Prejudice is the judgment of a person based on their religion, race, gender, and a ton of other factors. Prejudice has been a problem in our society for a while and sadly a lot of our historical conflicts are due to prejudice of some kind. Due to Harper Lee’s perspective in 1960, To Kill A Mockingbird expresses the idea that back then people are judged solely based upon what race they are while the novel The Hate U Give voices the more modern theme that people assume your character based on how you present yourself to others.
To Kill A Mockingbird, a novel about prejudice in a small southern town in the 1930’s, states the idea that people are judged solely upon what their race, gender, and social standing is. For example, in Chapter 12 Jem and Scout are invited to go to church with Calpurnia, their African American cook. When they get there most of the all-black members of the church welcome the Finch’s except for one woman, who gets mad that white kids are attending church with them. The author presents the woman’s anger about the situation as another form of racial prejudice. Later on in the same chapter, during the church’s service, everyone was gathering money to help out Tom Robinson’s family. Scout realizes that Tom is the person that Atticus is defending, and asks Calpurnia what he did.
Calpurnia tells her that Bob Ewell has accused Tom of something awful and because of that people are not hiring Tom’s wife. Scout is ultimately shocked that people are trusting Mr. Ewell, whose family is seen as trash within the community in Maycomb. Her shock that people would trust the Ewells over anyone else exaggerates the fact that people only trust their word over Tom’s simply because of Tom’s race. Also for example in chapter 19 when Tom was being questioned in court about why he helped with Mrs. Ewell’s chores Tom stated “I felt right sorry for her, she seemed to try more’n the rest of ‘em-” his response was seen as shocking since he was black and she was white. In this period it would have been crazy to say a black man could feel sorry for a white woman.
The Hate U Give, a more recent novel voices that people assume your character based on how you speak and present yourself. For example, in the second chapter of this novel, a police officer pulls Starr and her friend Khalil over and asks Khalil to get out of the car. When the cop walks back to his car to get something, Khalil moves to check how Starr is doing and the officer shoots him. This shows that the cop assumed Khalil would do something bad just because of the way he looked.
