Racial Injustice In To Kill A Mockingbird

To Kill A Mockingbird is regarded as one of the most influential staples of modern American literature, and to a lesser degree the film holds this mantle. When taught in high school, or perhaps even earlier, it 's often presented as a tale of racial injustice. It 's rather conducive to that narrative, centering Maycomb, a rural post-depression county in rural Alabama seems like the most "ideal" setting for a black man to be falsely accused of rape. However, this is a story about injustice on several fronts -- but more broadly about the injustice regarding the American people. Harper Lee has stated that she lived somewhat vicariously through Scott, the tomboy-esque main character, and it 's important to view the narrative both from the third

Once Atticus decides to defend Tom Robinson, insisting on his innocence in the case of the alleged rape of a white woman, he becomes a complete cultural outsider because he didn 't subscribe to the white narrative of 1930 's rural Alabama. The dehumanizing and hyper-sexualization of black bodies is an established driving force in this white narrative, enough of a force to convict Robinson falsely of his rape charges. The notion of white purity, and in contrast the inherent negativity of blackness plays heavily into this case and their real world counterparts. Emmett Till is the first such case to come to mind, a 14 year old boy who, while visiting family in the south, was accused of making a simple pass at a white woman. He was later lynched and mutilated beyond recognition by two local men who were acquitted after a 67-minute deliberation, where one juror was quoted as saying one juror said, if we hadn 't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn 't have taken that long." Cases like Till 's were not isolated incidents, and the inherent bias in the justice system demonstrated both in art and reality followed into the 60 's and still bleeds into our system today. Treatment of people of color by judicial and extrajudicial forces in America has always and continues to be a very scarred record, and To Kill A Mockingbird illustrates the impact of such trials, as well as the mindset of the communities that conduct such