To Kill a Mockingbird and Racial Injustice

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.

In this fairly straightforward and deeply moving novel, set in a fictional town in Alabama, a black man named Tom Robinson is falsely accused of raping and beating a white woman. Atticus Finch, who is a prominent lawyer and father of two children, is appointed to defend Tom in court. The story is narrated by Atticus’s six-year-old daughter, Jean Louise “Scout”, who also brings us along with her and her brother Jem in their experiences and everyday life in Maycomb.

The simplicity of the plot, I believe, in addition to the characteristic charming warmth of Lee’s writing, is what makes this novel resonate with so many readers, and what brought it to the top of the most prestigious lists, while still selling over 700,000 copies every year, even sixty years after its publication. However, this simplicity is merely a shallow notion, because there are so many layers of depth and meaning into it that, as the readers claim, it changes your life every time you go back to it.

Once we get to the deeper layers of understanding, we find that the idea of morality, of what is right and what is wrong, is one of the main themes of the story. But, most importantly, it makes a clear distinction between the idea of ‘doing what is right,’ and simply following the law. During the Great Depression, the time at which the novel is set, America is barely starting to heal from a past of racism, slavery, and white supremacy. Despite the Thirteenth Amendment taking effect in 1865, officially abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude in the entire country, the Confederate states, such as Alabama, did not ratify this decision, and thus it was not enforced until those territories were fully in control of the Union long after the end of the war. And even at the time of writing the book, in the 1960s, race and gender inequality were still enormous social problems, which are indicators of the considerable importance of the topic.

Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not to be trusted around women — black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.

Atticus tries to teach his children that black and white people are all equal and that there is nothing wrong with defending them. This comes after people in town find out that he has agreed to defend Tom Robinson, and start calling him a nigger-lover, with the only intention of offending him and his children. However, Atticus does not give in to the insults, and instead focuses on that idea of doing what is right — or similarly, not doing what is wrong —. In some cases, this idea is rephrased in the context of religion and sins, for which we may take the titular quote as an allegory of this:

Atticus said to Jem one day, “I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. “Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

In addition to this, there is another quote in particular that really resonated with me, which is said by Atticus to his older son, Jem, after Tom Robinson is finally — and unsurprisingly — found guilty, as one might reasonably expect from an all-white jury in Alabama in the 1930s, despite Atticus’s clever attempts to earn an acquittal. Back at home after the trial, Jem asks his father how the jury could have done such a thing, and he responds earnestly:

I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it–seems that only children weep.

And yet sixty years later we still find ourselves weeping over the murder of innocent black men, women, and children, while society as a whole seems to turn its back to this drastic issue that involves us all in one way or another. I find truly deplorable the need for the existence of social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter these days, more than twenty years into the 21st century, because this all essentially means that things haven’t really changed much since then.

At a personal level, I feel like we must have been doing something wrong all along, and I would like to know what it is, so that even with the institutions, organizations, and agreements for equality, racial discrimination still remains such a severe problem in our modern lives. Since the dawn of time, we have evolved in many different ways, and way more than any other form of life on this planet: we have made gigantic scientific advances, we have developed methods to improve our quality of life, we get to live more than twice as long as our ancestors, we have almost gained control over the laws of nature, and we have even set foot on the moon! However, though, these countless enhancements to human knowledge don’t seem to have liberated all of us from our catarrhine past. When I think of this, I often find myself wondering “how would Atticus Finch feel about this?” I imagine the utter surge of disappointment showing in his eyes from realizing that his efforts to create a better world for the most part turned out to be futile.

Now, do not get me wrong, I am not in any way trying to claim that we have not made any advancements whatsoever on this matter, but rather that I believe there is still a long way to go. In comparison to other epochs in our past, we have definitely improved exponentially in terms of these kinds of issues, in accordance with the scientific and cultural advances. Nevertheless, the fact that we have resolved many of these smaller issues does not connote a full solution to the problem, and yet many people feel contented by thinking it does, by thinking race inequality is simply a thing of the past. Being a European white male myself, and even though I might be somewhat biased on this perspective, I often find examples of contempt towards people of different ethnicities within my own environment, and let me tell you, whoever may have the audacity to negate the severity of this problem has probably lost their mind.

As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it–whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.