As reported by The Blaze on June 24, high school teacher Matthew Mastronardi seemed about to lose his job for having read before his Spokane, Washington students a passage from “To Kill A Mockingbird” which included the use of the N Word. In a June 11 post on X, Mastronardi explained that some of his students had expressed concern that in reading the many passages in the work containing that word, they were somehow committing a racist act. He felt the occasion presented an opportunity to enlighten them on the need for critical thinking and the relevance of context in making such valuations. After all, Harper Lee’s 1960 work was an indictment of the racism she had witnessed in 1930s Alabama where the use of the N word was a simple fact of life. That she was attempting to accurately portray history while her hero, lawyer Atticus Finch, was determined to attain justice for a Black man unjustly accused of rape, is apparently irrelevant to those seeking to fire Mastronardi for simply reading from the book. This is hardly surprising, of course, given that “To Kill A Mockingbird” has been banned by many Left-leaning school boards due to its “sensitive” subject. That the work is in fact truly progressive doesn’t seem to matter to “intellectuals” whose sophisticated world-view entails the conviction that the use of certain naughty words nullifies the significance and good intentions of even the most wonderful of literary efforts.