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Hollywood's White Legal Heroes And The Legacy Of Slave Codes, Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Hollywood's White Legal Heroes And The Legacy Of Slave Codes, Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Katie Rose Guest Pryal
This chapter explores the portrayal of black defendants in mainstream legal cinema and draws connections between these portrayals, the legacy of slave codes, and the Supreme Court's rejection of statistical and historical proof of racism in the application of the death penalty. I focus on a sub-genre of legal cinema, what I call the "White Legal Hero" narrative. The typical white legal hero film tells the story of an innocent or otherwise righteous black male defendant facing a capital charge. He is represented by a white male "hero" lawyer who tries to overcome the racist justice system. The failure of …
Walking In Another’S Skin: Failure Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird, Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Walking In Another’S Skin: Failure Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird, Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Empathy — how it is discussed and deployed by both the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird and by the author, Lee — is a useful lens to view the depictions of racial injustice in the novel because empathy is the moral fulcrum on which the narrative turns. In this essay, I argue that To Kill a Mockingbird fails to aptly demonstrate the practice of cross-racial empathy. As a consequence, readers cannot empathize with the (largely silent) black characters of the novel. In order to examine the concept of empathy, I have developed a critical framework derived from rhetorician Kenneth …