The Reality of Discrimination

The famous novel, To Kill Mockingbird, portrayed such literary excellence, that it will always be a large mark on the history of American literature. In To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel set in the 1930s about a child heroine, discrimination and prejudices both play key roles throughout. Today, one could not imagine what life would have been like had they lived during these times. Scout Finch, a girl who, in this novel, begins to understand the reality of the problems in her small southern town, was faced with discrimination in many instances. Three forms of discrimination throughout To Kill a Mockingbird were discrimination against gender, race, and the unknown.

The first example of discrimination in To Kill a Mockingbird is by gender, or sexism. There were only two children in the family of Atticus Finch: Jeremy “Jem” Atticus Finch and Jean Louise “Scout” Finch. Being that there were no other children in their neighborhood, the two children always played together. When the duo met Charles “Dill” Baker Harris one summer, they were instantly friends. To Scout, being “one of the boys” was never a problem. However, Jem and Dill began to think otherwise. When Jem became angry with Scout because of an argument over “Hot Steams”, he decides to push her, while inside the tire, down the walk and into the Radley front gate. Worried, Jem screams for her to hurry back to them; in her daze she forgot the tire. Jem ran to get it; when he came back he was scowling, “Nothin’ to it. I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl it’s mortifyin’” (Lee 50). He used her being a girl as an insult, despite the fact that he too was scared. However, the conflict really began when Dill and Jem decided to try to make the infamous Boo ...

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...ion and insult, which they would never have expected. (Felty 300)

This shows the extent of seriousness with the racial discrimination dispersed throughout the South during these times.

In conclusion, discrimination of gender, the unknown, and race were all present in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The reasons for the prejudices and discrimination were

all the same. These were the “ways” in the Southern communities, and the people of Maycomb knew no other way to live. They acted out of habit because this habit was the way they were raised by their parents and their parents by their grandparents, and so on. However, starting with the trial, things would slowly begin to change. Scout would be a part of this change as she grew and her innocence was put behind her. This novel will always represent Southern American History and the ways our society changed.