Racism In To Kill A Mockingbird

Life has a weird way of shaping us. If you think about it, if our lives did not go the way it did, we would not be the same person we are today. To Kill A Mockingbird is based around that idea; that our lives and the events that happen to and around us, is what shapes us as people. Racism was taught to the people in Harper Lee’s book to be acceptable. They didn’t learn it on their own, just as much as they learned to read and write. Harper Lee is trying to teach people is that although people in the 1960’s were racist, it wasn’t solely based on their own choices. They were used to that belief system, and that affected them, in a way that I now popularly thought to be wrong. Back in the 1960’s, the time that To Kill A Mockingbird is based in, white people honestly believed that black people were less than human, and most treated them as such. They did so, because most were never taught differently. Back then, society was only taught one thing on the subject of colored people; they were different, and that was not good. Actual studies went as far to say that black people were biologically lower on the food chain, using ‘scientific data’. The Origins of Lynching Culture In the United States says, “In

But a man named Theodor Adorno criticized that, saying; “They do not really identify themselves with [their leader] but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance…It is probably the suspicion of this fictitiousness of their own ‘group psychology’ which makes fascist crowds so merciless and unapproachable. If they would stop to reason for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.” They are so used to what is happening, they are now just stuck on a path. This lifestyle was being adopted by everyone, and it was an endless loop, that was catastrophic to colored