Stereotypes In To Kill A Mockingbird

Have you ever felt like the people around you judge you, even if they don’t know you at all? The citizens of Maycomb County stereotype the people in their community based off the rumors they hear around town. They may believe that a man none of them have ever seen is a monster and that a black man that has committed a appalling crime. Boo Radley and Tom Robinson are examples of mockingbirds in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

In every community there is someone who is considered an outcast. Someone who the community feels shouldn’t be around the rest of the them. More times than not, this person is misunderstood and ends up being and admirable character once someone take the time to get to know them. In Maycomb County these

people can be considered to be mockingbirds. When a younger Scout asked Miss Maudie about what is means to be a mockingbird she responds “ 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” (119). The birds don’t harm anyone but they are often killed. This is similar to the people, as they have done no definite harm to the community but they are treated as if they don’t belong. Atticus was a lawyer and he was trying to teach the kids to not judge people by what they hear and see on the outside. He told the kids "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. (39)" He wanted his children to be different than everybody else in the town. He wanted them to think for themselves and think about the people around them and what they go through.
Boo Radley is considered a mockingbird because the town passes on rumors of all the terrible things he has supposedly done.

The residents of Maycomb have never actually seen Boo and they only going off the stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. Scout was given a description of Boo by her older brother who said “Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were bloodstained – if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time” (16). Boo is painted as a monster that should be kept away from everybody even though they don’t know him at all. They say that he is the reason plants die when it get cold and that you should stay away from his house. The town is so busy spreading lies that no one has taken the time to get to know him. When Scout witnessed a neighborhood fire in the frigid winter air a blanket suddenly appeared around her. Later it is revealed who did it when Jem states “Boo Radley. You were so busy looking at the fire you didn’t know it when he put the blanket around you” (96). This mysterious man had helped out Scout by giving her a blanket when she was cold. He had also given children gifts through a knothole in a tree they found earlier. He had fixed Jem's pants when he torn them

on the fence and had carved the children in small soap figurines. Boo was reaching out and building a relationship with the kids and this was the first time we start to see his true personality.
Tom Robinson was a courteous man who did not deserve the treatment he got from Maycomb County.

He helped out whenever he could and was never anything but kind to others. When he was asked to help Mayella Ewell break up a chiffarobe she offered him a nickel and he refused. When asked about it later he reasoned “I was glad to do it, Mr. Ewell didn't seem to help her none, and neither did the chillun, and I knowed she didn't have no nickels to spare”(256). Tom helped Mayella with numerous other chores and he was happy to help her as he saw that she wasn’t being helped much by her father or siblings. When Tom was only trial for a rape he didn’t commit, Scout and Jem's father was Tom's lawyer. In his closing statement he said “And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to ‘feel sorry’ for a white woman has had to put his words against two white people’s” (273). Some people did see who Tom really was. They knew he was a kind hearted innocent man and they did everything in their power to help other people see that. Unfortunately, most couldn’t look passed Tom’s race to see the real

him.

Sometimes people don’t deserve what happened to them. Boo Radley is still looked at like and monster and Tom Robinson was found guilty by the jury and was later killed. These misunderstood people were treated as outcasts in their own community. Neither of them have done anything to hurt the town and the people treated them as if they didn't belong. The only way to fix this problem is to stop basing people on what we see on the outside. Maybe tomorrow you should take a seat next to the kid who always sits alone and ask him “what’s your name?”