In 2008, when I read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with my ninth-grade students, the room was filled with shock and bewilderment at the racism the story portrays. Our country was on the verge of inaugurating our first black president, and many of my students embraced the popular belief that racism, in the United States, was a thing of the past. We were finally living the ideal that all people are created equal.
This year, as in the past, we examined the trial of Tom Robinson, a decent and honest man accused by ignorant, racist people of a crime he did not commit. Lee makes his innocence abundantly clear—and then has the jury pronounce him guilty. The reason for such an obvious miscarriage of justice? Robinson was black.
This year, my students were not as bewildered by the trial verdict as they have been in the past. They did not look shocked. They were not confused by overt racism that’s totally foreign to their own experience. Because it isn’t. The kids I am teaching today did not go through junior high talking about a possible black president and all the progress we have made as a country. They went through those formative years talking about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, among many others.
The students I teach today have watched a lot of YouTube videos; they have questions about why young black men keep getting shot by police officers. They have questions about why Officer Darren Wilson was not indicted by the grand jury. They have watched the video of Eric Garner saying he could not breathe while Officer Daniel Pantaleo choked him to death. They have watched the video of Walter Scott getting shot while running away from Officer Michael Slager. They have listened to the 911 call placed by George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin. They have seen the death of Laquan McDonald.
Those curious enough to probe deeper know about Tanisha Anderson, Rumain Brisbon, John Crawford III, Ezell Ford, Freddie Gray, Akai Gurley, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Harris, Dante Parker, Jerame Reid, Tamir Rice, Tony Robinson and Phillip White.
My students are bright kids, and they recognize the complexity of those cases. They realize that most police officers want to serve and protect. They know it is a dangerous job. They also realize that none of the people who were killed were armed with guns. All of them were black and all except for Trayvon Martin died at the hands of police. They look at skin color and wonder out loud if that would happen to white people. Frankly, most of them doubt it.
I don’t know if the answers rest in body cameras for police or a return to greater community interaction. I don’t know why we are sliding back into a conversation that polarizes based on race.
I do know that my students look at a novel based on racism in Depression-era Alabama and see similarities I hoped would have turned, by now, into a distant and incomprehensible past.
Knoll is a writer and English teacher at public school in New Jersey.
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