In my opinion, chapter 20 is the most eventful, interesting and engaging chapter of the novel thus far. Reading it made me very content with Atticus’ calm, confident and determined approach to convince the jury of Tom Robinson’s innocence. The things he said could not have been said better. None of it was biased; it was based on the facts and his persuasiveness made the jury think long and hard about their decision. Of those 3 or 4 pages of Atticus’ speech, this was one of my favourite arguments:

“You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women—black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men. There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.” (pg. 273)

It was upsetting to find out that the jury still pronounced Tom guilty after this, but it must be taken into consideration that the mentality of the world in those times was discriminative, and a lot of the time, heartless toward coloured people.

The problem I have now is that even though we know that racism and prejudice are wrong, We’ve learned from our mistakes and tried to put them behind us, a lot of people still aren’t in the right mindset: they continue to make racist comments, continue to side with their own race because they don’t trust the other, continue to stereotype… this is unbelievable considering everything that’s happened in the past with enslavement and unfair rights for blacks (and women).

Lately, we’ve been making lots of progress as a society (a white man would probably not have a black man arrested because he felt threatened by him and the fact that he was black, for example). But on the other hand, sometimes it’s the opposite, where people are scared to take proper action against a black person who committed an actual crime. For a very long time now, the human race has struggled with looking at what’s beyond the colour of the skin and honestly, it’s ridiculous. Appearance really doesn’t matter. It is your words and actions that dictate your life, and it’s infuriating that anyone ever thought it should be your skin colour. Appearance is something that we can’t control. So how can someone justify treating someone differently because of the way they look? It’s medieval.

This is why I really appreciate the quote from Atticus’s speech: It highlights the importance of looking at the facts and putting an end to the stupidity that is prejudice.