Why might Atticus Finch be a racist?

IT is a literary classic, taught to generations of children as a powerful testament to the consequences of bigotry and hatred. But have we got To Kill a Mockingbird all wrong for all these years?

Strangely, it now seems that this book was in fact the second that Harper Lee wrote. Her first, only recently discovered and set for release Tuesday, was called Go Set a Watchman.

To Kill a Mockingbird’s striking quality was that it was told through the perspective of the young child Jean Louise, known as Scout. As Scout learns about the prejudices of her society, her child-like perspective shines a clear spotlight on just how stupid, ugly and irrational racism actually is.

The work’s hero is her lawyer father Atticus Finch, who shows his children how to rise above such racism through his kindness, treatment of others, and most infamously, by suffering persecution within his community for choosing to defend a black man falsely accused of rape, knowing he doesn’t stand a chance.

Now 26, Scout returns from New York City to visit an elderly, sick Atticus, according to reports. Shockingly, the Atticus of this book is a cantankerous, bitter old racist who allegedly attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
This depiction of Atticus stands in such sharp contrast to the Atticus of Mockingbird, that I am truly intrigued to read the next work, and I don’t usually go in for fiction much. What will be particularly interesting is to try and figure out why this contrast exists.

One possible scenario is that Harper Lee had a change of heart about the nature of one of her leading characters. If she decided that Atticus should instead be a paragon of virtue, then perhaps she changed the plot to accommodate telling the story in a different way, and this was the Atticus we came to know. Maybe this nasty Atticus was never intended to come to our attention.

I would be particularly interested to see whether the events of her first book are referenced in this work, to decide whether that theory holds any water at all.

The more interesting possibility is that the contrast is very deliberate. Perhaps something happened to Atticus in the intervening years, causing his attitudes to harden, in particular towards the black people.

This seems unlikely, as the Atticus of Mockingbird seemed more than capable of seeing good and bad in everyone whilst still espousing tolerance and fair treatment.

I wonder whether the point is, rather, that Atticus was not meant to signify the virtues of fairness and equality, but rather the insidious, secretive form that racism can take. Thinking about it, we always assume Atticus condemns racism because of his deeds, not his words, but does he?

Perhaps he doesn’t hold black people in utter contempt, or possess an overtly-displayed hatred of them. HE may even think it unjust if they are not given a fair hearing in a court of law where false allegations are made. None of this means he necessarily considered the blacks as equal.

Many early anthropological writings tended to regard members of other races with a real sense of ‘the other.’ They were exotic, possibly rather fascinating, possibly deserving of much respect, but they were definitely not us.

Works such as Orientalism, by Edward Said, show how these cultural depictions of the other (the oriental) are patronising. It was quite normal for an imperialist nation to see itself as more civilised than its colonies’ subjects.

Even though this attitude died away in the twentieth century, who’s to say it wasn’t the view taken by respected middle-class white Americans who, if they deplored the ill treatment blacks received, might still have seen them as morally or intellectually inferior or, as Atticus apparently describes, as having made progress towards being more like white people. He is also said to ask Jean Louise whether she wants her children going to a school that was “dragged down” to accommodate black children.

We will have to wait for the work’s release to see whether this is all hype based on a few quotes, or whether reviewers have accurately described Atticus Finch.

We should, however, be open to the possibility that a character who for years has held a hero status because of what he stood against, is actually a character who simply challenges our notion of what prejudice looks like and, perhaps, even a character who reminds us that the bigot isn’t necessarily ‘the other’ either.