To Kill a Mockingbird Essay

Corruption of Prejudice: Comparing Theme in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Langston Hughes’ “As I Grew Older”

Although Scout and Jem are sweet and innocent children, when they hear the rumor of how a neighbor named Boo Radley is an insane beast, they harass Boo. Miss Gates, sophisticated and educated, teaches her class about how evil the Holocaust was. Yet, with little evidence that Tom raped Mayella Ewell, she takes the side of the Ewells in the court case because Tom was a black man. What makes people so irrational and emotional about others that are different from them? Harper Lee, in To Kill a Mockingbird, proposes that prejudice insidiously penetrates in to our subconsciousness. Once a person has a biased view against something, their prejudice corrupts the very basic nature of human beings: compassion and fairness. Langston Hughes expresses a much alike thematic statement in his despairing poem “As I Grew Older”. Hughes portrays his situation and emotions in the early 1900s as an African American. The poem depicts his experiences as a black man during a time of white supremacy. As a victim of racism, he is suppressed by systematic discrimination of which has no sympathy and no fairness.

In the exposition of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee clearly depicts what prejudice means. No matter how illogical the idea is, people still believe it. For instance, Ms. Stephanie Crawford, the neighbor's rumor spreader, tells the townspeople that Boo was a "malevolent phantom" (8). She also spread stories such as, "A Negro would not walk pass the Radley place at night... Radley pecans would kill you… A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked" (9). No one would go into the Radley yard because they believed that Boo will harm them. They were so afraid that they wouldn't even walk past the place, and believed the pecans in the yard would also kill them. Pecans killing humans is an outrageous idea. However, no matter how illogical...