To Kill A Mockingbird Equality

It is an instinctive part of the human nature to attempt to reconfigure the world around us in order for it to fit to our convenience. Whether one does it intentionally, or as an unconscious defense mechanism, the change we create often serves as only a temporary disguise for what really exists around us. Like most lies and falsities, this can lead to negative impacts. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the white community of Maycomb is controlled by a deeply ingrained prejudice that they have rearranged their surroundings and ideas to accommodate. Over time Maycomb has found ways to alter certain aspects of life in order to continue their tradition of prejudice while pursuing more progressive ideas, such as equality. This lie has has had

The invisible modification that Maycomb has inserted, not consciously, into this phrase, is “white”. Maycomb certainly believes in equality, yet what they truly believe is equality for the white population. The white community has unintentionally created its own selective version of equality, in which prejudice against the black population is not considered unjust due to the fact that they are not seen as true humans created with the intention of being treated on the same level. The white population enforces cruel injustice upon the black community in every aspect of life, yet in their world it isn’t that they are refusing equality to the black citizens; it is that the black citizens were never part of equality in the first place. For instance, even in the court there is never a chance that Tom Robinson would receive unbiased treatment. The jury, like all other white citizens of Maycomb, believes in unbiased treatment for all white humans. Therefore in their eyes, the fact that Tom Robinson is black implies that there is no case and the jury should experience no indecision when deciding the course of conviction. “‘These are twelve reasonable men in everyday life, Tom’s jury, but you saw something come between them and reason…They couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins. They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life’” (220). No amount of evidence could force a typical white Maycomb citizen to defy the selective version of equality that defines Maycomb life. To grant unauthorized privilege to a black citizen who does not lay claim to treatment equal to a white citizen, let alone superior treatment, is unheard of in the white community. In the narrow minds of the white in Maycomb, such an action would be comparable to