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Examples Of Racism In To Kill A Mockingbird

Decent Essays

Let’s say you are a stray dog and you’re taking a stroll through the local junkyard. As you walk, a crowd of dogs with the same sparkly white fur as you started showing up. A few paces later, a black dog appears near you. Just looking at him disgusted you, he looked so different than everyone else…so you took it upon yourself to bite and kill him. Does that sound right? Nowadays it’s wrong to do that, but at one point in history, it was the right. It seemed so right that even humans had behaved in this manner. People have been (and are) dealing with racists for a long time. The story, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, explains in a brilliant manner how people should stop treating others badly. People have spent many years trying to bring equality …show more content…

Lynchings and unfair trials are the effects of the outbreak of racism and mistreatment; the way people threw out the unique and kept the twins. Until present times, people were laughed at, starved, and even killed, just for being different than their neighbor. A good example of this is when Bob Ewell is being questioned as a witness at Tom’s trial. While explaining his side of the story, he got a little off track and talked about the darker skinned people who lived in a small area of his town; He had said,” Jedge, I’ve asked this county for fifteen years to clean out the nest down yonder, they’re dangerous to live around ‘sides devaluin’ my property,” (234). What needs to be focused on in that sentence is the last part, Ewell had said that black people are evil and ruined his life by existing. He is the perfect example of people around those times, all they cared about was whether or not they got what they wanted. This can connect back to the dogs in the junkyard. Say a white man joins the hounds, and another darker dog shows his face. The man helps the whiter dog kill it. Now reverse that, with the whiter dog helping the man kill another man whom was a darker hue of skin than the first. It’s the same thing. People act like those junkyard dogs as soon as something different pops up, then they say things like Mr. Ewell did. Lucky for Scout, she realized this …show more content…

She went to Robinson’s trial and listened all through the ordeal. Scout already knew that Atticus won, but learned the sourness of the jury as each person in that section called guilty. Atticus is trying his best to teach his kids, and the rest of Maycomb, that just because the color of one’s skin is different, it doesn’t make them a criminal and a liar. Atticus managed to sneak a small lesson into a normal conversation when Jem got an air-rifle. He looked at his son and said: “Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” (119), Atticus was trying to teach Jem that since mockingbirds only sing, killing them for their innocence is the wrong thing to do. Atticus was also referring to black people and their struggles with being killed for doing nothing to hurt others. All they have done is shown their faces and tried to live

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