No sooner had I published my own thoughts on Go Set a Watchman than I stumbled across this very smart Jezebel piece making a convincing argument that my understanding of the book, and of its predecessor, is completely wrong.

In the post, titled “Atticus Was Always a Racist: Why Go Set a Watchman is No Surprise,” Jezebel writer Catherine Nichols argues that Atticus’ racism is not new to Go Set A Watchman, but was also on display in Mockingbird. She notes, for example, that the Atticus of Mockingbird explicitly models himself, on occasion, on Confederate ancestors. She also points out the ways in which Atticus describes Tom Robinson – saying that Robinson is from a clean-living family, for example – and makes the argument that these descriptions are the equivalent of “race chivalry.”

I won’t reiterate all Nichols’ arguments, because I can’t make them as well as she can. I also won’t quote her at length, because she deserves the traffic to her own blog post. I would like to offer one quote from her piece, however, that I think encapsulates her argument reasonably well:

From that perspective, it seems especially sinister that To Kill a Mockingbird is such popular reading for high schools. It’s about powerful white people being very polite—and that counting as good politics, without any charge or assertion that anything might really change in the power structure of the town. Atticus is canonized as the ultimate “good white person,” whose ostensible goodness hides the fact that they’re overly comfortable with the way racism has positively structured their life.

Nichols makes a strong case for her position – not just because she can point to evidence in To Kill a Mockingbird, but because if she is correct, then the Atticus of Watchman makes a lot more sense. And whether you choose (for some reason) to understand Watchman as a sequel or not, it’s clear that at some point Harper Lee intended the character to be less than entirely free of racist attitudes.

I don’t agree with Nichols, but I can’t refute her thesis – in part because I haven’t read Mockingbird recently enough to make the attempt, but largely because she has carefully amassed a significant amount of supporting evidence. So instead of trying to debunk her entirely, I will instead offer just a sort of mild criticism that I think is relevant beyond the scope of just this one blog post and just this one book.

My criticism is this: Nichols’ point of view is to a large extent shaped by the fact that she is living and reading this novel today, in 2015, instead of in 1960, when the book was published. In her blog post she calls Mockingbird “a racist book,” which is a criticism not just of Atticus Finch but of Harper Lee. Nichols may be right, and it’s not my intent to argue that she’s wrong. But there is a tendency among young people (and I say that not in a get-off-my-lawn way; I’m only 31 myself) to believe that because we are confident in our values, there is no excuse for anyone to have ever believed any differently. We say, as a too obvious straw man example, that it’s self-evident that slavery is wrong, and therefore it’s inexcuable that anyone should ever have tolerated its existence. It is undeniably true, of course, that slavery is wrong. Slavery’s wrongness is self-evident to me, certainly, and it’s hard for me to conceive of a reason that it should ever not have been so for any thinking person. It is also undeniably true, however, that a heck of a lot of people tolerated slavery for a very long time. Abraham Lincoln himself said he would have been happy to let slavery continue if it would have kept the country together. Are we to conclude, then, that because these people didn’t share our values or prioritize those values in the same way that we do now, that they were all bad people? Maybe, but that seems like an awfully big conclusion to leap to about a whole lot of people none of us have ever met.

I think my thoughts have sort of wandered off the rails here. Returning to the era of the books: Is it fair of us to judge Atticus because he did the right thing for what we understand today to be the wrong reasons? Nichols accuses the Finches of being “overly comfortable with the way racism has positively structured their life.” My guess, however, is that they are not so much overly comfortable with it as they are unaware of it. Is this the same thing? I don’t know, but I can’t help but feel that it’s at least a little unfair to say yes. If we insist on judging our ancestors according to our own values, how many of them could stand up to any measure of scrutiny? What do we say about some of the civil rights heroes of the 50s and 60s who had homophobic beliefs? Or the founding fathers who signed a document declaring all men to be created equal while benefiting from slave labor?

Is it possible that good people tolerated slavery? Is it possible that good people, at one time, honestly believed that certain races were superior to others? Is it possible that there have been good people, say, who believed homosexuality was wrong or that transgender people suffered from mental illness? If the answer is yes, then it remains possible to admire Atticus for the person he was able to be at the time he (fictionally) existed. If the answer is no, on the other hand, then the only possible conclusion is that we are just now, for after thousands of years of human civilization, coming to a place where the existence of good people is possible. That seems to me like either a very arrogant conclusion, or a very sad one.

It seems clear to me that values evolve over time, that views once seen as progressive can in many cases now seem hopelessly outdated and even offensive. But the millennial generation in particular seems to prefer a binary perspective when it comes to these matters. What someone believed 50 years ago was either right or wrong, we say, and he should be judged for his beliefs in the same way that we would judge a person holding those same beliefs today. There is little compassion, little empathy in this viewpoint, and I don’t think millennials are unaware of those absences. I think many would respond, perhaps not unfairly, that it’s always the privileged white person seeking compassion for his privileged white ancestors. I can’t help the fact that white people have historically so often been wrong, but I do think there is value in compassion and empathy no matter who it is being extended to, or by whom.

One day, some of the beliefs that I hold may be seen as wrongheaded, outdated, offensive, or any combination of the foregoing. That day may even be today, and the beliefs objected to may be ones I’ve outlined right here in this blog post. I have come to many wrong conclusions in my life, and unless I get hit by a bus in the next few minutes I will probably come to many more wrong conclusions before I die. But I hope that when people take stock of what I’ve said and done, they will also consider that I was trying my best to do the right thing, striving to move forward based on my best-formed understanding of where “forward” was, never giving myself permission to stop learning, but also understanding that I couldn’t possibly always know all the right questions to ask. And if we could give Atticus Finch and Harper Lee the same benefit of the doubt, that would be just fine too.