How Are Minorities Portrayed in Books?

While collecting for my reading inquiry, I noticed minorities in general were not being portrayed as 

stupendously as the other characters in some books. This shows that the worlds we read in and the world we live in are full of inequality.

 In the book The Gunslinger by Stephen King, Jake is a young boy who travels with the gunslinger. The gunslinger allows Jake to be fairly independent, but mostly he treats Jake like a child. Jake has a lot of potential but the gunslinger only views him as expendable. Now, just because he's young doesn't mean he has to treat him like a child, and no one is expendable. People usually see those younger than them as lower than them, which is where the seed of inequality is planted. Difference. 

Again, in The Gunslinger, the gunslinger and Jake run into a group of people called the "Slow Mutants." These "Slow Mutants"  are people with physical mutations, and the book strongly implies that they are quite close to the definition of 'monsters.' If you were to come face to face with one of these mutants, you would be sure to agree. However, even though the mutants may look and act and think differently, they're all still people. People with feelings and needs, even if they're not all that human. 

So when you look upon it like that, does it still seem right to treat others who are different from you like you're higher than them? Is it right to treat someone lesser than equal to everything around them? True, people are not all equal, in terms of finance or politics, but when it comes down to the basics, will any of that matter? It shouldn't, because our shells may be painted different colors, but our insides are very similar. Everyone is intuitive in their own way,