When Reality Hits You on the Back of the Head

"Atticus, are we going to win it?"
"No, honey."
"Then why--"
"Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win," Atticus said. (101)

I don't really know whether or not this is a quote that "relates to your motif," but I think it does so I'm just gonna roll with it.

Basically, what's happening here is that Scout doesn't understand why her father, Atticus, is defending Tom if he cannot possibly win the case, and Atticus responds by saying that he has to. He believes that this is his one most important case in his entire life, because Tom is innocent. By defending a black man at this time he is putting his entire reputation at risk, but he really doesn't care about what other people think about him as long as his kids know that he is doing the right thing.

So now I'm going to explain why I think that this belongs in oppression. To me, this is literally what oppression does to different people in society. There are those who inflict change (I don't know if that makes sense but...) and there are those who feel like things aren't going to change because that is all that they have known and just think that life will go on as it does everyday and that one person won't make a difference.

Oppression comes from society as a whole, but if all of the people that think that one person won't make a difference do something, then it will have a great impact on what the oppressors and the oppressed view the world around them as. Atticus is one of these people, and though the large majority of whites in their society feel that oppression should continue, he decided that he needed to do something to stand up for something that he believed in.

However, like I previously said, whites in Maycomb are definitely oppressive. They treat blacks as much lower than themselves and, sadly, that's just how life was all over the place.

And this brings us to the sad stuff. We still have major oppressive tendencies towards blacks, women, the LGBTQ+ community, other races, some religions, and a bunch of other groups of people (basically everyone who isn't a born a straight white male, at least in American society). This is what causes tension between groups of people, because we make a lot of assumptions that are usually not true. (And before you try to argue with me about how I am pigeon-holing straight white males, I'm not. I'm just saying that they have the most privilege and I do believe that everybody can be oppressive to other groups of people.) 

Society doesn't need to forget or get over what happened in the past, the oppressors just need to know that oppression occurs all the time and that life is going to get worse if we keep treating people who aren't exactly like us like crap.