To Kill A Mockingbird Expository Essay

Vie Mai
Lander
English, 2nd
16 December, 2013
To Kill a Mockingbird Expository Essay To be prejudice and to be bias is to judge a book by its cover; to judge a person by their appearance, by their skin color. To assume and to choose to believe false rumors about someone’s race, or ethnicity before you have met them. Prejudice has affected everyone’s life in one way or another. The novel To Kill a Mockingbird the author, Harper Lee, demonstrates various examples of prejudice shown by the folks of Maycomb County. Two of the main characters of the book, Scout and Jem, see the citizens of Maycomb through their eyes, facing the prejudices amongst their society. The innocent children do not understand why the people of their community act
Throughout Maycomb, Boo is known as a “monster” for stabbing his father with scissors many years ago while he was cutting paper for his scrap book one. Although no one really knows any information about the incident, they have misjudged Boo before they have met him. While Dill, a close friend was visiting Jem and Scout for the summer, the three children play many acting games about the life of Arthur Radley, and “as summer progressed, so did [their] game” (39). The game itself is a representation of prejudice because they are misjudging an innocent man. The kids believed that “Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall,” they assumed such by the tracks he left. They also imagined that “he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch,” concluding that that is “why his hands were bloodstained…” They also seemed to believe that “there was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time” (13). Although they have not met Boo Radley, they prejudged him by hearing false rumors from their
Scout and Jem’s father, Atticus, is an honest white man who is defending an innocent Negro man, although he is frowned upon by others. The white folks of Maycomb County think that they have a higher social status than the black community, and that the views of a Negro does not matter. The most blatant example of racism in the novel is when Tom Robinson was convicted of raping Mayella Ewell. Although the people of the town know that Tom Robinson was innocent, the jury still saw him as guilty because he is an African American man, and would never be able to win over a white man. This jury ruling causes both those who encouraged Robinson’s conviction and those who were convinced of his innocence to question their views of justice and fairness. This decision forces Scout and Jem to confront the fact that the beliefs that Atticus has taught them cannot always be accustomed with the reality of the world and the evils of human nature. Even their neighbor, Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose, who the children are scared of, is racist and calls Atticus a "nigger-lover" to his children. The children despise of her and “hated her. If she was on the porch when [they] passed, [they] would be raked by her wrathful gaze, subjected to ruthless interrogation regarding our behavior, and given a melancholy prediction on what [they] would amount to when [they] grew up, which was always nothing”