Examples Of Racial Discrimination In To Kill A Mockingbird

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“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee depicts the variations of prejudice and discrimination of white people against black people, which identifies relationships among the novel’s characters. The racial intolerance towards Tom Robinson in the novel relates to the Scottsboro Boys, indicating injustice and iniquitousness in the different trials, portraying how ignorant the human race truly is to black people, how a white person can’t even feel what a black person’s motive is, which is to be brothers and sisters to white people, and that racial judgment prohibits the society’s hopes of an improved world. The misapprehension of white against black truly shows how ignorant the human race truly is towards black people. The racial …show more content…

King has said that there only 2 laws in this world: “just and unjust” (pg.2), meaning that judgment in the world is determined by whether the law is just or unjust, and in the Tom Robinson and Scottsboro Boys cases, law was clearly unjust. It was a racial judgment statement and making it no law at all, stated by King’s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: “I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” (pg. 3). The fairness in court or any other situation is that in the South, white always wins- no matter the cost. This led to a weakened society because of injustice towards each other, as stated in To Kill a Mockingbird, "There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn't be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life." (pg. 295). Harper Lee used the idea of the trial of the Scottsboro Boys to further compare the two and to tell how society has been damaged and spoiled by racism, in which Atticus states that in To Kill a Mockingbird, “in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption—the evil assumption—that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption that one associates with minds of their calibre.” (pg. 273). Atticus and King’s message towards racial bias and injustice has demonstrated how society can bring devastating situations and how it can be held accountable for poisoning our world with the very thoughts of racism toward any race, not just black

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