A Bit of a Cop-Out

I shan't name the friend of mine who posted this on Facebook, but I repost it here in agreement with it:

To Kill a Mockingbird is undoubtedly a great novel, but it isn't often remarked that while black Americans are portrayed sympathetically, the novel's villain is the lowest-class white man, who lives on a rubbish dump and whose moral corruption goes hand in hand with physical dirtiness.

The pillars of the local elite, by contrast - the lawyer, sheriff and judge - all embody decency.

The racial hierarchy may have mattered most to whites at the bottom of the ladder, of course, but attributing so much of the race problem to the underclass seems a bit of a cop-out.