Goodbye And Good Riddance To Atticus Finch And Other ‘White Saviors’

Goodbye And Good Riddance To Atticus Finch And Other ‘White Saviors’

by Laurel Raymond at Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/07/18/3681833/atticus-finch-long-overdue-death-white-savior/

"SNIP...............



Shock over Atticus’ racism surrounds Go Set A Watchman. We’re very attached to our white saviors: Ava DuVerney’s magnificent Selma was criticized for its failure to make President Lyndon B. Johnson a central hero. We’re also fiercely protective of their honor, which is rarely unblemished: yes, LBJ was a major architect of the civil rights act. He was also personally prejudiced and used the n-word — a lot. Our founding fathers owned slaves and spoke of liberty and justice for all.

As Kimberly Ellis says in The Guardian, “The discrepancy is only a source of cognitive dissonance for those who retain the naive notion that white people who engage in progressive actions can escape white, racial socialization and the system of white supremacy.”

The new, more complicated Atticus is just the latest in a line of complex characters. And he was never that perfect — some scholars have been pointing out Atticus’ paternalistic form of racism for years.

Scout reflects in Watchman that the civil rights movement has driven a wedge through her community. She wonders “What turned ordinary men into screaming dirt at the top of their voices, what made her kind of people harden and say ‘nigger’ when the word had never crossed their lips before?” Of course, what Scout doesn’t realize — and hopefully, we now all do — is that the racism was there all along.



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