To Kill A Mockingbird Maya Angelou Analysis

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Maya Angelou’s I know Why the Caged Bird Sings both take aim at the same topic: racism in the American South. And they do so through a similar medium too. In both cases, the protagonist of the tale is a young girl, an innocent, who is observing the corruption around her. The biggest difference between them, however, is the difference of race. The protagonist of Lee’s work, Scout, is a white girl born into a position of privilege, and Angelou’s self-styled character Maya is a black girl experiencing the disadvantages that come not just with her skin color but also from living with poverty as well. The experiences that each girl lives through are very different because of their positions in society, but

For Scout, rape shapes her world because her father is locked into a trial in which he must defend a suspected rapist from the unfair views of a biased white society. By dealing with the rape, Scout shows us the oppression that black people face in the country, and she is able to wind her tale of inequality and a miscarriage of justice by using the rape as a lynchpin. Maya, however, is actually the victim of rape. By her experience of rape, we can also see the oppression and miscarriages of justice played out before us, albeit in a significantly different way. In Maya’s case, the rapist is let go, and the judge seems not to really care at all that a young black girl was raped. Instead, after the legal means failed to bring about the desired justice her family sought, Maya’s attacker ends up murdered, proving that if black people want to do anything in the white man’s society, they would have to do it

There was no white man there hoping to bend the corrupt views of the dominant society to her favor. Instead, there was an uncaring white government figure who took no real interest in the problems that the young black girl faced. Had she been a white girl, however, and was molested by a black Mr. Freeman, we can be almost certain that the situation would have been much different. Conversely, had Tom Robinson been accused of raping another black woman, rather than the white Mayella Ewell, the people would likely have turned a blind eye, and the uproar witnessed in the town of Maycomb would have never taken place. Because of this, and the vastly different ways that society dealt with the exact same crime (in Maya’s case, it may have been even worse as she was a minor), we can more fully see the hypocrisy of the people at the time. They were not really interested in the fact that there was a rapist among them. Instead, the people of the period seemed more pre-occupied with keeping the racial status quo alive, and ensuring that blacks were punished to the fullest extent of the law if they were even suspected of having sexual relations with a white woman. What black men did to black women or girls mattered little, just so long as they kept their business away from the rest of white