To Kill A Mockingbird Comparative Essay

473 Words2 Pages
It is both sad and true that alongside many good and evil things in this world, some human beings have the inexplicable urge to treat others as less human based solely on their outward appearance. Both To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou demonstrate the concept of racism in culture and how it is ingrained in children in their everyday lives. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a young Marguerite struggles with racism in almost every aspect of her life, mostly because she was African American. Just one way of her skewed visions of beauty shining through was as her mother made her a dress. She hoped that “I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who where everybody’s dream of what was right with the world” (Angelou 2). She thought that the only way one could be good and right was to be white. In contrast, To Kill a Mockingbird, Is from the point of view of a young white girl. African Americans, and words associated with African Americans, however vulgar they may be, are associated with stupidity. For example, Miss Maudie, in response to Scout telling her about the rumors surrounding Boo Radley, says “‘That is three-fourths colored folks and one-fourth Stephanie Crawford,’” (Lee 60). Miss Maudie was using another man’s race to devalue Scout’s claims.…show more content…
Marguerite saw herself as looking ugly. She had grown up in a society so prejudiced against her kind that she wasn’t even comfortable in her own skin, and even dreamed that one day she would become just like her society’s standard of
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