As if the celestial bodies controlling the courses of human events possessed some strange sense of irony, the book To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, has in recent years, become a mockingbird itself. The book's only crime has been deepening its reader's perception of life, and providing them countless hours of enjoyment, and what thanks does it receive? It receives the honor of being banned from many schools across America, being called "uncouth," "obscene," and "unfit for even a sailor's ears", and publicly burned by angry protesters in Texas. ""Tis a sin- Atticus, a character in the story would say. The poison at the heart of this controversy is the use of what has been defined, and rightly so, as the most offensive racial slur in the entire English language the word "nigger." Other charges against this book include, but are not limited to, the appearance of sexual content and racial themes. I cannot argue that these issues don't appear in this book, because they do. I just believe that they are no basis for eliminating the book from our public education system.
To Kill A Mockingbird is a compassionate, dramatic, deeply moving novel that contains many valuable morals and life's lessons about justice, courage, integrity, perseverance, and equality, while at the same time opposing racism and discrimination. I think how this book effectively exposes the cruelty of racial (and other) injustice is a big part of what makes this such a powerful story. The themes that make this work disputed, for me, only intensified my passion for what I was reading. When Tom Robinson (the defendant in a rape trial) was convicted, I did not think: "Why would Harper Lee even write about a black man being discriminated against like that? I"m disgusted with this novel! It's unfit for my reading!" No, I thought: "That's horrible! How could they? That's so wrong! Racism sucks!"-These racial themes just made me more ardent against racial discrimination.
