#25 ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

White Nobility in the Shadow of Racism

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is the kind of film white America loves to clutch to its breast like a moral security blanket: a courtroom drama soaked in sepia-toned righteousness, where injustice is condemned—but only as long as it doesn’t really disrupt the status quo. Adapted from Harper Lee’s novel, it tells the story of a black man wrongfully accused, a small Southern town steeped in racism, and the one good white man brave enough to gently object.

Gregory Peck plays Atticus Finch, the most patient, soft-spoken martyr ever committed to film. He’s not just a lawyer; he’s a walking sermon in a three-piece suit. His speeches are slow, deliberate, and full of Reasonable White Man Gravitas™. He defends Tom Robinson, an innocent Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman—and he does it with grace, dignity, and zero impact on the actual outcome. But don’t worry, the town children learn a lesson.

And that’s the crux of this revered morality play: it’s a film about racism in which the white people are centered, canonized, and morally polished to a gleam. Atticus loses the case, Tom dies, and yet somehow the film leaves us feeling like Atticus wins. Why? Because he tried. Because he taught his children about fairness. Because he didn’t yell while the system devoured an innocent man. Moral victory by inaction, sanitized for your suburban soul.

Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) barely gets screen time, and when he does, he’s gentle, passive, and heartbreakingly polite—because God forbid a Black man in a white film express anger about being railroaded toward death. His fate is sealed not by the justice system but by the film’s need to preserve its central thesis: racism is a shame, but isn’t Atticus lovely?

Scout, the narrator, is charmingly precocious in that classic literary-child-who-asks-awkward-questions kind of way. She’s meant to represent innocence, but in reality, she’s the vessel for white audiences to confront racism without confronting themselves. She’s allowed to grow. Tom is not.

And let’s not forget Boo Radley, the pale shut-in next door, who somehow gets more redemption arc than the Black man falsely accused and murdered. Boo is misunderstood, tragic, and ultimately rescues the white children—earning the kind of narrative closure denied to every Black character in the story.

Yes, the film is beautifully shot. Yes, the score is tender. And yes, Gregory Peck is excellent at portraying quiet dignity. But let’s not confuse a liberal bedtime story for radical storytelling. To Kill a Mockingbird condemns racism just enough to soothe its audience, but never enough to provoke actual reckoning. It’s a courtroom drama where the system is broken, but the hero still gets to tuck his kids in at night, safely above the wreckage.

3 out of 5 mockingbirds
(One for Peck’s performance. One for Brock Peters, silently carrying the weight of the narrative. One for the cinematography. The rest flew away with any chance of a story that actually centered Black voices, justice, or truth beyond white liberal comfort.)