Essay On Stereotypes In To Kill A Mockingbird

Stereotypes are labels put on people that are often harmful and almost always based on a trait that person has that they can’t control, usually relating to appearance. In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. The three biggest stereotypes that characters face are the stereotype of women, poor white families, and of course, people of color, particularly males. In the past, having a complete list of what a female should look like and act like was common. Women and even little girls were expected to behave in a certain way, and show their femininity and properness in whatever they did. The main character and narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird is a girl named Scout. Scout is very different from other girls because she’s a total tomboy. She likes
The most discriminated and stereotyped ‘group’ is African-Americans. Especially in the past, black people were known to be prejudiced against and forthrightly looked down upon. Since To Kill a Mockingbird‘s setting is in the olden days and takes place in a particularly racist state, this book shows a lot of examples where white people treated ‘people of color’ as lower class. A large part of what people typically take out of this story is the trial scene. What happens during this specific part, shows a lot about how black people were treated and expected to be horrible. Tom Robinson is convicted of the death penalty even though there is a myriad amount of evidence pointing to the fact that he was innocent. A memorable quote that Atticus Finch, Tom’s lawyer, said was “The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, 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 one associates with