YOUR WHITE NEIGHBOR’S ‘”BLACK LIVES MATTERS” YARD SIGN IS NOT ENOUGH. While I was living in Portland, Oregon, I was asked to teach To Kill a Mockingbird to a group of middle schoolers during a Black History Month freelance gig. The students were bright and eager. When I asked them what they knew about the history of racism in America — slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and Civil Rights — their arms shot in the air resolutely, in that endearing way we’ve all lost by our freshman year of high school. Those are all things that happened in “The South,” Ms. Lawson, the kids parroted in the ignorant haze that is how most kids in this country are taught to think about its racist past.