There is a lesson that deals with the use of the N-word, which was designed using researched best practice in the US and UK and I personally consulted with a race relations charity in Manchester. It worked brilliantly with my class of diverse, mixed ability Year 8 students, opening up a mature discussion
Ability: KS3 Mixed
Lessons: 15 lessons, but could be stretched into 20
The lessons make time for reading the novel, dealing with the racial/gendered language and assessing male behaviours.
I had pretaught some of the gender vocabulary previous to this unit. If you have not done similar work, you might want to add a little more vocabulary consolidation work in this scheme.
There is plenty of low stakes character analysis work, and character comparison tasks.