Examples Of Prejudice In Of Mice And Men

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck possesses many themes. For example friendship, racism, innocence, false trust, betrayal, and the sexism, are a few themes in this novel. Additionally, another theme that appears incessantly is prejudice. Prejudice is the act of judging someone for his/her race, gender, sexual orientation, social status, appearance, or speech without truly meeting or knowing him/her. An example of prejudice would be if one were to assume another person was stupid because he/she stuttered. Another example would be assuming a woman was weak, dependent, and stupid simply because of her gender. In Of Mice and Men, there are several examples of prejudice. To begin, one example of prejudice pertains to how the stable buck is treated

Done pretty good, too. The guys wouldn’t let him use his feet, so the nigger got him. If he coulda used his feet, Smitty says he woulda killed the nigger. The guys said on account of the nigger’s got a crooked back, Smitty can’t use his feet(Steinbeck 11.)” Some may believe, the prejudice in this quote involves racism because of the racial slurs; however, the prejudice here involves the appearance of Crooks. The workers believed because he had a crooked back, they gave Crooks a handicap. Thus implying that because Crooks had an abnormal spine he was weak. In this case, Crooks proved this prejudice wrong because he won the fight. Unfortunately, this does not apply to all scenarios. To explain, not all prejudicial beliefs are incorrect. There are over seven billion people in this world and more than likely one’s prejudicial beliefs will be true at one time or another. For example, a person could be walking down the street and sees a person with a pimple on his/her face with pus and other bodily fluids burgeoning out like magma out of a volcano. The pedestrian could be prejudice and assume because of their appearance this blemished person is lazy, dirty, putrid, and does not keep up with his/her hygiene.