"He had announced the other day in the schoolyard that Scout Finches daddy defended n******."
This quote is from Scout, when she is discussing what a classmate said to her earlier. What her classmate Cecil Jacobs actually meant is that Scout's father, Atticus, is a lawyer who takes the side of the black defendant in his trials.
    The fact that Scouts classmate, who is probably about 8 years old is using this fact against her, shows the racial bias of this town. A tiny, Alabama town is much more likely to have racist politics than another. Living in the south myself, though some of this racism has disappeared, I will occasionally still see a confederate flag. This represents the extreme amount of this disturbing tradition that has remained in society even to today. To truly understand each character and element of the book, one has to understand the setting that the author has given the character. Though a setting like this one never excuses racist acts, it explains most of where these families get their ideas.
    In the next scene, Scout is explaining this to her father when he tells her not to use offensive words and describes it as "common". This shows how much more sophisticated and ahead of their time the Finches are and how their ideas are way different than those of the people in their town. This book is one of the most controversial books of all time and it's because in part of the word use and the racist content that people were offended by. But without this book, it might have been hard to understand how huge racial bias is in certain communities in comparison to others.
This relates to the Trayvon Martin case from 2012, where a young black man was shot by a neighboorhood watchman for no reason. The case resulted in the watchman, George Zimmerman being called innocent, when he was really demonstrating complete racism and assuming things based on peoples race. This case shows why we need more people like Atticus, lawyers that will defend against racist people.

-Zosia