Book Bonding: Building Connections Through Family Reading by Megan Dowd Lambert

Author:Megan Dowd Lambert [Lambert, Megan Dowd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Most of this piece originated as a post for the Horn Book‘s 2018 Calling Caldecott blog, where (after some careful reflection) I was delighted to support Marcy Campbell and Corinna Luyken’s Adrian Simcox Does NOT Have a Horse. I’ve expanded that post to include how talking with my son about his eighth-grade class reading of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird served as a backdrop for my thinking about this picture book.

My son Stevie’s response to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird when he read it in his eighth-grade English class was akin to that of writer and scholar Dr. Roxane Gay, who wrote in the New York Times in 2018, “Perhaps I am ambivalent because I am black. I am not the target audience. I don’t need to read about a young white girl understanding the perniciousness of racism to actually understand the perniciousness of racism. I have ample first-hand experience.”

Stevie was aghast at his white classmates’ naivete. “They’re just like Jem!” he said incredulously, referencing protagonist Scout’s older brother. “How could they be surprised that Tom Robinson [a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman] gets convicted?”

He went on to rail against the text and (among other things) asserted a powerful critique about its ahistorical scene when three white children, Scout, Dill, and Jem, turn back a lynch mob.

“That’s not realistic!” he said. “I mean, if it was that easy, then maybe all those Black people wouldn’t have been killed.”

Stevie and I talked about how the scene provides a white savior, which creates wish fulfillment for white readers. Hey, look at these white kids doing the right thing, and look at those white grown-ups changing. But the dishonesty at the heart of the scene is dismaying at best to a reader like my son. It offers him the opposite of empathy, as it roundly dismisses his understanding of the history of lynching in the United States.

“Why do people talk about this book like it’s all about being against racism?” Stevie said during another conversation. “It’s not even really about the Black people in the story. It’s about all the white people.”

He had a point. A former graduate student of mine, Autumn Allen, wrote in the journal Research on Diversity in Youth Literature in 2020 about an oft-quoted line from Scout’s father, Atticus Finch: “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.” She pointed out that the line is not aimed at getting Scout and Jem to empathize with Black people like Tom Robinson; his wife, Helen; and the Finch family’s maid, Calpurnia. No, Autumn clarified, Atticus means that the children should try to understand Boo Radley, who is ostracized but not persecuted, and who is white. This is just one way that Black characters are marginalized and silenced in this book, so they end up serving as vehicles for white characters’ (incremental) growth.

Stevie’s teacher, Michael Lawrence-Riddell, was a white,

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