Theme Of Prejudice By Exposure In To Kill A Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is Harper Lee’s view on racial prejudice. Through showing the aspects of such she explores the applicable concept of prejudice by exposure, the form of prejudice that takes place when people are prejudiced simply because they have been exposed to it. Lee makes this especially visible through the children focused upon and interacted with. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee demonstrates the power of prejudice by exposure through the dialogue and thoughts of the primary children. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem is a clear egalitarian, but he is still susceptible to prejudice. In the novel, he says that “Mr. Radley kept [Boo] chained to the bed most of the time” (Lee 14.) This is a very exaggerated statement to make about an event

It is known that Jem received his information about Boo from Miss Stephanie Crawford, a woman known throughout the book as the neighborhood gossip, which should make anything she says taken with a grain of salt, but simply the exposure to Boo’s myths led Jem to create his own. When Calpurnia takes the children to her church for the day, Jem and Scout learn that she speaks in different dialects depending on her surroundings, namely a black and white dialect. When she tells the children that she talks the way she does around black people because she’s black, Jem said “‘That doesn’t mean you hafta talk that way when you know better’” (Lee 167.) He specifically says that a white dialect is better than a black English dialect, and while the white one may be older and most often used, one is not better than the other. The reason that Jem said it was is because he lived in a very racist area, and was constantly reminded that white people were superior. Later in the book, after Aunt Alexandra denies Scout’s request to have Walter Cunningham Jr. come over, Jem claims “There’s four kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind like us