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American Racial Equality

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“It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals,” was one bunch of wise words once said by Felix Frankfurter. What Frankfurter means by this is that the biggest act that is unequal is giving equal treatment to those who are not your equal. In America, there will never be a time where true racial and social equality is achieved. America will never achieve true social and equal equality, because there has been uneven social classes and different views of different people for as long as we’ve been a country, most people still view some people as their unequal whether that be because of their race or their social class, and you cannot completely control what people say and how they think about …show more content…

In ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee there were several instances where this showed through. On page 282 Tom Robinson’s trial against Bob and Mayella Ewell was going on and the jury was out discussing whether or not Tom, the defendant, was guilty. They finally came back after a long time, over thirty minutes (page 279), and before they had even said anything everyone knew that the verdict would be saying that Mr. Robinson was guilty of raping Mayella Ewell. This is an example of racial inequality because before the jury had even left to discuss, the case had clearly been one by Atticus, defense attorney, and they ruled in favor of the accuser, Mayella and Bob Ewell and Mr. Gilmer as the prosecutor, because Tom had been a black man and Mr. Ewell was a white male. People of color also, had to sit in a completely different part of the courtroom than white people (page 219). It says on page 219, “The colored balcony ran along three walls of the courtroom like a second-story veranda, and from it we could see everything.” This is saying how there was a balcony specifically for black people to sit. In the story, people were also classified by how long their family has been living on the land. “The longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was,” Is a quote that Scout had told us that Aunt Alexandra had said. Another way they were judged was their last name, where they lived in the town, and the amount of education they had (prezi.com). For example, Atticus was looked very highly upon because he was a lawyer and lived in town. The Ewells on the other hand were thinked of more as “white trash” because they had very little education and they lived outside the town and on a farm (page

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A moral that is common to both To Kill a Mockingbird and an article titled “ Outrage Over 6 Month Sentence for Brock Turner Rape Case”, is that favoring a certain race or social class causes society to degress rather than progress. In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the Ewells had accused a man named Tom Robinson of rape and they already acted like they’ve won the case because “ ‘ when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins. ’”(295), they knew that whatever they accused Tom of they could’ve gotten away with it as a result of the color of their skin. More importantly, there wasn’t really a case to begin with as “ Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.” (323), the result was already decided before the case got to court.

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866 Words | 4 Pages

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