Racial Prejudice in Harper Lee´s To Kill a Mockingbird Essay -- discri

Life is like a thrill ride; one never knows what will be in store for them. Many characters in the story To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee feel the same way about life, having experienced many surprising and unexpected turns of events. This story is about a sleepy southern town filled with prejudice, and a lawyer’s quest, along with his children Scout and Jem, to take steps in ridding the town of its prejudiced attitude. Despite being a white man, a lawyer named Atticus, defends an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman. However, everything does not go as was hoped, and the mindset of the society overpowered Atticus’s fair-minded argument. From this emerges a theme regarding the bigotry and bias overwhelming Maycomb: A prejudiced society results in blindness and ignorance, which can be thwarted through courageous and compassionate actions. The discriminatory mindset of Maycomb’s society shows how prejudice can result in blindness. For example, in Scout’s class, Miss Gates talks about persecution of innocent people in a society after a student brings up the topic of Hitler and the massacre going on in Germany. â€Å"Over here we don’t believe in persecuting anybody. Persecution comes from people who are prejudiced.† (329) Miss Gates is extremely biased towards black people in her own society, and she doesn’t recognize the atrocities happening all around her, similar to the ones happening in Germany. This quote employs irony to show that because of these dominant external and internal influences, Miss Gates is blind to the injustice taking place. She is overly discriminatory towards black people, and feels that they should be treated as lower than white people. This shows how strongly biased mindsets, similar to th... ...history by nearly every race and group in the world; even those who seem the most peaceful and sophisticated commit this atrocity. For example, in the American colonial times, white men from Europe settling in the Americas discriminated against the Native Americans. They decided that they were superior to the Native Americans, and that they had total right to rampage their native lands and claim it as their own. This has been happening ever since the beginning of time and it will continue until the end of civilization, but through courage and compassion, the destructive course of prejudice can be controlled. Work Cited Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Warner Books, 1982.