No White Heroes Allowed

Sir: I enjoyed Barry Spurr’s argument in “The Vicious Circle in the Teaching of English” (June 2022) simply because he gathers most of the miserable developments in the teaching of English and presents them as the cultural catastrophe that they cumulatively represent.

I have one point on which I’d add a thought. Spurr laments that To Kill a Mockingbird has been cancelled and banned in many US and Canadian states because it “deals frankly with issues of race discrimination”. That motive would be laughable enough, but I think that the motives are darker. 

Atticus Finch is a white lawyer representing the black defendant Tom Robinson against a charge of rape. The reader sees Atticus expose the charge as a load of baloney, but Tom is convicted regardless and is subsequently shot “while escaping custody”—clearly murdered before an appeal can be heard.

What can offend a BLM supporter in that? Police shootings, systemic racism, power inequality: they all fit squarely into the woke playbook.

The simple answer is that Atticus (the good guy) is white. The idea that there can be white people who believe in equality but don’t araldite themselves to main roads, who refrain from bellowing their opinions while “occupying” bits of the CBD, whose idea of a good debate is where the opposing side also gets to say their piece; these views are anathema to the woke. 

You can’t have a hero who’s white and conservative; it defeats the purpose. That’s why the woke want to ban To Kill a Mockingbird.

Robert T. Walker

IQ Differences

Sir: I refer to the letter by Les Cooper in your June edition. He discusses the differences in IQ between white and black Americans and suggests that this resulted from selective pressures as to which individuals were enslaved.

Contrary to what he claims, the evidence is that the descendants of slaves in the Americas have higher IQ scores than black people in Africa. Those in the Americas tend to score about one standard deviation, or fifteen IQ points, below whites while those in Africa tend to score two standard deviations, or thirty IQ points, below whites.

There are a number of books on this subject, including Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis by Richard Lynn.

Garth Fraser

Full Authorship

Sir: Regrettably, in the May issue, the full authorship of the article “The Impact of Lockdowns on Vulnerable Children” was not acknowledged. May I point out that my friend and colleague, paediatrician Bijender Gautam, was a co-designer and that he and my son James were basic to interpretation of results.

John Whitehall