“Little niggers in the country don’t have things like we do. “He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “He didn’t have any britches on,” June Star said. “Wouldn’t that make a picture now?” she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. “Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. An O’Connor passage from “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” famous before its current notoriety, led a black student to drop my lit class in the 1990s. These works expose the human condition, the dilemmas of conscience and troubles of the soul that I need students to understand. I have not removed it nor O’Connor from my course list. It happened with Death of a Salesman after news broke of Dustin Hoffman’s sexist treatment of a coworker during the play’s filming a student asked me if I would stop teaching it. I can distance from an artist’s despicable character flaws yet love their work. Yet I love her work, which has mentored me mightily. Flannery O’Connor is under attack, rightfully so, for her privately held racism and bigotry.
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