"Scout," said Atticus, "n*****-lover is just one of those terms that don't mean anything—like snot-nose. It's hard to explain—ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody's favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It's slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody."

"You aren't really a n*****-lover, then, are you?"

"I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody... I'm hard put, sometimes—baby, it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you." (Chapter 11)

Basic set up:

In this excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who's representing a black defendant falsely accused of the rape of a white woman, explains to his daughter, Scout, that some words are just plain wrong.

Race is the central theme of Lee's novel. Much of the novel is told from the perspective of Scout, Atticus's daughter. In this passage, Scout is learning a lesson about the South's nasty racial values at the time (the novel is set in the 1930s).

Atticus has been verbally attacked by some of the white people in town because he's a white lawyer defending a black man. Scout understands that "n*****-lover" is an insult, and she doesn't want her father to be something bad. But Atticus explains that it's the people who use that word who are doing something bad; he's teaching Scout not to accept the South's racial values without questioning them.

This passage is practically all dialogue, specifically a conversation between a father and a daughter, which means that we get both and adult's perspective and a child's perspective about the situation.

By providing us with a child's perspective on this discussion of race, Lee is really breaking down the issues for us readers and showing us how wrong these racial values are. On top of that, though, she's showing us how dangerous and powerful these ideas can be. Scout is just a little girl, but already she's hearing things that could shape her views forever. It's lucky she has Atticus to set her straight; not every kid is so lucky.