Social Inequality In To Kill A Mockingbird

In the United States of America, and globally, rising social inequality is very much a part of the average teenager’s life, whether they see someone who experiences it or are the victim of it. Also, literature can be a huge tool to have an impact on social inequality of an adolescent's life. Many problems, can be addressed by authors and even at times remedied with something as simple as a book.

Social inequality has been evident for many years as the growing inequality between poor and rich teens has only grown worse throughout countries in North America and Europe. America has the second largest population of people in poverty from a survey of 34 different developed countries.The poor should be made a priority of the government because
they suffer the most out of all Americans.Poverty in America is said to be living on less than half the median amount of income, and without a decent income no one can live comfortably and safely.Many problems in societies have been shown to be worse in countries with larger income gaps between the the poorest and richest people living there.And since inequality is so prevalent, it affects many more of us than most would assume.Unbelievably, one in five American children live in poverty.As the rich obtain more money, it is only natural to see less of it being spent on middle class and poor children’s well being.

In modern America, there are many racial inequalities that exist.
This has been going on almost as long as America has been a nation, and has gone ever since. Research shows that adolescence may be the time when people form opinions about ethnic groups, and racism in everyday life has caused families and adolescents of color to have less openings for success. On top of that, it has been shown that teens who were exposed to racism with no support had higher health risks and more health problems than those who did. In the novel To kill a Mockingbird it shows how devastating racial bias can be to people when Tom Robinson was obviously innocent, but was sentenced to jail and
execution.

Bullying should not be taken lightly because it affects both victim and bully negatively. One of the most studied and known inequalities teenagers face is bullying, whether it be physical, verbal, or psychological. It is such a common phenomenon that an estimated thirty percent of teens in the United states had been a bully or been a victim of one. This is a staggering amount of bullying, and only continues to get worse as bullying is taking full force on the web. The devastating effects of being bullied and harassed were written about in S.E Hinton’s The Outsiders. The character Johnny had never left without a knife after a traumatizing incident where he was harassed for no other reason but his looks and socioeconomic class. The depressing part is that it isn’t too uncommon to be traumatized by a bully like that, as many adults still have horrible memories from their childhoods and adolescent years because of bullying.

Many author’s writings have a profound effect on their readers. In the case of inequality three such impactful authors are Harper Lee, S.E. Hinton, and Suzanne Collins. All three of these authors display a sensitivity to the feelings and experiences of young people when dealing with inequality due to social and racism issues. Each of these authors wrote about how their subjects dealt with hatred and exclusion. In the heat of the civil rights movement, To Kill a Mockingbird was published.
When the novel became a bestseller, America read. The character Atticus, a single father with a young daughter and son, stood up for a man wrongfully accused of rape even though he knows the odds are stacked against him. A young girl who is trying to analyze and understand the world, and finding her own place in it. All of these plot elements supported the goal of the civil rights movement which was to bring equality to black Americans. Illustrating how unjust a segregated world was this novel was illustrating the inequality created by a racist society and the American public saw this play out in the simplicity of a young girl’s observations of watching racism in
action. The novel The Outsiders showed the extent of a story aimed at teenagers at the time, and proved they could handle much more than they were given. The 1960s was a time of societal change and evolution, and so it’s literature reflected that. Showing teens a realism that was rare at the time, it very much showed the state of the nation which was breaking boundaries all the time. Many books took note of this one after it was written, getting rid of the old format of idealized teens for young adult stories, and favoring a realistic story with realistic problems.

Suzanne Collins is a modern author writing for the current generation of adolescents. Teaching her readers about inequality in a fictional dystopian setting,yet it is not difficult to relate to the real world and its inequalities. For instance, the society in the Hunger Games seems like a metaphor for the rich and poor in today’s society, most on the bottom and a few on the top. She also seems to be hinting that the world may be moving towards her fictional society, with the ever growing wealth gap becoming a more and more prevalent problem. Authors of narratives and nonfiction articles alike, hope to use their pieces as a tool to fight what they feel is unjust. Through their works they hope to gain many readers, and they would often want to bring awareness to their topics, persuade views, or reveal their ideas and beliefs to the public. This is something that is seen over and over again, and many novels do achieve their goal and affect their readers. One way authors use their works is as a tool to fight inequality and bring awareness to their topics. This objective reflects the book The Outsiders by S.E Hinton. As it was written earlier in this paper, The Outsiders was made in a time where books with reality for young adults was rare. S.E. Hinton wanted to show to an audience previously not reading very many books about current teens and their problems, what it was like for some kids at the time. With straightforward details about the lives the teens lived, readers were captivated by the emotion and plot twists. This novel shed a new light on a topic that a teenage audience was previously ignorant to. Furthermore, another way to use literature as a resource is to change society’s view completely on a matter, or support an idea that was challenging a conventional one. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird did just that. Lee wrote the book to help change the view on the effects of ignorance and racism in such a way that readers could become captivated and keep reading. The book was often a sad one, and that made its readers reflect on their society and how it functioned. Lastly, we have the author Suzanne Collins who took her views and beliefs, and put it into a futuristic setting. Unlike the other two authors mentioned, Collins took what she believed to be wrong about human nature and society today, and wrote about what could happen in time. As she describes the setting and situation of The Hunger Games if starts to look like her own opinion on today’s society. The rich, living extravagant and carefree lives, the poor struggling, with no support from the rich. This is like real life America in an exaggerated way, as poverty is a huge problem in society, and the rich giving little to no support. In conclusion, social inequality is a problem that America and the world must face head on. Many of the tools that can change the world are available to us such as great books. Impacts have been made in the past on society using literature and should happen again, to make the world more fair for everyone. So all in all, equality is the goal we all want to achieve, literature is the key to open it.