A Black teenager in Northern Ireland has been threatened after calling for the removal of John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men from the GCSE curriculum.
Police visited the Belfast home of Angel Mhande this week to notify her of the threat, prompting the family to take security measures.
“It’s scary. If we had known it was going to cause all this we wouldn’t have done it,” her mother, Apolonia Mbondiya, 49, said on Friday. “A difference of opinion is healthy, we don’t have to agree in a discussion, but threatening a child for something that she said, that’s terrible.”
In a BBC interview broadcast on 25 May, Angel, 16, said the novel’s depiction of prejudice and use of racial slurs made her uncomfortable and that she thought it should not be part of the GSCE English literature course.
Steinbeck’s story features migrant ranch workers in 1930s California, including a Black character called Crooks who experiences discrimination and abuse.
