How Does Lee Show "The Hell White People Give Coloured Folks"?

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In To Kill A Mockingbird, the white people of Maycomb see themselves as better than their black counterparts, which drives them to degrade, harass, and badmouth them. They often see them as barely human, and patronise or outright insult them. One way that Lee shows how white people treat black people is during Mr Gilmer’s cross-examination of Tom Robinson in court. Gilmer asks Tom increduously how “You felt sorry for her, you felt sorry for her?” This excerpt shows the low opinion of black people by the white Maycombites, as Mr Gilmer insinuates that a black person could not feel sympathy for a white person, as they were seen to be immensely lower in society than whites. By doing this, he brings Tom’s character into question as a result of what he sees as his lack of respect for his betters, when he was only being empathetic to Mayella Ewell’s plight. Furthermore, Lee also shows how, even when they are liars and frauds themselves, some white people still look down on the black people, even though, as Scout put it, all that made the Ewells “any better than [their] nearest neighbours was, that if scrubbed with lye soap and very hot water, [their] skin was white.” This attitude is shown by Scout’s observations of how Mayella “stood up and looked at [Tom] as if he were dirt beneath her feet.” While the fact that Mayella has lied and perjured and still looks down on black people is bad enough, the racism is emphasised by the fact that Tom was the very person she was lying about to save her own good name from actions she committed herself. Another way that white people in Maycomb treat the black population poorly is by their casual racist comments. One example of this is during one of Aunt Alexandra’s Missionary Society Meetings, where one of the members remarked flippantly “That Robinson boy was legally married … kept himself clean, went to church … but when it

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