Bigger Thomas is a victim of injustice, discuss.
Injustice arises when equal cases are treated unequally and unequal cases, equally Bigger Thomas is a victim of injustice. He lives with his mother in a little apartment in Southside Mississippi, together with his siblings, Buddy and Vera. They pay as much as eight dollars a week for that rat-infested apartment. Ironically, the house is owned by Mr. Dalton, the owner of a Real Estate Company who later becomes his employer. Meanwhile, he exploits the blacks but pretends to be engaging in philanthropic gestures to them.
Injustice drives people to do the unthinkable. Blacks have no access to good education, health or housing. They are subjected to dehumanizing working conditions with poor wages. No black man enjoys the freedom of fraternizing with a white lady no matter the condition for such is punishable severely. The fear of injustice makes Bigger Thomas to back out in the planned robbery against Blum. He fears the consequence of being caught. During the submission of Mr. Max, Bigger’s lawyer, he makes it clear that Bigger indeed is a victim of injustice.
“Let me, your Honour dwell a moment longer upon the danger of looking upon this boy in the light of injustice. If I should say that he is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking for sympathy” P.418
In his statements, Max alludes that the whites who hire these Negroes subject them to conditions that make them vulnerable to crime and when such crime is committed, “they say to their guilty hirelings, stamp out this ghost” (p.419). Mr. Max does not see the several years of slavery and deprivation as years of injustice, he sees those years as oppression. Furthermore, Max sees Bigger Thomas as “representing a tiny aspect of a problem whose reality sprawls over a third of his nations”. He feels that the whites create social barriers which promote hate and fear. Such is the fate of Bigger, who, though employed by Mr. Dalton hates Miss Dalton the very moment he sets eyes on her. It is this hatred that drives him to kill the girl.
It is however realized that whites commit more grievous crimes and not much is said about same but the torture, the brutality, the insults and castigation of Bigger and his likes actually justify the assertion that he is indeed, a victim of injustice.