Bias In To Kill A Mockingbird

No matter how much the human race will evolve, we will always have a form of bias in our mind that ranks people in our everyday life. Whenever you walk past a crowd, your mind instantly begins to go through an array of questions or standards to sort people out in your own version of a caste system. Most of these decisions are often based on the general opinions of your society, which ultimately leads to the entire subject of prejudice. This case of biased assorting was much more extreme in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, than our modern day society. In Lee’s novel, Jem and Scout begin to open their eyes to the prejudice that was affecting Maycomb county, and they see the people of their hometown in a new light. As the events in Maycomb …show more content…
One of the main assets to the novel was the trial of Tom Robinson, which never would’ve never took place in the first place if it weren’t were the racial injustice Tom was facing. He was a Negro, and that was enough for people in a racist society to blame an innocent man for a crime as demoralizing as rape. Tom faces further discrimination during the trial. When Mr.Gilmer questions Tom, he always refers to him as “boy”, even though he is clearly a man. “Then you say she’s lying, boy?” (Lee, 264). This is possibly because Mr.Gilmer has a mentality that Black men aren’t actually real men and are immature lower beings. A more innocent case of racial discrimination is when Jem and Scout build a snowman. Due to there not being enough snow, Jem collects dirt to build the base of the snowman, and Scout remarks, “Jem, I ain’t ever heard of a n***** snowman” (Lee, 89). Jem then responded with, “He won’t be black long” (Lee, 89). Jem then precedes to cover the entire body with snow, perhaps trying to hide the Negro side of the snowman underneath the white side (“Symbolism and Racism in To Kill a Mockingbird”). In this case, Lee was able to use a somewhat humorous situation to show how white people viewed Negroes at the …show more content…
Despite the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird took place in a setting that was nearly a century ago, the themes of prejudice coexist with our own society. If anything, looking back at the discrimination that occurred back then should be showing us how to improve upon these same type of issues today. Together, we can all learn to stop discriminating towards people of a different race, a certain gender, or for how poor they are, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird can give us all the inspiration to take steps towards that