With the Jim Crow Laws in effect during the time setting of the 1930s, Scout thinks that certain ideas about black people are simply a matter of course.
In Chapter 10, for instance, when the rabid Tim Johnson staggers down the street and Calpurnia rushes to warn the neighbors, she runs to the front door of the Radleys and cries out to them because they have no phone. Watching her, Scout automatically remarks to Jem, "She's supposed to go around in back." Later, she questions her father about a term that she has heard him called on more than one occasion--"a n****r lover"--because she does not understand what this term means, nor its implications.
Further, in Chapter 16, as Scout, Jem, and Dill are waiting outside the courthouse, they observe Mr. Dolphus Raymond, who has been ostracized from white society because he lives by himself near the county line. In this area he has "a colored woman" and mixed children. Jem explains that the children are "real sad" because they are not accepted by either race. But, two of them have gone "up North" where "they don't mind 'em."
When the children are outside the courthouse because the sensitive Dill has started crying from hearing the abusive tone Mr. Gilmer uses with the defendant, Tom Robinson, Dill tells Scout that he did not like the way Mr. Gilmer talked to Tom, but Scout excuses Mr. Gilmer's tone and his derogatory calling of Tom the pejorative term, "boy," saying that he is supposed to act that way in cross-examination. But Dill retorts,
"I know all that, Scout. It was the way he said it made me sick, plain sick."
Because of her environmental conditioning, Scout merely replies, "Well, Dill, after all he's just a Negro," indicating her unthinking acceptance of the different standard set for the treatment of blacks, a standard under which she has grown up and which she has taken as acceptable behavior.
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