If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside.

This line is spoken by Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel *To Kill a Mockingbird* (1960), during a conversation with his daughter Scout about social divisions in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. Scout has been trying to make sense of why people sort themselves into “kinds” and look down on one another—questions sharpened by the town’s racial hierarchy and by the hostility surrounding Tom Robinson’s case. Atticus uses her confusion to point toward a broader moral insight: prejudice is often irrational and self-perpetuating. He links Maycomb’s everyday contempt to Boo Radley’s reclusiveness, suggesting that withdrawal can be a response to a community’s cruelty.

Atticus challenges the comforting idea that people are fundamentally “one kind” by exposing how readily communities manufacture difference and contempt. The rhetorical questions underline the illogic of prejudice: if similarity is real, hatred should be unnecessary—yet it persists because social status, fear, and inherited bias matter more than reason. His turn to Boo Radley reframes Boo’s isolation not as mere oddity but as self-protection: staying inside becomes a rational choice in a town that punishes vulnerability and nonconformity. The passage thus connects private suffering to public injustice, implying that a society’s casual scorn can be as damaging as its formal institutions.