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Inequality in "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Decent Essays

One of the major themes of To Kill a Mockingbird is the divisions in human society and how those cause inquality among people. Even though most people know that they shouldn't judge others, it's human nature, and because of this, it causes different sections of society. Most of the characters experience this throughout the novel. In To Kill a Mockingbird, certain divisions in society cause inequality in the town of Maycomb, and the characters and the reader both learn important lessons. When unequal divides in society form, the person or group of people that are looked down upon don't get the respect that they should. In Maycomb, anyone different from the traditional southern ways gets the short end of the stick. Race is an obvious division in the society of Maycomb. White people are automatically thought of as good people, while African Americans do not get accepted. The people of Maycomb seem to think that there's something not right about black people, just because that's not traditional in the south. Tradition states that white people are better than black people without a question, and we can see through name-calling and the unfair trail that many people in Maycomb still hold on to this tradition. They don't even think that African Americans deserve to associate with whites hardly at all. Examples of characters experiencing this divide are Atticus and Tom. Atticus gets looked down upon by a lot of people in the town simply because he wanted to defend Tom, who was

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