Raffles Institution I-Learning 2005

Secondary 2 GE English

To Kill a Mockingbird

Task 1

Questions on Black Boy:

  1. Why did the whites feel blatantly superior to the Blacks from the 1920s to the 1960s in USA?                                        [6 marks]

        The whites, through their upbringing and societal influence, stereotyped and believed that all Blacks were “bad”, meaning that the Blacks engaged in corrupt practices, such as stealing and rape. Generally, they thought that Blacks were inferior in many ways, including intellectually and ethically. This slowly developed into the Whites making use of this stereotype to frame the Blacks. An example would be the Scottsboro Trial, which was similar to the trial of Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, in which Black was accused of rape in order to cover up a White’s “crime”, and the Black was in the end convicted.

        From this stereotype, the idea of “pure blood” arose. The Whites believed that by having interracial relationships and marriages, the “White Blood” would no longer be pure. White supremacists felt that the mixed blood would cause genes to be intermingled, causing inferiorities such as lower intelligence of offspring.

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        Also, some White scientists had developed theories about differences in races that could be explained scientifically such as that of Blacks being less intelligent, and these discoveries encouraged white superiority among the society. The theories although disproved later and considered “pseudoscience”, were still widely accepted due to the influence of the people and the psychological stereotype they had built up.

  1. Why did the Blacks not complain and protest about their treatment to the state authorities or federal government?                [6 marks]

        The authorities were whites, and many of them were also prejudiced against the blacks.

        Many of the ...

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