In his Farewell Address on January 10, 2017, President Obama
once again charmed and pleased many English teachers across the United States
with his reference to Atticus Finch and To Kill a Mockingbird.
In case you missed the moment, Obama said, “if our democracy
is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need[s] to
try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction – Atticus Finch
– who said, `You never really understand a person until you consider things
from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’”
This passage, a favorite for many teachers, comes at the
beginning of Chapter 4, when Atticus describes the practice of climbing into
another’s skin, or what we might today call radical empathy, to Scout as a
“simple trick” (39). The current political moment suggests there is nothing
simple about it.
Indeed, Obama acknowledges in his Address the difficulty and
rarity of this act of empathy. He presses Americans to “pay attention, and
listen … acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t vanish
in the ‘60s.” Obama insists that we also need to work to tie the “struggles for
justice to the challenges that a lot of people in this country face …
[including] the middle-aged white guy who, from the outside, may seem like he’s
got advantages, but has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and
technological change.”
The allusion to Mockingbird
seems a perfect exemplar for Obama’s point and for our current political
moment. Tom Robinson and Calpurnia live in a desperately unequal world. In
Maycomb, their lives are simply worth less; they are disempowered and
dispossessed.
But so too is Mr. Ewell. Scout as narrator in Mockingbird explains that the “families
like the Ewells” (227) inhabit every town like Maycomb. They are people left
behind by both good times and bad: “No economic fluctuations changed their
station – people like the Ewells lived as guests of the county in prosperity as
well as in the depths of a depression” (227).
Just as Atticus never really steps into Tom Robinson’s skin
and imagines the world from his point of view, the plight of the Ewells, who
actually live in “what was once a Negro cabin” (227), is never tied together by
anyone in Maycomb as part of a broader struggle for justice in the novel. One
might say that the two disempowered characters live in their separate bubbles,
until their worlds collide. Mr. Ewell is the antagonist, of course, but both
characters suffer, disproportionately of course, from their place in the world
of Maycomb in which they are not seen by the broader society or by each other.
Obama’s Address asks us to do what is definitively NOT a
simple trick: to see each other and all those who are interconnected with us; to
listen to each other and have real dialogue, rather than stay in our bubbles or
snipe at each other over social media.
For those of us teaching Mockingbird,
this is one more moment in which we can use informational text – in this case
Obama’s Address – to show students the relevance of the literary texts we teach
and to cultivate in our students the skills, disposition, and courage to become
engaged, informed citizens.
