The Rage Behind Gratitude

To Kill a Mockingbird has been getting  a lot of press recently, with the coming release of author Harper Lee's original ms, but something about the movie (which I remember far better than the book), once one of my favorites, has rankled me in recent years. For a long time, though, I couldn't figure out what it was. 
Now I have.

First, I want to say that I will always love the character of Scout, a rare movie depiction of a real human girl.
The scene where she's forced to wear a dress to school is cringe-making---though at the time the movie was made (1962, the year after I was born), no one would even think to suggest that forcing a kid to wear a dress was an injustice. 
Her father, Atticus Finch, otherwise the movie's hero for justice, doesn't take her case to the school board or anything---everyone just accepts that's the way it is: girls have to wear dresses. 

But that's not my problem with the movie.

The problem is I can't stand to watch a group of powerless people express gratitude: 
seemingly the entire black population of Scout's town stands up to honor her white lawyer father for daring to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, against a rape charge brought by a white family led by the father, Bob Ewell. 

(An aside: How would the movie be different if the white family were classy, like Atticus, instead of being the pig-ignorant white trash they are depicted as?)

Not to take away from Atticus's bravery.
Atticus doesn't have to do his job, or do it well, after all, and he takes a huge risk in choosing to defend Tom Robinson.
He is an ally who puts himself and his family on the line. His children almost pay for his bravery with their lives, when Bob Ewell attacks them with a knife.

Scout and her brother almost lose their lives, but the innocent Robinson actually does lose his:
at the end of the movie, after an all-white jury finds Robinson guilty of a rape Atticus has proved he physically could not have committed, we are told that the police have shot and killed Robinson while he was trying to escape.
Atticus expresses dismay that Robinson ran, when Atticus had told him they would appeal the case.

Tom Robinson ran?
Really?  
Like Steve Biko died of a hunger strike? 

And, so what if he did run? He was unarmed, like Michael Slager.

I, and I suspect most white fans of this movie (how many black fans does it have?) don't remember it as a tragedy, though, right? 
To be honest, it's really a feel-good movie if we identify as Atticus, or Scout.

And I always have identified with Atticus, the way some identify with the Kevin Costner character in Dances with Wolves;
it's so gratifying to see oneself as the Rare White One Who Gets It and earns the respect of nice, grateful people. That's the whole point of these movies: the white audience sees ourselves in Atticus and his family, not the Robinsons, and certainly not Bob Ewell (. . . and, therefore, not as racist; never mind that Atticus is "Mr. Finch" to his black housekeeper, while she is "Calpurnia" to him and to his young children).

But, no. I'm not Atticus, and I know it.
Here are the number of risks I've taken to right racial injustice: 

0

But that's still not my primary problem with the movie. 

My primary problem is that it finally occurred to me to wonder,
what about those people who are obliged to Atticus: 
how does it feel to be one of them when someone finally sees and speaks out against the injustice and fear society forces you to live with EVERY SINGLE DAY of your life?

Grateful, sure.

But also... ?

Well, I'm not Atticus, and I'm not African American, but I have been the recipient of charity, and I hate feeling thankful for charity when I also feel powerless.

In fact, I don't even feel thankful in the long run; 
I feel resentful, sometimes to the point of rage, for being powerless and--on top of it--now in the debt of someone with more power who chooses to give me some.

It's an ugly thing to feel. Oppression breeds ugly feelings.
  
And I'm not really powerless––I mean, sometimes I'm one-down or am treated with condescension, but I'm not powerless in the inescapable legal, social way of Tom Robinson and his community.

To Kill a Mockingbird has come to feel emotionally dishonest to me.  There's got to be a better way to honor white allies in the struggle for civil rights, if that's the story being told.

We see the gratitude. 

But where's the rage?

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End Note

Where's the rage?

Perhaps in forthcoming documentary about musician Nina Simone, What Happened, Miss Simone , someone who was not grateful to white fans:

Her music was by, about and for black people. She would scan the crowd for black faces and tell them, “I’m singing only to you. I don’t care about the others.” White fans, she said, were “accidental and incidental”.

She could not ignore the fact “that I was a black-skinned woman in a country where you could be killed because of that one fact.”

--"Nina Simone: 'Are you ready to burn buildings?'"

Here she is performing "Mississippi Goddamn", the song she wrote in response to four white supremacists bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church and killing four girls in 1963:
 


After the bombing, the New York Times reported, 

"Johnny Robinson, a 16-year-old Negro, was shot in the back and killed by a policeman with a shotgun this afternoon. Officers said the victim was among a group that had hurled stones at white youths driving through the area in cars flying Confederate battle flags."

Confederate flags.   Huh.



I have taken To Kill a Mockingbird off my list of favorite movies.
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Having struggled mightily to figure this out and write about it, I see I could have saved myself the work and just linked to the excellent post on TKaM on the blog stuff white people like: 
warmly embrace racist novels.