This Little Light of Mine

Literature is the means by which we shine a flashlight onto society to illuminate what is so we can validate what needs to be. Historically, there are pieces of literature that paint an ugly picture, while others point to a path that benefits all of mankind. In the effort to be politically correct, a fine screen play has been renamed by a local high school theatre class, changing Twelve Angry Men to Twelve Angry Jurors. Pivotal to the story is the fact that the jurors are all men, historically accurate in its portrayal of the group dynamics that characterized the men’s club that was our society for far too long. The message, if we don’t learn from our history we are condemned to repeat it, is lost in the translation from what was to what someone has decided should be by not just changing the title of the play, but its focus and, therefore, its message.

The message is lost in the changes that today’s society deems politically correct, as if denying the history changes it to something more palatable. While teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, I insisted that the students say the word nigger as that is what was common during the 1930s, the setting for the story, as well as an appellation one black person uses to greet another today. After reading that word for an entire novel, students develop both an understanding of and appreciation for racial epithets that, on the surface, seem benign, but which stigmatize an entire race of people. People with black skin were historically referred to as negra, which is the Spanish word for black, but when the word was bastardized into nigger and used in a derogatory manner against all people with black skin, it became a racial epithet. We can add to the list the words wop, spic, beaner, slant eyes – and so many more derogatory names for people we fear solely because they are different.

Atticus Finch, the protagonist in To Kill a Mockingbird, addresses an all-male jury in the defense of Tom Robinson, a black man guilty of nothing more than being black. Atticus is one man, speaking man-to-man to an all-white, all-male jury, imploring them to do the right thing, for God's sake. To change the dynamics between the characters would be another novel, not the novel Harper Lee wrote about growing up in the deep South during a troubling time in our nation's history, echoing the fate of the Scarsboro incident wherein a group of young black men were railroaded into guilty verdicts because they were black. Tom Robinson gave up his life to racism, but, thankfully, sanity finally prevailed with the Scarsboro Seven as the facts became the truth, rather than the people's fears and prejudice.

Arthur Miller wrote a play about the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, The Crucible, using the inciting incident from the Salem witch trials to portray a government gone mad. It was all about the men, the power, the abuse of the system by a megalomaniac whose personal agenda became the national agenda. Changing McCarthy’s character to a female lead would destroy the impact, as well as the historical accuracy of the piece. A clever editor could change John Hersey’s capture of Hiroshima, deleting the words of the Japanese civilian that “it was war, we had to expect it,” and sanitizing the Japanese to look better to a world audience – but that’s not the history. Anne Frank's diary could be edited to share more of her personal experiences and less of the victimization of Jews by the Nazis in Germany during World War II, but that's not the history.

It’s much easier to create a version of reality that everyone can live with, but there’s ancient wisdom in the belief that if each of us don’t stand for something, we’ll fall for anything. People who are consistently told the truth are more likely to accept the truth than those who are first deceived and discover the truth for themselves. That includes high school students who should not just know the title of the play, but the reason behind the title – the backstory that is the foundation of all writing. Not trusting our youth with the truth condemns them to live a lie, and that is far more wrong than explaining why the title of the play is Twelve Angry Men and will remain so.