“‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’” (119) To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in a small town called Maycomb county, located in Southern Alabama. The narrator, Scout Finch, goes over the past three years of her life from when she was six to eight. Scout’s brother Jem and her learn many things from their wise father -Atticus- and from their own experiences. In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee portrays the idea that prejudice and empathy conflict with each other in humans overall morals; this becomes clear when Scout and Jem learn to be able to see the evil of others, but to also focus on the good.
Prejudice can be very harmful, especially when it is used to put people in categories and defining them as a specific type of person. Miss Maudie talks to Scout about Arthur Radley: “‘The things that happen to people we never
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Atticus gives his final speech to the jury: “‘You know the truth and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around our women- black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of man. There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked up on a woman without desire.’” (273) There is not a certain person that just acts a certain way; black or white people will be people. They will do bad things and good things it doesn’t matter what they look like or where they come from. Only their actions define them as a person. Prejudice is ignorance and ignorance is blindness, blind to what’s happening to others and the