Tkam - Prejudice

Prejudice/Discrimination
Racial Prejudice was very common in the mid 1900’s America, where blacks were looked down upon and treated unfairly. They were segregated and forced to do things like use separate toilets, and go to separate schools and churches. They were thought of as so dumb by some people that they weren’t allowed to do anything except hard labour, and things like chopping wood.
Prejudice can be found in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, through the eyes of a young middle class white girl named Scout. Scout was brought up by her father, Atticus, to be respectful of blacks, however she discovers at school that other children her age have picked up their parents racist views, and tease her about how Atticus is defending a black man, Tom Robinson, in court who is charged with raping a white girls. Scout responds with violence, because she feels the need to defend her father. “My fists were clenched I was ready to make fly. Cecil Jacobs had announced the day before that Scout Finch’s daddy defended niggers” I think this is important because it is the beginning of Scouts discovery of prejudice in her town, Maycomb, and it is starting to change her life and her views of people, and her ideas about how others view each other.
Scout has several other encounters with racial prejudice throughout the novel. For example Dolphus Raymond is seen as a sinful man because he married a Negro woman and he is always drinking out of a paper bag, however he knows that Scout and her brother Jem understand that racism is wrong, so he tells them, “Secretly miss Finch, I’m not much of a drinker, but you see they could never, never understand that I live the way I do because that’s the way I want to live.” He pretended to be a drunkard because he could never explain to society that he was in love with a black woman, and the alcohol would make them think he just didn’t know what he was doing. This encounter was important because Scout learns that people’s racist views can affect other people’s lives around them, even people of their own race, and she now understands more, through Atticus and Dolphus Raymond, that their society won’t accept people with different views, which include equality. The effect on the reader is that their view and attitude towards racism changes throughout the novel. The racial prejudice starts off as just bullying and discrimination for a few characters, and turns into a life changing phenomena for almost every main character. We see just how destructive and life changing racial prejudice can be, causing hatred among people leading even to wanting to kill each other like Bob Ewell attacking the children, and turning others into outcasts, like Dolphus Raymond.
Racial prejudice is important to the text as a whole because it is the underlying basis of the novel, because it disrupts almost every main character in a life changing way. We see that all the main characters, racist or not, have their eyes opened to see the truth about the society they live in. For example Aunt Alexandra learns that she needs to respect people like Walter Cunningham, who she previously called ‘trash’, simply because he is poorer than them, and not to judge Atticus about the way he raises his children. “I’ve been wrong, Atticus. I’ve been so very wrong.”