In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, is Scout racist?

Throughout Harper Lee’s classic coming-of-age novel set in the American South during the 1930s, To Kill a Mockingbird, the story’s main protagonist and narrator, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch uses the word “nigger” in casual reference to individuals and concepts. When her older brother Jem is frightening Dill with stories of ghosts—Hot Steam—wandering the woods at night, Scout innocently cautions her friend not to believe Jem’s stories: “Don’t you believe a word he says,...

Throughout Harper Lee’s classic coming-of-age novel set in the American South during the 1930s, To Kill a Mockingbird, the story’s main protagonist and narrator, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch uses the word “nigger” in casual reference to individuals and concepts. When her older brother Jem is frightening Dill with stories of ghosts—Hot Steam—wandering the woods at night, Scout innocently cautions her friend not to believe Jem’s stories: “Don’t you believe a word he says, Dill,” I said. “Calpurnia says that’s niggertalk.” Later, as Jem and Scout are enjoying the very rare occurrence of a snowstorm in their southern town, they decide to build a snowman. Lacking sufficient snow, however, Jem proceeds to augment their limited supply by using common dirt, which is obviously making the white structure much darker, prompting the following comment by Scout:  “Jem, I ain’t ever heard of a nigger snowman.”

Is Scout racist? No, she isn’t. Scout is a product of an extremely racist culture that permeated the American South, and that would continue to do so for decades to come. Her use of clearly-racist language is not a reflection of her soul, but a sad indication of the depth of the racism that dominated the culture in which she lived. At the beginning of Lee’s novel, Scout is not quite six-years-old, an age at which language and perceptions are overwhelmingly influenced by those around her. Fortunately, the single most influential individual in her life is her father, Atticus, a learned and intelligent lawyer who dislikes the culture of racism in Maycomb, but who has learned to navigate his way through it in order to do as much good as he reasonably can. Atticus’ passionate defense of the crippled, poor African American Tom Robinson, and, more importantly, his respect for Calpurnia, the family’s African American housekeeper, bespeak an individual of integrity and tolerance that is in desperately short supply in Lee’s fictitious but realistic Southern milieu. Scout does not like or dislike anybody on the basis of their skin color; she uses the morally abhorrent “n-word” loosely because that is the society in which she lives. She is otherwise a young, innocent and loving little girl who, through the course of Lee’s story, evolves into an intelligent and wise young woman. She is not, however, a racist.