The Class and Caste of Maycomb County

The first 200 words of this essay...

The Class and Caste of Maycomb County

"...I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks." (Lee 227). The existence of a superior and inferior stratification in societies are due to economic status, social status, and skin color between the white and black race as demonstrated in To Kill a Mockingbird (Symkowski).Today, this process of identification, while also functioning at the individual level, works itself out at the level of whole groups of people who judge themselves better or worse than other groups, not only in terms of economic property, but also on the basis of such characteristics as skin color, gender, education, sexuality, etc. That each society has such a categorical list is without doubt and Maycomb's society was no different.

"There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb..." (131). Maycomb County was based on three main classes and a caste: the prestigious and "rich" of the post-depression era, pursued by the white workers which consisted primarily of farmers, who in turn were followed by what could only be described as "white trash." The caste of Maycomb was the Negroes. Roughly translated, Jem tried to make Scout understand that "there's four kinds of folks in the