to create the world that they want. Atticus was a fictional character but we needed him to be different. If he were different then perhaps there were other white people who were likewise different.
But now we find out, in Lee's new novel, that Atticus was a racist just like so many others. Atticus was no hero; he was just another white American man, an attorney who defended a black man in court. He was admirable in that in Lee's book, he defended Tom Robinson as we think a defense attorney ought. Certainly in history that has not been the case...but the bitter pill that Lee's new book is causing us to swallow is that Atticus was, after all, a white man, a Southern white man, deeply planted in Southern white culture. The fact that Atticus was a Southern white man made his heroism in Mockingbird all that more admirable; it was not a statement that racists only live in the South, as our history lessons would have us believe. How noble was it, how much a knight Atticus seemed to be, as we settled into his fictional nobility as an icon of racial justice.
What do we do with this, the "fall" of Atticus? We should embrace it. We should embrace it , talk about it, say out loud the racist views that Lee has Atticus share in this new novel. Atticus is not an anomaly in the sense that he was apparently racist; if he was an anomaly it was, as mentioned before, that he got around his racism in order to function as an effective defense attorney for a black man. But embedded in the psyche of white people is the belief that black people, and in fact, people of color, are just ...less than ...white people. Atticus' desire not to have black people live near him, his belief that black people were stupid and dirty and unintelligent ...is not new news. Those jaded beliefs are behind so much of what has gone on in America.
Although I am disappointed, I think I am glad that Atticus has fallen. It will be interesting to watch and see how the conversation on race, which has always been rather antiseptic and superficial, might change. Until we get into the heart of what makes racism so vile, we will always look for a hero. The fall of Atticus is a wake up call that when it comes to racism, heroes just do not exist.