Prejudice In 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

Good morning/afternoon Mr Ibell and class. Today I am here to talk about the aspects of prejudice in our lives. Through Harper Lee and Oodgeroo Noonuccal, we can explore the significance of our past and examine the prejudice aspects in the texts. Through Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, we explore the power of the innocent and the importance of discovery in a prejudice community. When we explore Son of Mine, we can uncover the hardships of Indigenous Australians in the past through alienation. Texts have the capacity to challenge individuals pre-conceived ideas around prejudice, discrimination and racism in the hope to promote change.

The innocent can provide insight and perspective about societies biased and prejudice opinions. The naivety of
In Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird, we explore the prejudice community of the 1930’s, in Maycomb Country where many people faced poverty and unemployment due to the Great Depression that was widespread in the United States. Lee refers to the innocent 10-year-old protagonist as ‘Scout’ in the text. This is symbolic of the responsibility of a scout which is to ‘show the way’. Scout is still a child and still developing knowledge about her prejudice community. She has not yet been exposed to the beliefs of society at that time, leaving her innocent and questioning certain ideas. Her innocence subconsciously represents the path away from prejudice that the innocent can bring, helping to lead the reader through the text and Scout’s experiences and growth throughout it. Excluding a certain group of people because of prejudice creates dis-function within the community whilst limiting its ability. Through Harper Lee we can also explore the symbolism of Scout and Jem playing with the newly fallen snow to make a snow man. Scouts innocence allows the reader to see the snowman, that is party made of dirt as the same as a normal snowman. The snow represents the outer layer of each being, but once the snow melts, revealing the dirt, we
When society accepts the discrimination and racism, it becomes extremely difficult to overcome as it creates cultural barriers and is devastating for the victim. In Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem Son of Mine, we can explore the alienation caused by prejudice beliefs. The author has a unique voice when telling the poem about her innocent child. She explores the suffering of the Indigenous in Australia’s past, of how the prejudice and racism towards Indigenous people resulted in the alienation of their kind. We are shown how the persona has been restricted and choses to only tell what she must, because she doesn’t want her son to know her pain from racism and prejudice. This is evident in the personal pronoun ‘I could tell you of heartbreak…I’ll tell you instead of brave and fine’. It symbolises that the mother, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, wants her son to remember the past experiences of their kind, but wants to offer a brighter future with the good that mankind is also capable of. We also see her choice to tell her son of the good of mankind through the juxtaposition in ‘lives of black and white entwine’. This metaphor gives hope and a positive future for her son as it helps him discover how humans are not always prejudice and can include everyone, so that he doesn’t become racist like the people in his past. The Aboriginals were treated unfairly because they were considered different because of their skin. We