Prejudice In To Kill A Mockingbird And The Help

What if the world was still the same as it was back during the great depression. What if this was the truth. In To Kill a Mockingbird readers can see how prejudice affected people of color back then, and how it’s not so different from today. In the novel readers will find unfairness in court, hate crimes, and segregation. Today readers can still find these same issues, but in different forms.

In To Kill a Mockingbird there are lots of racial, gender, and religious, discrimination. Which is shown a multiple amount of times throughout the novel. To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel written by Harper Lee which takes place in Maycomb Alabama, where there is a lot of racial discrimination. But there is also some gender, and religious, discrimination.

Our society and Huck Finn’s society have many similarities even though they are separated by nearly 170 years. Many of these similarities show that we haven’t really gotten any better as a society or that we have gotten worse. Some of these similarities are violence, racism, and scams/cons. Today, we see many of these things still happening and seem a lot worse compared to Huck Finn’s time. This paper will show how our society since Huck Finn’s time has gotten worse because of violence, racism, and scams.

In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture: but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.” While it seems like a singular person has respectful opinions and is generally accepting, large groups are more likely to side on the negative view point on a subject. Whether this is because a larger group is louder with its opinions, or just because it is easy to be persuaded if there are more people with the same views, ‘good’ people are always in the minority. If the amount of good people in the world is low, true justice is near impossible. Then again, what is true justice?

Racial injustice in To Kill a Mockingbird was malevolent due to the executing of a black man with false evidence, but today the racial injustice appears to be eliminated although it still exists. Today the legal system will not tolerate the racism like it is in the book To Kill a Mockingbird. Racism is normal in Maycomb county some support it and others are against, the Finches are high in society, although they still respect the blacks. Racial injustice throughout the book is a big factor with Calpurnia as a maid, And Atticus defending Tom Robinson, but less of a factor for everyday life in modern times.

The multiple levels of injustice and racism in this book are astonishing and heartbreaking. Everywhere you look in this book there is a problem, not just with the Lacks family but with our cultural as whole. The environmental racism in Turner’s station and displacing 1,300 people for a power plant to the treatment of black patients and Henrietta for being a black woman. It saddens me for two reasons, one being that I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this wasn’t very long ago in the scale of time. Two, we are still dealing with so many of these issues right now.

I think that we have improved since the 60’s when it comes to slavery. In the 60’s many African Americans we 're free but there was still a small portion of people who were still considered slaves. As time moved on After the MLK jrs speech more African American women and men were freed. Their rights started to develop and more and more whites started to get along with the colored. Today slavery is illegal all across the United States of America.

Nowadays society thinks that everyone is being equal by the way they treat each other. They think that racism is no longer around, and that people are getting better at it. Yes, Racism has improved, however, there are many different types of racism that are going on till this day. Also, there is a high amount of racism in the USA, that has been claimed to not exist anymore. There are many ways it is shown, however both ways are similar in each country.

In today’s culture I feel that minorities are no longer treated as poorly as they were in the 1920s. In the 20s, by my understanding of the book minorities were discriminated against and disliked by most people. Life was made more difficult for the minority just because people thought they were vicious beasts who would attack any white woman if given the chance. Today people are not as open about their racism if it’s there because they are no longer supported by the government, in fact the government has made it clear that racism is not to be tolerated in this country anymore and for the most part the average person agrees. In modern times discrimination has moved to people who are of sexual minorities rather than racial.

“A classical book engains messages that influences the readers to be better and aids them in comprehending the human condition; it speaks directly to the reader’s heart, discordant to the current best sellers.” (Ramirez, 2012) The Great Books Curriculum (GBC) is the compilation of traditional classical literature implemented by high schools and colleges to their students. The Great Books Curriculum of 1990 was created by Mortimer J. Adler and used three main criteria to select the books of that year. It is widely known that history often repeats itself, therefore the great books which confront some real-world problems from the past can still be relatable today and in the future.