To Kill A Mockingbird - Racism Analysis

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To Kill A Mockingbird Analysis Social commentary is one of the driving forces of fiction writers. All have opinions of the society from in which they were reared causing many of their story driving characters to come from similar situations. One southern born woman, Harper Lee, followed this formula when writing her staunchly moral yet surprisingly youthful novel To Kill a Mockingbird. To Kill A Mockingbird is set in Alabama before civil rights cases flooded the benches of justices and cases against African-Americans were considered open and closed. Through To Kill A Mockingbird, the reader puts on the shoes of a little girl, Scout, and traipses through this familiar town and learns of social injustice by seeing it affect not only a member of the town, but her own father. The societal ills To Kill A Mockingbird comments on the most are race and the morality of acceptance. Race is the central issue of To Kill A Mockingbird. With Scout being white and coming from a seemingly middle class family, she does not understand racism or its effects on those for whom the hatred is intended. Scout’s hero, her father Atticus, says to her, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”. This is ultimately what Atticus was trying to teach Scout through example. Scout was born into a society that conflicted many of the things her father told her to be true. Atticus is who Scout sees as the wisest man. He taught Scout the ideologies of equality and that no man was better than the next. However, the central issue the town is grappling with at the time of Scout’s youth is the rape of a young white woman by a black man. This southern town is stereotypically racist. Atticus, however, is defending this black man. The inhabitants of Maycomb believe the same thing their white
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