If one were to argue against including Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in a school's curriculum, what would be a counterclaim?

Many high school English teachers argue against including Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in the curriculum because, though it deals with the topic of racism, it does so through the eyes of the novel's white author, who tippytoed through the subject delicately.

The novel was written in 1960, in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, but looks back on the 1930s, a time period in which the oppressed had not yet found their leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, who would help them raise their voices and take the actions needed to protest against oppression. As a result, Lee approaches the subject of racial oppression without exposing all of its tragic and grizzly details. Instead, she depicts the consequences of racism through the eyes of an innocent white child who really doesn't know a great deal about all of the tragedies that occur around her.

Consequentially, many high school English teachers argue Lee's presentation of racism is shallow and that children today have experienced far more consequences of racism than Lee has had the nerve to write about. Instead, they assert that there are other books today that take a much stronger approach to the topic of racism, and teenagers will be able to relate to those such books much more easily.

That being said, it can also be argued that it was not Lee's intention to expose all of the harsh realities of racial oppression in vivid detail since she was not a member of the oppressed class; one can only write about what one knows about. Instead, she wrote about racism from the perspective of her own white educated class in order to expose the hypocrisies of her own Christian class. In doing so, she contributed a brand new perspective on racism that will always be very relevant and meaningful.

The hypocrisies of the Christian class are especially exposed through such characters as Aunt Alexandra and the members of her missionary circle, members who cry over the conditions the African tribe called the Mrunas are in but get uptight when their own African-American servants go "around grumbling and complaining" any time they face new injustice (Ch. 24). The ladies of the missionary circle further demonstrate hypocrisy when such ladies as Mrs. Merriweather say that the church should help Helen Robinson, Tom Robinson's wife, "lead a Christian life," despite the fact that the Robinsons are already devout Christians and all evidence pointed to Robinson's innocence, not his guilt (Ch. 24). Even the beloved character Miss Maudie displays her fair share of hypocrisy when she once says to Scout, "We're so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we've got men like Atticus to go for us" (Ch. 22). Instead, shouldn't it be said that all Christians are called on to be Christians every single day of their lives?

Hence, all in all, while some may protest that the book presents an outdated, shallow perspective of racism, it can also be argued that it also presents a very realistic perspective of humanity's hypocrisies that will always be relevant.