Pivotal. I read this as part of an advanced reading group in 5th grade. I, a white girl, and an African-American girl were tasked with acting out a scene in the book. Going into the time we had to practice the scene together, I was jealous because I had (obviously) been assigned the part of the mean (racist) white girl character. My classmate, who was a friendly acquaintance, was the sympathetic main-character. I was old enough to understand this, and that I had no reason to expect it would be different.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how hard it was for me to do anything other than read my lines flatly and how immediately my classmate embodied her character with experience and passion. Yet I could still see her holding back. I saw her catharsis and restraint competing in real time and realized how necessary this was for her. The scene led to the characters physically wrestling. By the time my classmate and I got to this part, we were both emotionally jolted and shocked by the experience. We agreed, almost silently, that we couldn’t act out this scene in front of others, nor practice it again. We returned to class and asked for a different assignment.
It might have been the first, most eye-opening “lesson” on the current state of racism in the US that I experienced in school. This is the hard, necessary work of teaching American students about the history and continuation of racism that many would silence.