Books: To Kill A Mockingbird

I grew up in the 1960s in a small country town imbued with a pervasive suspicion that the death of Queen Victoria may have been greatly exaggerated. Mind you, we experienced diversity in my school — there was a French boy called André. White, obviously. As children we sang unapologetically racist songs about the Italians and the Germans. Well, our fathers had won the war.

So my adult life, like many white Brits of my age, has been a gradual journey towards a better understanding of human identity. Tolerance. Diversity. Celebration of difference within our common humanity. But perhaps it came as something of a shock that ‘Black Lives Matter’ was still a necessary mantra as we head towards the third decade of the 21st century.

As a middle-class white liberal it has sometimes been hard for me to understand white privilege. My parents came from a working-class background, and as a grammar school boy I felt I worked for everything I got. But I have learned from talking to some of my friends. A younger friend, a church pastor, who has been repeatedly stopped by the police with no reason apparent but his skin colour. A high-flying manager responsible for the running of a large chunk of Transport for London who, at a TFL social gathering, was assumed without enquiry to be a train guard or a porter.

There is an inequity of esteem somewhere deep within the Western psyche. I don’t like it and I don’t really understand why we still have it. And if we will not address it in ourselves we could easily find ourselves kneeling on someone else’s neck — and we know that’s not always metaphorical. So I would like to tell you about my own recent refresher course in racism via two classic prize-winning novels.

I recently read a student’s work that referred to Harper Lee’s 1961 Pulitzer-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. I thought it was about time I actually read it. It is a staggeringly good novel. It defuses our instinctive reaction of disgust at overt and murderous racial inequality by telling the story through the eyes of a child, Scout, Atticus Finch’s precocious but perceptive daughter. Distancing us by one step from the events themselves releases the author from telling us what to think. We ourselves are enabled to work out the lives of the black population of Alabama in the 1930s. They were still seen as morally and intellectually inferior, still desperately poor, and still had little control over their lives. How much difference had the abolition of slavery actually made? And how much progress has been made since, for the present peoples of Birmingham, Alabama, or Birmingham, UK? Some certainly, but why only some? And why might things even be drifting backwards from the heady days of the 1960s?

• © British Journal of General Practice 2020