“Just hours before the curtain was to go up” last night, Shorewood High School (Wisconsin) “canceled its production of To Kill a Mockingbird in response to a planned protest over its use of the n-word,” reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck, faces a hostile crowd in To Kill a Mockingbird.
“We’ve concluded that the safest option is to cancel the play,” said Superintendent Bryan Davis in a statement.
Shorewood is an affluent suburb of Milwaukee.
Blogger Ann Althouse imagines what the “safest option” was like for students, who’d spent weeks or months rehearsing the play, which was slated for a three-night run. “It’s practically telling the students who worked peaceably on their theater project that they should be less well-behaved, so that ruining their work won’t seem ‘safe’,” she writes.
She closes with a quote from the book:
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” – Atticus Finch.
Eighty percent of Americans think “political correctness is a problem,” according to Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape by a group called More in Common. Some groups hate PC culture more than others, but nobody likes it — except for the 8 percent labeled “progressive activists.”
Hidden Tribes estimates that 25 percent of Americans are conservatives, 8 percent are progressive activists and two-thirds make up an “exhausted majority.”