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To Kill A Mockingbird, And 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

Decent Essays

What does it mean to be oppressed? To be oppressed means to be have rights taken away, as a result of discrimination. People can be judged by their race, financial situation, gender, etc. and can do nothing about this discrimination because so many other people strongly believe in segregating the community by the standards that they’ve set up. The image of a tiny person next to a large thumb, the poem “I Look at the World” by Langston Hughes, the excerpt from Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick, and the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee all illustrate what it means to be oppressed. The tiny person in the image, the person from the poem, the person from the the excerpt, and characters from To Kill a Mockingbird have been discriminated by the people in their society.

Source #1, an image of a small person standing under a giant thumb, depicts a scene where the person is ultimately helpless. The hand is about one hundred times larger than the person. If the individual were to even try to fight against it, the thumb would squish it in an instance. The hand also wears a cuff, indicating that it must belong to a person of high status. Because of it’s high status, it can treat people that he feels are inferior to him any way he wants, and it knows that it wields more power than the person it’s got under it’s thumb. Consequently, the person under the thumb is forced to stand still and behave the way society, or the hand, wants it to. Moreover, his rights have been

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