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The 10th Juror is an antagonist and espouses virulent and hateful racist ideology throughout the play. From the beginning, the 10th Juror speaks about the defendant almost exclusively in offensive racial stereotypes. He assigns a series of derogatory traits to the boy, and because of his deeply entrenched racism, he considers it an open-and-shut case. The other jurors push back, such as when the 9th Juror tells him that he is ignorant. This emphasizes that the 10th Juror is unfit to assess the case as he has a dogmatic worldview which makes him incapable of processing nuance or listening to reason. As the deliberations progress, the 10th Juror becomes more and more frustrated and increasingly vocal and intense about his beliefs until he erupts in a racist screed at the play’s climax. He reveals the fearful underbelly of his ideology and a terror about people of the boy’s race taking over America and displacing people like himself. He admits that he has no interest in due process or in the legality of what he’s talking about. He merely sees the proceedings as an opportunity to put a member of the boy’s race to death. After he makes this impassioned speech, he soon relents and votes for acquittal, seeing that he is outnumbered and outsmarted. Thus, the 10th Juror represents the ignorance of racism and how racist beliefs can hamper and corrupt the American legal system.
