if a non white person tried to order a meal back in 1850 would they serve him?

LizzieMaine said:

Precisely -- social history, to be specific. There's a difference.

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Fading Fast said:

And returning to "Go Set a Watchman," while that Atticus Finch says some offensive things to our 2018 ears, for his time, he was a forward-thinking, good man trying to see outside of his cultural context but still, to a degree, confined by it. To denounce him for not living up to today's standards is unfair, but IMO, that's not giving him a pass either.

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sheeplady said:

I have a completely different reading of the two books. Scout is a child in "to kill a mockingbird." In her child's mind, she sees her father as a heroic non-racist. She bases her identity off of what she sees. She fills in the blanks about her father. She sees him in court fighting against having a man (a black man) put in jail for something he didn't do, against the backdrop of a town who wants blood. She assumes her father isn't a racist. She comes to base part of her identity off of it.

In "go set a watchman" she returns to her childhood home as an adult. She finds that her father is a segregationist. She has difficulty accepting this. However, she comes to understand she had a childhood idolatry of her father. She is faced suddenly with her own dilemmia: stand against her father and childhood friend or let go of what she believes in. Watchman is about the battle of choosing beliefs over blood. It is about how hard it can be when you have a strong belief but find that those who you once thought shared these beliefs never really did. It is the loss of idolatry; the mooring of a person not as a shadow of their parent but as their own person. Yes, there is grief and anxiety there. But also strength.

The story(ies) is not about Atticus Finch, it is always about Scout.

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LizzieMaine said:

I can see both sides of this argument, given that Lee wrote "Watchman" before "Mockingbird." I think she made a conscious authorial decision to go with Scout's more innocent point of view about her father because nuance was a difficult commercial sell at the time she wrote the original version. America's racial nerves were rubbed raw in the late 1950s, and I don't think the largely white middle-class market for mainstream hardcover fiction wanted a book that laid certain uncomfortable truths bare in the way that "Watchman" does.

That market fell in love with "Mockingbird" largely because it gave them a picture that they wanted to believe -- a world in which one (white) man of stalwart principles consistently did the right thing. At a time when the Klan and the White Citizens Councils and other such bodies were running rampant in the South, and when Little Rock was a suppurating open wound, white Americans desperately wanted an idealized Atticus Finch figure to prove to themselves that the kind of things they were hearing about weren't a structural part of the society they lived in, but an anomaly, an isolated evil that could be defeated by a brave, principled figure who looked and sounded like the way they themselves liked to think they'd look and sound in similar circumstances. The idea of an adult Scout having to confront the real, flawed man inside that idealized image would have forced those Americans to confront the flaws within themselves -- and nobody ever made any money doing that.

"Mockingbird" is one of the most beloved books of the last sixty years for good reason, but I think "Watchman" is a far more courageous -- and honest -- one.

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HudsonHawk said:

Isn't the prevailing theory that Watchman is simply an earlier, longer draft of Mockingbird, which was cut because no one wanted to read the second part, for the reasons you describe?

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sheeplady said:

Lee's editor suggested she write about the story within watchman about the court case- that this story within watchman (which became mockingbird) was more interesting.

I can see how after the public loved Mockingbird she refused to release her "first" book- the sequel. She acutely understood that many people would not accept it. It hurts when our idols are destroyed, and I've heard a lot of denial that Scout's father is the one and same in the two books. That a person can believe that people shouldn't be jailed for the color of thair skin; but also that races should stay separate.

I've seen this... racists who would never treat someone out right badly but have plenty of damaging things to say in private about those type of people.

I really liked watchman. I know a lot of people panned it. But the truth is there's a lot more racists than most of us would like to admit in many of our lives. We would rather pretend they don't exist than confront them or admit to ourselves that we welcome them into our homes, communities, etc.

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LizzieMaine said:

There's several books worth reading if one wants to get a really good picture of the racial situation in the America of the Era. In 1943, the African-American journalist Roi Ottley wrote "New World A'Comin'," an extremely informative inside look at the state of the civil rights movement during WWII, and how it impacted the lives of everyday African-Americans in creating a sense that there was a momentum building toward positive change that wasn't going to be stopped. This book became the basis of a popular radio show of the same title, heard in New York under the sponsorship of the City-Wide Citizens Committee for Harlem starting in 1944.

A more scholarly but worthwhile book is sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's epic 1944 study "An American Dilemma," which gets deeply into the statistical realities of the time in demonstrating the existence of institutional racism in American culture. The prose is dry, and the book is thick, but its research is impeccable, and its conclusions are definitive.

And I'd also recommend the works of journalist Stetson Kennedy, a remarkable Southern white man who devoted his life to fighting the system of injustice he was born into. He extensively documented the workings of Jim Crow, both on the local level, and also how Northern industrialists exploited it for profit. Kennedy wasn't some beard-stroking academic, and he didn't just write theory: he went so far as to personally infiltrate the KKK in Georgia, and uncovered information that led to the revocation of that organization's formal charter. His 1946 book "Southern Exposure" is the definitive look at not just how organized racism functioned in 1940s America but also exactly why it was maintained. Later on, he wrote "A Jim Crow Guide to the USA," a blistering indictment of the "customs" of racism done up in the satirical guise of a WPA-style travel guide. Kennedy has his latter-day critics, as might be expected, but his research nevertheless stands up to scrutiny, and I recommend his work without hesitation.

The Civil Rights movement didn't begin in the 1950s, and these books offer ample evidence of its early years. They're an excellent introduction to a critical, formative period.

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LizzieMaine said:

You don't need to make it 1850. There were plenty of places in 1950 where this would have happened. While segregation by law was a Southern phenomenon, segregation by custom was widely practiced in the North -- many hotels routinely turned away non-white guests, and many also operated on what was genteely/gentilely called a "restricted" basis: which meant No Jewish Guests.

I wouldn't be too inclusive about Europeans, either. If you weren't a *northern* European you could have a rough go of it in many parts of the country -- those swarthy Mediterranean types, the Slavs, even what they used to call "black Irish" were the subject of discrimination. The social "whiteness" of these groups doesn't go back all that far at all.

Xenophobia is America's Original Sin, and a lot of it goes back to the very first colonists. The Puritans were not nice people, and they certainly weren't Christians, since Christ preached exactly the opposite of xenophobia.

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HudsonHawk said:

In high school I read John Howard Griffin's "journal" Black Like Me, where a white man has his skin darkened and immerses himself into 1950s black culture in the South. Of course you can imagine many of the things that happened, the usual segregation woes of being denied service in restaurants, having to sit at the back of the bus, the vile comments, and the plain "evil eye" he got everywhere, but he also got insight into the way the African American community interacted within itself. He got a much more candid view as people would be much more honest with him than if he'd been a white man. His surprise was the black community trying to take advancement into their own hands, the unity and self-reliance. He assumed that they simply wanted to be integrated into white society, but that wasn't necessarily the case.

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HudsonHawk said:

However, I disagree about Watchman as a novel. Nothing wrong with the storyline, I just think it's poor writing. I enjoyed reading it, but it's not a good book.

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LizzieMaine said:

That's especially powerful coming from Webster -- a cartoonist whose entire stock-in-trade was a sort of wistful nostalgic Americana. It's the same sort of statement as Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With."

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