Racism In To Kill A Mockingbird And The Butler

Literature is a precious art form to many and important for various reasons. Literacy helps improve grammar, provides entertainment, educates people and provides inspiration. It is specifically useful for educating people on racial discrimination as many classic works contain racism. Both To Kill a Mockingbird and The Butler are great at expanding people’s knowledge on racism. Although they have two entirely different plots, they both depict how little people value an African-American’s opinion, characters challenging racism and the acceptance of blatant racism.
African-Americans’ voices and opinions had no value during the 1930’s. A white man’s voice always overpowered a black man’s voice. Both To Kill a Mockingbird and The Butler are exceptional

In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the entire town of Maycomb accepts and contributes to maintaining the racial status quo. The narrator, Scout, tries to make it seem as though Maycomb, Alabama is a better place than other southern states in the United States. Although, they tolerate racism just as much as any other southern state. Some characters are aware of this, like Atticus Finch and Dolphus Raymond and others are not. Dolphus Raymond even states “Things haven’t caught up to that one’s instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won’t get sick and cry.” (269) He stated that as Dill Harris was crying over Tom Robinson being treated unequally. As Dolphus Raymond states, the entire town of Maycomb consists of racist adults and children that haven’t yet realized they’ll grow up to be just like them. They won’t cry or have a pit in their stomach, it’ll be normal. Most of the Maycomb town was unaffected when Tom was convicted guilty or was shot. They talked about it for a few days, then forgot all about him along with every other innocent black individual killed by a jury composed of white men. Likewise, in The Butler, we are shown that an acceptance of racism can also be coming from an African-American. Cecil Gaines is a character that is very conscious of how poorly black people are treated in the entirety of the United States but mostly in the slave states. Although he is aware, the problems in the southern states don’t directly affect him so he chooses to ignore them. However, there is still a remarkable amount of racism happening in Washington, where he seems to blindly believe, things are well. Despite him thinking this way, the black help is still getting paid less than the white help; they don’t have any economical equality. He even goes as far as attacking his own son, Louis Gaines out when he finds out about the nonviolent sit-in at the diner. He